How Imprivata Uses Gainsight AI to Optimize Its CS Infrastructure, Standardize CSM Work, and Extend Customer Intelligence

More than a decade into running Customer Success on Gainsight, Imprivata’s CX Strategy & Operations team faced a new need. As the business evolved and customer relationships grew more complex, the company had moved from one core product line to several and added systems along the way, and its CS environment needed to be revisited and rebuilt to keep pace. At the same time, CSMs were spending valuable time assembling executive briefings, preparing for customer conversations, and maintaining account information. And across the business, other customer-facing teams needed access to Gainsight insights without necessarily working in the platform themselves.

For Mark Maida, Sr. Director of CX Strategy & Operations at Imprivata, AI presented an opportunity to address these challenges from several directions: better understand the systems already in place, make everyday CS work more consistent, and extend customer intelligence to the people who need it.

With Gainsight, Imprivata:

• Used Gainsight Copilot to analyze and optimize its existing health scoring configuration, work that traditionally took data analysts and subject-matter experts
• Leveraged the Gainsight Model Context Protocol (MCP) to create more consistent, executive-ready account briefings without requiring CSMs to assemble the information themselves
• Gave CSMs a holistic view of account engagement before customer calls, without chasing sales reps or digging through Salesforce
• Extended access to Gainsight customer intelligence through an AI agent in Slack for customer-facing colleagues who never log into Gainsight
• Began automating contact hygiene with email engagement signals, starting where it matters most: pooled CS accounts with no named CSM

Imprivata’s Zero Friction Security Platform provides digital identity and access security for healthcare organizations, a market where trust is the product. Its Customer Success team, along with a Managed Services team that works the same way, runs on Gainsight to manage customer health, coordinate engagements, and support customers across different coverage models.

Mark Maida, Sr. Director of CX Strategy & Operations, owns the systems that make that possible. But after more than a decade of growth and change, the Gainsight environment reflected decisions made for a very different version of the business. When Imprivata adopted Gainsight, it sold one major product line. Acquisitions added more, and an instance tuned for a single product had to stretch to cover several. Plus, much of it had been built by people who were no longer there. As Maida put it, “the people that were here building Gainsight a number of years ago aren’t here. So we don’t know why they made the decisions that they made.”

The operational challenges extended beyond Gainsight’s underlying configuration. Imprivata’s CS organization supports customers through several coverage models, which is a large part of why consistency is hard to maintain. For larger accounts, named CSMs work closely together, often across overlapping accounts, and alongside sales and renewals teams. Smaller customers have a looser connection to a CSM, while Imprivata’s long tail operates under a pooled CS model without dedicated CSMs. Across these segments, the organization needs consistent customer information and processes, even when the way teams engage with customers looks very different.

The CSM side had its own version of the problem. Briefing an executive on an account, preparing for a customer call, keeping contacts current: all of it ran on manual effort. The quality was usually high. The consistency wasn’t. “But the consistency isn’t always there,” Maida said. “CSMs will approach the work differently.” Getting the full picture before a call often meant checking with the sales rep or digging through Salesforce. At the same time, Imprivata didn’t want to prescribe exactly how every CSM should manage their day. The team wanted to give CSMs flexibility in how they supported their customers while creating more consistent processes for the work that needed to happen across every account.

The question the team set out to answer was, in Maida’s words, “how can we improve quality and scale at the same time so that we can free up more time for our CSMs, to drive value for our customers and take the administrative load off of their plate.”

Imprivata approached AI from three directions, starting with the one most AI documentation never mentions: the admin side.

Understanding and Optimizing CS Infrastructure

Imprivata’s rollout began with its own configuration. After more than a decade on Gainsight, Imprivata’s CS infrastructure reflected years of business growth and configuration decisions made by former team members. By using Copilot to examine its existing setup, the team gained a clearer understanding of how its health scoring works, where it may fall short, and what needs to change to better support the business today.

How Imprivata Leverages Copilot

• Understand existing configurations: Use Copilot to investigate how health scoring is configured and understand the logic behind systems built over the years.
• Identify areas for improvement: Examine where existing health scoring works well, where it may fall short, and what needs to be revisited as the business evolves.
• Make complex analysis more accessible: Investigate questions that traditionally required a combination of data analysts and subject-matter experts, which gives administrators another way to evaluate and refine their systems.

Making CSM Work More Consistent

The outcome Imprivata is after is more consistent customer information and preparation across the CS organization, with less administrative work for CSMs. CSMs keep latitude over how they run their day, so consistency comes from the tooling: inside Gainsight, the team tunes Copilot directly, setting key definitions that shape how it responds to certain kinds of prompts. That tooling has changed quickly. Three to six months ago, the team relied on custom GPTs for consistent output; it now builds reusable skills that guide a user through a conversation and make sure every piece is covered.

• Executive briefings: Leaders who need an account briefing rarely log into Gainsight; they want a one- or two-page summary, and building it was a CSM’s manual job. Using the Gainsight MCP, Maida said, “we can tune what that looks like in a consistent way, make sure that we are interpreting both a request and the data in a similar way and create an output that is for the most part executive ready without the CSM having to do very much.”
• Call preparation: CSMs used to check with the sales rep or dig through Salesforce to see what other teams were doing in an account. Now, in Maida’s words, “leveraging AI tools both inside Gainsight and outside, they’re able to get a much better picture of just the holistic engagement within an account before jumping on a call with them.”
• Contact hygiene: Keeping contacts current is, in Maida’s words, “the bane of every CSM’s existence.” Alongside a contact overhaul in Salesforce, the team is rolling out an automated approach that uses email engagement to suggest the right technical, commercial, or security contacts. It matters most in the pooled CS segment, where no named CSM is around to notice when a key contact leaves.

Bringing Customer Intelligence to Teams Beyond CS

Many of Imprivata’s customer-facing colleagues outside CS depend on information that lives in Gainsight, but they don’t log in. As Maida explained, “they’re not familiar with the interface. What they need though is information that’s in Gainsight a lot of times.” Because AI and MCP make that information available outside the Gainsight interface, Imprivata can deliver it through tools those teams already use instead of asking them to learn another platform.

• Access to customer intelligence: Customer-facing teams outside CS need customer insight but don’t regularly work in Gainsight. AI and MCP make it possible to deliver that insight without requiring a Gainsight login.
• Where teams already work: An AI agent in Slack gives these colleagues access to Gainsight customer context in an interface they use every day, without requiring them to navigate another platform.
• More value from existing customer data: Information already captured in Gainsight becomes useful to more people across the organization. Maida describes some big early successes, and the team keeps tuning the agents to improve the results.

Imprivata’s team is still refining how it uses these tools, and the clearest signal so far is direct feedback from the people using them. The bar is high. “We know that as soon as we deliver something that is garbage out to a team member, they’re going to stop using the product.” That’s why every new workflow starts with a small pilot group of trusted users. The team takes their feedback, which Maida describes as mixed at first, tunes the workflow, and then rolls it out more broadly.

After that, usage alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Some of what the team builds sees heavy use but delivers modest value. Other workflows are used far less often and still carry high impact, because they remove a task that is particularly time-consuming or important. The thing employees use most isn’t necessarily the thing that makes the biggest difference. Imprivata understands those differences and judges the program on the total: “If we’re creating enough total impact in aggregate, then we see that as a success point.”

For other security-minded and healthcare organizations on the same path, Maida’s advice is to start with policy, not tooling, by “making sure that you understand what your internal policies and processes are so that you can help to identify and work through those.”

Looking ahead, Mark sees opportunities to take these workflows further. One way is to anticipate what CSMs need before they ask, such as preparing relevant account context based on upcoming meetings. Mark is also evaluating Gainsight Agent Studio, which lets admins and other approved users build and automate custom Skills and workflows directly within Gainsight, as well as the possibility of developing agents in external tools that connect to Gainsight through MCP.

While Mark and the rest of the Imprivata team explore what’s next, one constraint doesn’t move: efficiency can’t come at the customer’s expense. “It’s not just about work getting done,” Mark shares. “It’s about making sure that our customers are set up for success and that they’re getting value out of our products and services.”