When Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham first began experimenting with AI in its marketing department, the work looked like many other health systems’ early pilots: market research, analytics and creative testing.
Mark Bohen, chief marketing and communications officer of Mass General Brigham, said those experiments were useful, but the bigger opportunity came after they ended.
“Those things are good, and we’ve learned a lot, and we got some experience,” Mr. Bohen told Becker’s at its Marketing Leadership Forum on Sept. 16 in Chicago. “But the real value here is to reimagine how we work, which we call ‘the future of marcom.'”
That reimagining started with an audit of marketing’s own work processes. Many were repetitive and mechanical — compiling and synthesizing data — the kind of work AI tends to be good at. Rather than hand down a mandate to fix it, Mr. Bohen’s department created what it calls AI champions.
“These are volunteers,” he said. “They’re younger people in our marketing communications department who said, ‘Hey, I want to help reimagine the future.’ What’s good about that is we’re building it up from the bottom up. It’s not a top-down mandate — ‘here’s how we’re going to change how we do our work.’ They’re creating the new processes.”
“We had more people volunteer than we could accommodate at first,” Mr. Bohen added.
One of the first processes the group tackled was Mass General Brigham’s integrated marketing communication plans, which number about 15 a year. “We do a plan for every business and clinical [unit] that we support, and we’ve shaved off about 40% of the time to complete the plan by using AI,” Mr. Bohen said. The department also built its own AI agent to help synthesize the data that feeds into those plans.
The AI champions also became the department’s trainers, teaching colleagues skills ranging from prompting to building agents. “It’s really their program, and I think that’s been a big key,” Mr. Bohen said.
He said staff hasn’t expressed fears about AI replacing their jobs. Instead, the technology is freeing them from repetitive work.
“When people were doing the plans, they became too mechanical,” Mr. Bohen said. “They weren’t creative enough. There weren’t enough insights baked into them. They weren’t strategic enough. I think by freeing people’s time up to focus on more of those things, we’re getting better plans.”
“This really isn’t about the technology as much as it’s about transformation and change management,” he said. Mass General Brigham built its tools on Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio, platforms already provided by its digital IT team, rather than shopping externally.
He added a caution for other health systems building their own agents: The underlying data matters as much as the tool itself. “Some of these AI platforms are built on very flimsy data models, and so we did spend a lot of time when we built our own agent thinking about what should go in our agent … and make sure that we have the right data inputs so we get the right answers,” Mr. Bohen said.
Mr. Bohen said the shift also comes with a trade-off he recognizes from his own early career.
“I started at Nabisco. I was in the cookie and cracker business. My first year, I just forecasted volume. Every week, I would do a reforecast of volume, and I didn’t like the job very much for the first year. But what I realized afterwards is that I learned the business from the ground up,” he said. “I think we’re going to lose some of that here with AI, and so we have to figure out how we supplement people’s development in training and learning of the business as more of AI takes a lot of those tasks out.”
The department has also used AI to proofread press releases, though it hasn’t extended the technology to video or social content in order to protect its brand voice, Mr. Bohen said.
Mass General Brigham is now looking for more processes to hand off. Its creative intake process — the routinized requests that eat up staff time — is next on the list. “That could be done by AI with human designer supervision and oversight,” Mr. Bohen said.
