Healthcare marketers keep asking the same AI question, usually between a campaign deadline, a service-line request, and someone forwarding a breathless LinkedIn post about agents.
What should we actually be doing with AI?
It’s a fair question. Most healthcare marketers are trying to learn a new set of skills while continuing to perform under the old set of expectations. Service lines need support, campaigns have to run, and the organization expects results, with new tools or old ones. Nobody gets to step away from the work for six months and come back with an AI degree. Even if you could disappear for six months, there’s a reasonable chance part of what you learned would be out of date by the time you got back.
So how are you supposed to keep up?
In some ways, AI is raising a question that healthcare marketers have wrestled with many times before. When does it make sense to build expertise internally, and when does it make sense to borrow it from people whose full-time job is staying ahead of a rapidly changing field?
Most organizations can’t afford to sit the conversation out entirely; AI is becoming too embedded in how work gets done. Every healthcare marketing team will need some level of fluency. The question is how much expertise you want to build yourself, where outside perspective creates leverage, and which parts of the work are important enough to own regardless of how quickly the technology changes.
That’s where the AI conversation gets useful. Also slightly less spiritually exhausting.
What AI can’t create: advantage, context, and the things that matter
AI has a way of pulling attention toward what it can do, partly because the capabilities are impressive and easy to demonstrate. The assets organizations have spent years building, like trust, reputation, and institutional knowledge, get lost in the anxious energy that surrounds AI.
Healthcare organizations have unique perspectives on the communities they serve, the physicians they support, and the choices people make when they need care. They understand their markets in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate because that understanding was built through experience, observation, success, failure, and relationships.
A community hospital may know exactly why one physician has become a trusted voice in the market. An academic medical center may understand why a particular clinical program has become a destination for patients throughout the region. Those insights are part of the fabric of the organization itself and extremely hard to account for on a spreadsheet.
Over time, the things organizations spend years building create advantages that competitors struggle to reproduce. They also happen to be things AI can’t create for you.
The answer is not ‘everyone become an AI expert.’ Healthcare marketers already have jobs. Several, actually.
What AI can do is help make better use of those advantages by surfacing knowledge, identifying patterns, and connecting knowledge that has accumulated over time but never existed in one place.
Expertise, perspective, and the value of looking outward
Unless you’re new to marketing, you’ve already lived through several technology shifts. There was a time when healthcare organizations debated whether social media belonged in a marketing strategy at all. Today, healthcare influencers are building audiences that rival some health systems and, in some cases, enjoy more credibility with consumers than the organizations delivering care.
AI is a different kind of technology shift because it’s finding its way into search, content creation, analytics, and marketing automation, and just about every other marketing discipline all at once. The question for organizations is how much expertise to build internally and where it makes sense to look outward for help.
Expertise comes from spending time with the technology itself, understanding how the tools work, where they’re useful, and where they struggle. This level of expertise develops through immersion that many in-house marketing teams simply don’t have time to pursue.
Perspective develops differently. It comes from seeing that expertise applied across many organizations, teams, workflows, and situations. Over time, you encounter a wide range of responses to the same challenge. Each organization brings different constraints, different priorities, and different strengths. The resulting solutions can be surprisingly varied.
Expertise and perspective are assets in their own right, but they require a degree of focus and scale that may not be sustainable for in-house marketing teams.
Where things get interesting
The most effective use of AI comes from blending advantage, context, expertise, and perspective. Each contributes something different. Taken together, they create opportunities that would be difficult to uncover through any one lens alone.
A health system may know that a particular physician has become a trusted voice in the community. It understands why patients seek that physician out, what concerns they bring into the decision-making process, and what makes that relationship meaningful. An agency with high AI fluency may recognize opportunities to make that expertise more discoverable, more accessible, or more responsive to the questions patients are already asking.
The same thing happens with institutional knowledge. A health system may possess years of consumer research, campaign performance data, service line history, and market knowledge. Much of that information exists in different systems, different teams, and different people’s heads. AI can help bring those pieces together.
The organizations creating the most value with AI are finding ways to apply expertise and perspective to the advantages and context they already have. That’s where new capabilities emerge. That’s where years of accumulated knowledge become easier to access, connect, and apply.
What to do next
By now, you can probably see why the answer to “What should we be doing with AI?” was never going to be a simple directive.
A five-hospital system with three open marketing roles, a service-line VP asking for leads yesterday, and legal reviewing copy by carrier pigeon should not have the same AI strategy as a small rural system making it work with 2.5 FTEs.
Some organizations will invest heavily in internal capabilities while others will look outward for support as they build fluency and confidence. Most will find themselves somewhere in between, applying the technology in ways that make sense for their goals, their teams, and the advantages they’ve already built.
What’s exciting about AI is the sheer range of possibilities it creates. Knowledge that was scattered across teams can become easier to access. Connections between ideas become easier to find and expertise becomes easier to share. Organizations can experiment with new ways of reaching consumers, supporting physicians, understanding markets, and improving the work itself.
The possibilities are broad enough that no universal roadmap exists. Which brings us back to the question beneath all the others.
Who are you as an organization?
Before deciding what to own, what to borrow, and where to invest, it helps to understand how your organization approaches change, where its strengths already exist, and what advantages are worth amplifying.
Additional resources
Some of these ideas deserve more space than a single article can provide. If you’d like to dig deeper, start here.
There is no “right” AI strategy in healthcare marketing, only yours (No registration required): A deeper exploration of the organizational characteristics that shape AI strategy, including the archetype and fluency concepts that help explain why the same recommendation succeeds in one organization and stalls in another.
AI resource hub: A collection of articles, guides, and practical resources for healthcare marketers navigating AI adoption.
AI archetype and fluency assessment: A structured way to understand how your organization approaches change, where it stands today, and what that means for AI adoption. If you’re interested in learning more, we can connect you with Luke.
Luke Farkas: Many of the ideas in this article came from conversations with healthcare marketers trying to make sense of AI while still doing the work they were hired to do. Luke enjoys those conversations. If you’re working through similar questions inside your organization, he’d be happy to talk.
