Is Your Healthcare Marketing Ready for Agentic AI and Beyond?

If you thought social media was rough on the truth, just wait for AI content. But bigger changes are coming in this global attention economy, increasingly ruled by AI. Healthcare brands face more risk than brands in other industries because the offers in this space are so personal, so linked to one’s health and well-being, and so regulated.

Nothing is going to be the same going forward. We have gone from “Does this smell right?” using our primordial brains to trust what we take in, to “How much do I trust this source?” And now, we are moving into “Do I know who I am speaking with?”

AI content is changing what “Dr. Google” says faster than people can find their new Dr. Google. AI content is spewing half-truths and falsehoods. And, much of that content falls outside of the assumed parameters of privacy and HIPAA data handling. So, it’s a whole new world.

But, the solution is hidden inside the problem. Whether you are driving B2B discovery of your EHR software platform, or you are doing B2C patient volume offering care, you have found that the landscape for connecting with “customers” has changed.

Here’s what’s next and what it means to you. And, you will find that trust is a single part of the bigger issue: the singularity of all markets through agentic AI.

The Cooperation of Agentic AI: The Internet Is About to Spin 180 Degrees

The Internet is the biggest thing to happen in commerce since the Industrial Revolution. Let’s call industrialization the “scaling of production.” That revolution to mechanize was the biggest thing since print, or, the “scaling of inspiration.” So, what did the Internet scale? It scaled “innovation” in that it made everyone an equal publisher (in theory) and gave everyone connected to it access to ideas that can be replicated and applied quickly.

So the modern, interconnected world is connected through these enablements of scaling:

Inspiration > Production > Innovation > ???

The next piece is coming now very fast: Agentic AI: “The Scaling of Cooperation.”

Inspiration > Production > Innovation > Cooperation

Bandwidth to process data is the only bottleneck keeping Large Language Models (LLMs) from using the world’s knowledge to form optimal uses of technology faster. So, agentic AI will load-balance the world’s problems. Whoever is working on a problem others have solved or are solving will simply tap into that work already being done. It’s unknown what currency will share the load. Still, it is a certainty that the costly processing resources needed to do things like solve the common cold, or HIV, will not be consumed ad infinitum by different parties working on the same issues. Agentic AI will optimize and enable collaboration.

In short, Agentic AI means “our bots will talk to your bots.” And we will all focus on doing the things each separate company is best at doing.

For companies with offers (that’s all companies), you are going to be working in a world that enables the consumer, the patient, the buyer to optimize for cost or value with the entire world’s opinion taken into account instantly. And, every company will be working to compete for that purchase by reducing costs to optimize yield. This optimization will include collaboration to stake out niche areas of value creation, and it will include joining up in partnerships and collaborations that make sense at scale.

The speed of the rollout of this collaborative Internet will be 10x faster than the first Internet. And that will “feel” 100x faster. The whiplash will not come from misinformation, but from new offers that seem too good to be true. These new innovative offers will undercut market after market.

If the world needed one Amazon, one Netflix, and one Google before, now it will only need one of anything. Agentic AI may enable collaboration as never before. Some of these collaborations will be formal and have names, but will more likely be confederated, not corporate. Players will come and go in these ventures that will seem to emerge from nowhere with no one in charge. We could quickly see the existing corporate order re-distributed to informal associations of players who don’t need the overhead of an administrative class.

This collaboration is already happening in manufacturing. Part suppliers join marketplaces and feed their live product data and inventory to distributors and resellers. What we do with part sales will happen with complex business operations. This will change everything about the healthcare industry.

How This Will Look. Sample: EHR Companies

Suppose you have been selling EHR software to hospitals. In that case, you were hoping to market enough to get added to the consideration set and earn an opportunity to bid on a location or facility.

Now, the entire world's knowledge of your capabilities, your personal preferences, and the drawbacks of your business model will be dissectable in a chatbot.

This deity-like equipping of the buyer will create a level playing field for all EHR offers. No government will be able to protect a monopoly, and no buyer will self-limit their choices because no one gets fired for buying the market leader option, a la IBM.

This level playing field for all offers will firm up the buyer side of the equation. For comparison, consider buying a house now with access to all MLS listings and not just the ones your realtor friend knows. The options are wider, and the sorting and filtering by desires is much more direct.

With the value proposition of many industries moved to a single playing field, growth will come by driving up value and/or costs down. Each EHR company will stake out a territory. These territories will be exclusive and negotiated constantly. How to teach the AI-scanned world that one has the high ground on a feature will be the new SEO. We are doing this now at GoEpps with AI-ready (not AI-produced) content to establish trust in the output of AI tools.

Doing Marketing Now for the AI-Enabled “Single Playing Field” World

Starting today, focus on creating a unique and human perspective and stating it in your website content. Be the source of solutions to very human problems, and bring the receipts. Going forward, you are only as strong as two things you can gather: the unique insights from your data, and your uniquely human ability to deliver products and services to your customers. Showing the single playing field that you have real insights gets you into the consideration set. Defining and driving up the value of your product and service delivery make up the other lever, so start being warm and human now.

Diving Deeper to Be AI-World Ready With Your Marketing

Let’s hit the high notes here to frame up what the brands of the future will feel like to buyers:

1. Branding Advertising: Future-focused companies will focus on branding and advertising to build their reputation and attract interest. They will drive buyers to look them up and see that they have the reputation to support their claims. AI tools will provide the answers based on who is the biggest, and winners will continue to win more easily. The single playing field for all possible offers will be global. The brands that get on top of this now will be there. Digital will go from being a first impression to being the only tool to help buyers decide.

2. Brand Voice: Brands in the future will align every pixel of interactions with people around a strong brand voice. Policing the boundaries in a single-playing-field world will leave nothing to chance on brand voice. We are going to continue to see the “McDonald 's-ification” of the human experience, and we are going to see it in every area of life and business. Brands will protect their unique selling proposition (USP) the way Disney protects its IP. Claims will have to be defensible in a world where there is arguably a source of truth for value claims, like “best.” The law will need to catch up to the marketplace being the origin of monopolization, and the law will lag behind for decades while winners take over the field of open commerce.

3. Brand Performance: Expertise and value will be demonstrable. If you are using case studies to paint the picture now, you will be generating libraries of case studies to offer AI agents source material for your value proposition. The agentic AI web will allow for schematic sharing of data with redactions. Your buyers will be able to use your AI agents to see case studies that align with their businesses. Where we see self-education now with website content, we will see self-comparison of one’s buyer desires to your existing outcomes data.

4. Brand Credibility: Brands that speak with authority will build and maintain libraries of problems solved. Inputs and outputs will be quantified to compare apples to apples. And your AI agents will be used alongside your competitors' AI agents to run comparisons of your buyers’ needs to simulate outcomes.

5. Brand Education: Your brand education will benefit from your in-house AI agents. Your agents will tell you the content to produce. It will focus on using your solutions to meet needs and solve problems. It will tell you what the other AI agents are asking, and what your own AI agents are putting out there with direct questions from buyers. Your AI agent will help guide your investments in content production going forward.

Crazy, Right?… No

No. It’s not crazy. It’s not even new. It took thousands of years to get to movies, which emerged 130 years ago from photography. At first, the writer, director, and lead were one person, best exemplified in the talkies era by Buster Keaton. But, with time, the craft became specialized. The auteur-director typically hires talent to do the dangerous bits now.

This change is just the growth and division of labor applied to every market that exists. It’s not new, but it will feel new. It will feel revolutionary. It will feel like the end of the world. But it’s just the end of talkies and a move toward a more vibrant world.