The robots are coming.
No matter what sector you work in (Trucking! Customer experience! Legal! Uh, public relations!), the message since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in 2022 has been the same: AI is here. And it’s probably coming for your job.
But AI doomerism in the white-collar sector is noticeably offset by the AI optimism in another sector—healthcare (Sorry about the em dash. This post was written by a human, I swear.). It is no secret that the U.S. healthcare system is fundamentally broken. The U.S. spends about 18% of its GPD on healthcare, almost double that of other wealthy nations, but our outcomes are significantly worse. We spend way too much for what we get, and the underlying problems are so diffuse and complicated that very little has made a dent in that uncomfortable truth. AI, however, finally offers an actual solution.
AI hype meets a real-world need
AI is already accelerating research timelines, improving diagnostic accuracy, and unlocking new possibilities in drug discovery, and opening the door to more proactive, preventative models of care. Thoughtfully deployed AI could actually (finally!) solve the trillion-dollar administrative burden that haunts the overall system. Early predictions that AI would replace clinicians have given way to a more nuanced reality: demand for care continues to rise, and AI is increasingly positioned as a meaningful collaborator rather than a substitute. In fact, our client Zocdoc recently released a report showing that 77% of doctors actually like that their patients are using AI.
In a sea of panic, healthcare remains a true bright spot when it comes to the technology’s potential. The broader industry would be smart to embrace healthcare as a meaningful use case to demonstrate AI’s upside. No one less than the Mayor of Techlandia, Kara Swisher, identified this herself in an interview earlier this year with the Bulwark’s Tim Miller when she cited drug research as a reason to be excited about AI. It is going to be pretty hard for society to stay mad at AI companies when one of them discovers a cure for cancer.
In the meantime, health AI companies need to be thoughtful about their own communications to avoid the doomer swirl. The reality is that if the aughts tech boom rode a wave of post-financial crisis heroism (remember when techies were the good guys?), our current era is defined by skepticism and anxiety. Every company needs to be conscious of the underlying suspicion that accompanies new AI products. Unfortunately, it feels like AI companies only have two real pathways at the moment: either people believe your product will do what you say it will (inevitably replacing human workers: bad) or they don’t (fraud: also bad).
How healthtech can meet the moment
In this milieu, health AI companies can succeed by leaning into the high stakes of the underlying problem. It might be challenging for the attention market to understand why AI applications in most white-collar settings do anything other than replace workers, but healthcare is fundamentally different. All Americans are hyper-conscious of the challenges facing our system and the fact that there has been little meaningful progress. AI becomes, in this case, a solution to a very tangible and emotionally resonant problem.
There are a few key ingredients to doing this successfully:
- Get hyper-specific about your audiences and tailor accordingly. While healthcare is a major problem that affects all of us, healthtech companies typically sell to different audiences who care about different things. Companies need to be very specific about their business goals and create a communications strategy that aligns with them. Trying to get a physician to trust and adopt your technology requires a different tone and approach than with a payer, and still a different one from a consumer. You need to be thoughtful about who you’re talking to and what they care about.
- Pick a hero (not you). At Inkhouse, we’ve always talked about the tenets of good storytelling, rooted in the hero’s journey. It’s one of the reasons we start all of our engagements with our Storycrafting Workshop. Every communications company needs to identify within its own story: the hero, the villain, the emotional resonance, and its company’s revelation, its “no place like home.” For healthcare, care providers offer a built-in hero. What is more courageous than saving lives? “So where does my technology fit in?” you might, reasonably enough, be asking. Your tech supports the hero. It makes the hero’s journey possible. You’re not the main character, but you’re what makes the main character’s success a possibility.
- Root it in reality. The AI market is, uh, frothy. In times such as these, journalists can have a hard time discerning what’s real from hype, and the more times you use the word “revolutionize,” the less real it becomes. In healthcare, where the stakes are literally life and death, you can’t afford to be seen as unserious. That’s why your proof points are essential. It is notoriously hard to secure approval for customer quotes or storytelling participation among health systems, so think creatively here. For example, talk about the number of patients your technology serves, what percentage of top health systems use your tech, or other tangible proof points. Surveys of your customer base paired with owned data are a great opportunity to shape the conversation as well.
2026 feels a long way from Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ days. But healthcare is a legitimate bright spot for the application of artificial intelligence and a reason to embrace the technology from a place of hope. Communicators in this sector should focus on their north star, whether that’s achieving better outcomes at lower cost or supporting our front-line healthcare workers who spend their days and nights caring for humanity. Perhaps other industries could learn a thing or two from healthcare, and that the stories that will resonate most aren’t always removing humans from the equation, but rather the opposite. Maybe this technology might actually afford us the ability to be more human.
