A new wave of AI is entering healthcare, and it's going to change the way communicators and marketers talk about it.

Agentic AI, the kind that can plan, execute, and complete multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention, is moving into healthcare operations faster than most of us expected. We’ve come a long way from simple diversions in creating clearly fake images to share with friends for a couple seconds before forgetting about it.

Now, Microsoft is publishing about it in the New England Journal of Medicine. And 61% of healthcare executives are already building or budgeting for it.

If you work in healthcare communications or marketing, this changes how you message AI, how you build your company’s reputation around it, and how you plan content strategy going forward. Here's what you need to know and what to do about it.

In this issue:

Is this a safe space? I'm still a Marvel guy.

The last few films have been bad (Fantastic Four: this isn’t about you). But the original Iron Man run? Whew.

One of the things that always stuck with me about Tony Stark was how his relationship with technology evolved over the course of those films. In the beginning, he had J.A.R.V.I.S., a really smart assistant that could answer questions, run diagnostics, pull up data on command.

Classic “2025” AI assistant energy.

But by the later films, the suit was doing a lot more than responding to voice commands. It was thinking ahead, anticipating threats, executing complex sequences on its own while Stark focused on the bigger picture.

I keep coming back to that because it maps almost perfectly onto what's happening with AI in healthcare right now. We spent the last two years in the J.A.R.V.I.S. phase: chatbots answering patient FAQs, generative AI drafting social content (poorly, most of the time), large language models summarizing records and meetings. Useful? …Sure.

Transformative? Not yet.

But something is shifting quickly this year. Healthcare AI isn't responding to prompts anymore. It's planning, sequencing, and executing multi-step workflows on its own. This is the era of agentic AI in healthcare, and it's moving faster than most communicators realize.

The simplest way I can put it: think about the difference between an assistant that waits for instructions and a colleague that anticipates what needs to happen next.

Traditional AI tools – the tools of yesteryear – are reactive. You prompt, they respond. Agentic AI systems can plan a sequence of tasks, adapt when conditions change, coordinate across platforms, and deliver outcomes. All with human oversight, but without someone hand-holding every step.

Take MLR review, one of the most time-consuming workflows in pharma marketing. Today, a content team drafts a promotional asset, routes it through medical, legal, and regulatory reviewers, waits for comments, revises, resubmits, and repeats. (I think we all know this all too well.) Review cycles can stretch 50 to 60 days per asset. An AI agent can pre-screen content against approved claims libraries, flag compliance issues before it ever reaches a reviewer, surface previously approved language for similar assets, and route materials through the right approval pathway based on content type and market. If something gets flagged, the agent recommends compliant alternatives using your own approved messaging. Galaxy brain thinking, galaxy brain efficiency.

We're talking about a digital coworker for your content supply chain. Now imagine building agentic AI platforms purpose-built for MLR, with the goal of getting reviews and approvals done within 24 hours of content creation. The company I work for can do this for many of our clients, and many pharma companies have their own “MLR agent” for this exact purpose

For anyone who has watched a campaign stall for weeks in the review queue (raising my own hand here), that should get your attention. It got mine.

Healthcare has historically been the vertical that big tech acknowledged but never truly prioritized. The regulatory complexity, the data fragmentation, the glacial pace of institutional change. It was always easier to go dominate retail or finance or CPG first.

That calculus has flipped for the first time in decades.

In just the past few weeks, Humana and Google Cloud launched an agentic AI tool supporting 20,000+ member advocates across 80 million annual calls. Microsoft co-authored peer-reviewed research on agentic AI readiness in the New England Journal of Medicine. Deloitte's 2026 Health Care Outlook found that 61% of executives are already building agentic AI initiatives or have secured budgets.

But Microsoft's NEJM research shows only 3% have deployed agents in live workflows, even though 43% are piloting.

That gap between experimentation and execution is where the real story lives for us as marketers and communicators.

This is where I want you to spend the most time, because everything above is context. Everything below is what to do with it.

AI messaging needs a vocabulary upgrade. Most healthcare organizations are still saying "we use AI" like it's 2023. The problem is that "AI" now covers everything from a spell-checker to an autonomous agent negotiating with a payer. Words are important. If your organization is deploying agentic AI, say so. If you're still in the chatbot phase, be honest about that too. Audiences, especially HCPs and healthcare decision-makers, can smell vague tech claims from a mile away. Specificity builds reputation. Buzzwords erode it.

The reputation narrative is yours to own or lose. Microsoft's research found that 60% of executives cite reskilling and upskilling as a top challenge. There is real anxiety inside health systems about what autonomous AI means for jobs and patient safety. The organizations that proactively communicate their approach to AI governance and human-in-the-loop frameworks will own this narrative. I’m currently working on exactly this type of governance structure for early adopter companies.

Everyone else will end up playing defense when the inevitable "AI made a mistake" headline drops. Get ahead of it now. Develop your organization's point of view on responsible AI deployment before a reporter asks for one.

Agentic AI is about to reshape your content strategy. Capgemini Invent projects that AI agents could generate up to $450 billion in economic value by 2028, and 69% of executives plan to deploy agents in marketing processes by year's end. For pharma and life sciences communicators specifically, this means AI agents that can identify which HCPs to target, generate intelligence briefs before a rep visit, analyze prescribing behavior, and recommend personalized outreach channels(!!!). If you're in commercial pharma, your media planning and HCP engagement strategies are about to look fundamentally different. The teams that understand how these tools work will have a major advantage over the ones still debating whether to use AI for social copy. “New era” HCP engagement is a personal interest of mine, so look for more to come on HCP personalization in communications and marketing materials in a future edition.

Map this to your editorial calendar now. Agentic AI touches almost every beat healthcare comms covers: workforce, patient experience, data privacy, generative engine optimization (GEO), digital health investment. This is a theme, not a one-off story. Build it into your thought leadership pipeline. Find executives within your organization who can be credible authorities on this topic and pitch them as voices on AI governance. Create content series around how your organization is approaching implementation. The window to establish credibility on this topic is right now, before every health system and pharma company is saying the same thing.

Brief your earned media teams yesterday. The next generation of journalists are already writing about the 3% deployment gap, the workforce anxiety, and the governance questions. If your organization has a real agentic AI story to tell (even a pilot), get it in front of reporters. If you don't have a story yet, at minimum prepare your spokespeople to talk about your AI roadmap intelligently. The worst outcome is a reporter calling about AI in healthcare and your exec fumbling through talking points from 2024.

Watch the regulatory conversation. This one is quieter but will get loud fast. As AI agents start making autonomous decisions that touch patient data, payer communications, and clinical workflows, the regulatory frameworks will tighten. We already saw the FDA issue over 60 compliance letters in 2025 as part of its crackdown on deceptive drug advertising, including letters targeting digital and social media content. That was about promotional compliance, but it signals a broader appetite for enforcement that will absolutely extend to AI-generated and AI-driven communications. HIPAA wasn't written for an AI agent that queries claims databases and coordinates across systems. Communicators who understand where the compliance lines are (and where they're about to move) will be invaluable to their organizations. Partner with your legal and compliance teams now, not after the first enforcement action makes headlines.

Healthcare's J.A.R.V.I.S. moment is over. The technology is scaling. Big tech is invested. Pilots are turning into long-term contracts. The question for communicators isn't whether agentic AI will reshape healthcare operations. It's whether your communications strategy is ready for what that means.

The teams that move early, with clear messaging, credible governance narratives, and smart editorial planning, are going to set the standard everyone else follows.

This is science fact. And don’t worry: this is the fun stuff.

Final quick hits on what’s trending for the curious

until next week,

✌️ j