Much like the rest of the marketing and communications world, AI adoption in healthcare is skyrocketing – with 89% of organisations reportedly pursuing or already implementing it¹.

While AI implementation in healthcare and life science businesses brings a wealth of potential, from medical document transcription to patient satisfaction monitoring, there is one application with huge potential that perhaps goes overlooked by many: internal communications - specifically focused on change and transformation.

Informing employees around a change whilst also inspiring them to act is often difficult to do – but adopting AI can open-up fresh possibilities to support and enhance your existing internal communications. AI has an important role to play in saving time and money, improving accessibility and maximising relevance and motivation – while revolutionising the way you plan and deliver impactful change programs within your own teams and out into the wider world.

At CTL Communications, our expert knowledge and passion for healthcare communications is powered by more than 15 years of award-winning industry experience – now enhanced by AI via a partnership with Sacher AI, a leader in the development of AI-enabled behaviour change solutions.

So, if you’re thinking about considering adding AI to your internal communications mix, this brief article will set out where we are most excited by the biggest possibilities, and propose some barriers to, and benefits of, early adoption.

The potential for AI to enhance healthcare communications and transformations

Across the healthcare sector, internal communications teams are increasingly looking to deliver better change communications, often in support of organisational or team transformations. The application of artificial intelligence – and in particular machine learning – is an emerging area in this field, but one that has some exciting potential, including:

Ask AI: More and more, customisable AI-agents or ‘chatbots’ are replacing old-school static Q&A documents with real-time automated responses – trained on your data to tackle common questions and update answers at lightning-fast speed. Machine-learning elevates and accelerates access to information, ensuring commonly asked, or indeed new, questions are highlighted and answers developed – hence making the Q&A process dynamic, ever-current, and relevant.

Personalised content: Building from your current communications and brand narrative documents, AI can adapt core messaging to your stakeholders or internal personas on-demand and at-speed – making content instantly more relatable and impactful. Plus, AI-driven translations and cultural adaptation can further enhance global accessibility too.

Sentiment analysis: From challenges to common themes, letting machine-learning explore your employee and customer data can harness valuable and actionable insights – ready to inform your communication and behaviour change activities moving forwards. 

Tailored training: Transforming newly revealed insights into embedded learning is now possible with realistic AI-generated scenarios. From micro-interventions to MS Teams add-ons, this approach is particularly useful for improving preparedness – rolling-out response strategies and embedding corporate or brand language through AI ‘coaching’ tools.

Culture growth: Today, 33% of CEOs rank culture as the number one most important influence on financial performance², so taking advantage of data-driven insights to boost cultural buy-in from your people is key. By combining employee behaviour recognition with targeted strategies through tailored app integration across web, mobile, and other digital platforms – you can power greater workplace productivity, fuel personal growth, better manage chronic health conditions and more.

Whilst generative AI has enormous potential to enhance internal communications and change programs throughout the healthcare industry and beyond,  as a heavily regulated sector - it is important to recognise some of the challenges to AI adoption in healthcare that may exist.

Recognising the barriers to AI adoption in healthcare

As a tool, AI has endless potential to enhance behaviour change and transform engagement across a business. But there are still some common hurdles to watch out for…

Regulation risks: In such a heavily regulated industry, it’s crucial to stay compliant with AI communications at every step. From personal information usage to bias prevention, having trusted teams with in-depth sector knowledge can make all the difference – so seek out an expert.

Data security: Currently, a third of IT managers cite AI data privacy as their biggest fear³. So, while AI can undoubtedly enhance your company’s onboarding, culture and beyond – make sure your data security is up to standard to reassure employees and maintain trust in your organisation as a whole.

Cultural resistance: The introduction of AI often brings scepticism and hesitancy within businesses and their people. So, it’s critical to lead with a focused, clear communication strategy and targeted messaging in AI deployments, just as you would with any other channel. This keeps the focus on promoting the transformational user benefits and seamless integration of AI into existing workflows and behaviour shifts.

Widespread misconceptions: Like any communication tool, AI can disrupt your user journey and deliver a poor perception of your brand if used badly. So, ensure you shape AI tools to suit your communications strategy and plan accordingly to deliver a streamlined experience.

Understanding the benefits of AI adoption 

Happily, the benefits of enhancing your internal communications strategy with AI far outweigh the barriers, including:

Enhanced efficiency: We all want to cut down on time-consuming admin, and with AI – help is at hand. From patient motivation to information sharing, AI’s effectiveness at automating routine communications and data analysis can free up extra capacity and resources to focus on complex tasks and more targeted messaging.

Enhanced accessibility: With advanced language capabilities, such as real-time translation, AI is uniquely placed to break down cultural and linguistic barriers between teams – driving greater understanding for better relationships. Alongside, the ability to scale up for a wider audience and overcome geographical barriers means greater accessibility for all.

Enhanced decision-making: Responsible AI adoption focuses on supporting your teams with time-saving tools, not replacing them. Data-driven leadership insights are the perfect example, providing distilled information and sentiment analytics that help organisations stay ahead of upcoming challenges and turn them into opportunities.

It's time to get ahead

Of course AI is a powerful tool, which we believe has the potential to transform change communications as we know it. In particular, helping internal comms team drive more effective, more tailored, more relevant communications at speed. As data analysis and impactful content combine, you have the opportunity to build behaviour change solutions that suit your specific needs – which will only become more focused as the technology and your business’ usage evolves. Particularly if you have reliable AI and communications experts to call upon.

At CTL, we believe the best way to harness the transformative power of AI-driven communications solutions is to explore specific business use-cases, and co-create potential solutions and possibilities – together. More so than any ‘traditional’ communication tool, AI benefits from a hands-on, iterative development process.

So, if you’re ready to explore how AI could solve your communication and insights challenges, drop us a line today at [email protected].

1. McKinsey US survey on gen AI in healthcare
2. Heidrick & Struggles, Aligning culture with the bottom line: Putting people first
3. Cavell, 2024 AI in Comms Report