Celebrating comms excellence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries. Healthcare is no exception. The conversation around AI’s impact in healthcare and its potential to expedite drug discovery, improve diagnostic accuracy and personalise patient care continues to increase, but AI is informing and influencing healthcare communications too.

Using AI together with predictive analytics is revolutionising healthcare communications, helping us to forecast future trends, behaviours and responses that allow us as communicators to more quickly and accurately counsel clients.

New, technology-powered social listening tools broaden our insights, analysing online conversations, images, podcasts and video at scale to identify patterns in behaviour and attitudes toward healthcare services – providing a ‘panoramic’ view. Drawing on rich data that goes beyond text to identify content that stakeholders prefer to engage with, AI can be used to develop more accurate predictive models of how markets will change, accelerating the movement from the mere identification of trends to actionable scenarios to inform the development of detailed stakeholder personas.

AI personas expedite insight gathering processes, meaning we are now able to bring our target audience ‘into the room’. We can ask our AI ‘bot’ questions on a scenario with the confidence that its response will be underpinned by robust data. While not ‘human’, AI persona bots can help address a hypothesis. For example, we could take different ‘AI healthcare professional bots’ to an ‘AI ad-board’ or ask a range of ‘AI payer bot’ personas to react to predicted scenarios.

This use of AI will inspire and provoke strategic and tactical thinking more quickly, expediting communication strategies and tactics. It is as close to having an audience panel on your team to ask them anything, whenever you want to, and because you can’t promote products to an AI bot within restricted access tools, it’s also compliant.

Understanding the evolving landscape using AI means we can be even more agile and prepared in our work as communicators. While AI won’t ever replace the validation of ‘real’ people, it is a game changer for communicators whose thinking it enhances. It’s the power of real people working with AI that will advance our work.

Meg Morgan is Practice Leader at Real Chemistry