At last month’s Healthcare Interactive Conference (HCIC), I was able to talk to marketers who are very results-focused. They are also very focused on what will impact their marketing efforts and why. Every conversation came back to the AI.
In my previous conclusion on HCIC, I wrote about how AI is not a strategy—It is a tool to solve real problems. Now I want to dive deeper into a specific problem that AI is creating for healthcare marketers: how they find us. We need to think about all aspects of how AI can be used. Generally this breaks down into both impact and chance.
Impact: AI search is transforming healthcare discovery
Several sessions at the conference alluded to this shift, but marketing experts Brittany Young and Gina Linville provided deeper insight.
From a marketing perspective, the greatest impact is one of being found. Think about how much time a typical hospital marketer spends getting found. I’ve had many conversations over the years about search engine optimization (SEO) and the importance of having valuable content that search engines find unique and relevant.
AI impacts this in ways that are not obvious at first glance.
The new reality of patient search
Think about how you typically use ChatGPT or how its search engine has evolved. AI now extracts the data and gives you a summary with information pulled from multiple online sources. The good news is that the AI tool will typically reference a website you are accessing. The bad news is that while AI often credits source websites, patients get their answers without even clicking on your site.
The scale of this change is staggering:
AI provides an overview of up to 84% of search queries when it comes to health care issues.
Healthcare leads nearly every sector in AI-powered search results, a trend that is accelerating:
Strategic response: winning in the pursuit of AI in healthcare
This change requires a fundamental rethinking of content strategy. Two concepts emerge as critical:
1) Response Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Response Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring and optimizing content so that AI-powered systems such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and voice assistants can easily identify, extract, and cite it as a direct response to user queries.
2) Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a digital marketing technique designed to improve a brand’s visibility in the results produced by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms. It involves adapting digital content and online presence to ensure that artificial intelligence systems can accurately interpret, cite and use the content when generating answers to user queries.
The imperative is clear: organizations that don’t optimize AI-powered discovery will not just lose rankings, they will lose visibility altogether.
If you’re not already thinking about how to target your content toward this, know that you’ll soon feel the impact.
Opportunity: AI agent and productivity
On the other side of the coin is opportunity. While the impact above gives you a chance as long as you react appropriately, I want to focus on the productivity part of this. Specifically, think about what AI agent can do for your organization.
What traditional campaign development looks like
Let me give you some examples of common tasks and how long they usually take:
- Create a campaign summary: up to two weeks
- Create copy on multiple channels: 8-16 hours
- Create digital assets related to the campaign. that fit your brand standards and work on each individual channel. The website may allow larger images. Paid search or paid social may have limited space: 40 hours
- Creation of the segment and taking it to marketing automation tools: several hours
Now imagine specialized AI agents handling each component, not replacing human strategy and judgment, but instead accelerating execution while maintaining standards and brand compliance. Simply having a campaign spread across multiple channels turns into multi-person engagement over several weeks. While you focus on that, you won’t focus on additional campaigns or perfecting your craft.
The Team of AI Agents Your Marketing Organization Needs
The answer lies in agent AI. We believe AI can reduce the time needed to complete these tasks and still keep humans informed. Below are some examples of agents you might need in your organization:
| Agent name | Aim |
| Hunter | Lead identification and acquisition specialist who finds potential customers using predictive artificial intelligence and behavioral signals. |
| Oracle | Predictive intelligence that forecasts customer behavior, market trends and campaign performance. |
| Driver | Omnichannel orchestration that translates strategy into high-performing, compliant journeys. |
| Guardian | The predictive retention specialist who monitors satisfaction predicts attrition and intervenes to preserve valuable relationships. |
| Craftsman | Creative engine that powers Gen AI to produce brand assets at scale. |
| Tutor | Strategic marketing consultant providing real-time recommendations and optimizing campaigns based on performance data. |
| Conversational | Engage the prospect through chat, email, and social media with contextual awareness. |
| Sentinel | Compliance and security ensuring all marketing activities comply with HIPAA regulations. |
| Segmentation | Discover audience segments and create new segments for activation. |
| Bridge | Content migration specialist to transfer content seamlessly between platforms. |
| Write | Copywriting specialist to create attractive brand texts. |
| Forge | Application migration specialist to assist with code generation and web development. |
Most importantly, this frees up your marketing team to focus on what AI can’t do: strategic thinking, creative problem solving, and understanding the nuanced needs of your community.
The way forward: integration, not replacement
Organizations that win in this new landscape do not choose between human experience and AI capabilities. They are strategically integrating both.
Success requires more than technology. You need an integrated approach:
- Rethink discoverability through AEO and GEO optimization
- Implementation of specialized AI agents to accelerate productivity
- Maintain human supervision for strategy, creativity and judgment
- Ensure compliance at every step, particularly in heavily regulated healthcare
- Impact measurement versus business results, not just operational metrics
Enable healthcare organizations to lead this change
HCIC reminded us that success in healthcare marketing is not about pursuing technology for its own sake. As I shared in my HCIC’s first takeawayAI is not a strategy, it is a tool to solve real challenges that impact your organization’s ability to connect patients to care.
The search revolution is here. The productivity opportunity is real. Organizations that act quickly to optimize AI-powered discovery while deploying strategic AI agents will gain a competitive advantage that will compound over time.
start a conversation with our experts today.
