Programs fueled by AI have captured the imagination of healthcare marketers

All the recent “AI is coming to healthcare marketing” chatter tends to overlook one important piece of information: It’s already here. Organizations big and small across a range of therapeutic categories are using tactics grouped under the AI umbrella — machine learning, natural language processing and the like — to great effect. Anyone who says otherwise is either out of the techno-loop or attempting to preserve some imagined competitive advantage. Where there seems to be a disconnect is in expectations around the use of these tactics. Perhaps because of the hype, there’s a sense that AI will magically transform an organization’s mess of data into beautifully ordered stacks that are ripe to be mined, which couldn’t be further from the case. AI tactics are only as useful and potentially effective as the data that fuels them. Similarly, it goes without saying that certain organizations are more forward-minded than others, both in their ability to collect/parse zettabytes of data and to extract actionable insights from it. And even within the companies that are “good at data,” there are often splits: An ability to tap into this information at an organizational level doesn’t necessarily correlate to an ability to tap into it at a brand level.