Tangela Babbitt.

Context

Statewide CalWIN-to-CalSAWS transition across 58 counties and 13M+ beneficiaries, with benefits never pausing.

Decision

Designed a phased post-go-live reinforcement model (desk-side coaching, refresher training, team-meeting reinforcement) that the department adopted as its standard stabilization approach.

Context

A go-live gap threatened roughly 30,000 federally protected cases with improper discontinuance.

Decision

Designed a compliant workaround that rebuilt the required regulatory notices back into the process, then ran a five-phase pilot-to-countywide rollout that cut the discontinuance list by about 10% per month.

Context

$19.5M portfolio, eight concurrent workstreams bringing AI-enabled workflows to operational teams.

Decision

Embedded AI into technicians’ existing CMMS tools instead of standing up separate dashboards, fitting the change into how people already worked.

The Problem

Applications get submitted on time. The regulatory clock isn’t the bottleneck — the verifications are. Required documents (citizenship, income, SSN, birth certificate, address, and the like) are either submitted but not yet attached to the case, or not submitted at all. And when they’re missing, the applicant often doesn’t learn exactly which documents are needed until the eligibility interview.

That single gap forces a bad choice at the interview: deny the case (procedurally allowed, but blunt), or set it to pending, which is more accurate but transfers completion risk and delay onto the worker and pushes against regulatory timelines.

Why It Matters

• Avoidable denials: cases are closed over a missing paper, not a real eligibility question, and applicants must re-apply and re-wait.
• Worker risk & delay: every pending case adds to a caseload the worker is now accountable to complete against the clock.
• Timeline pressure: documents that surface late eat into the regulatory processing window the county is required to meet.

The AI-Enabled Fix

Move the document conversation to the front. The moment an application lands, the system identifies what that household must verify and tells the applicant, so the interview confirms eligibility instead of discovering a shortfall.

Projected Outcome

• Interview-stage surprises replaced by documents already on file.
• Fewer avoidable denials and re-applications; more cases cleared within the regulatory window.
• Worker caseload risk reduced at the source, so the pending backlog shrinks before it forms.

The Problem

A claimant was approved for good-cause separation but placed under a temporary disqualification for availability (health-related). Once medically cleared for full-duty work with no restrictions, effective the claim start date, the claimant obtained a physician’s clearance and faxed it to the determination unit the same morning, before any disqualification had posted online.

Roughly 2.5 hours later, the disqualification posted anyway, for the exact two-week window the clearance covered. The document that would have resolved the issue was sitting in a manual intake queue, unseen by the determinator making the decision.

Root cause: the intake process moves faster than the human routing chain behind it. Decisions get made before the supporting document reaches the decision-maker.

Why It Matters

• Wrongful disqualification: a claimant loses benefits for a period they were, in fact, eligible.
• Unnecessary appeals: the only remedy becomes a formal appeal — days or weeks of staff time, hearings, and rework for an error that never needed to happen.
• Agency cost & trust: every avoidable appeal consumes determinator hours and erodes public confidence in the system.

The AI-Enabled Fix

The failure isn’t the people. It’s the gap between fast intake and slow routing. AI closes that gap by getting the right document in front of the right determinator the moment it arrives, so the clearing document is seen before the clock runs out.

Projected Outcome

• Turnaround on supporting-document intake reduced from days to minutes.
• A measurable drop in avoidable disqualifications and the appeals they trigger.
• Determinator time redirected from paper-chasing to judgment — the work only a human should do.