AI Adoption in Healthtech Marketing: What the 2026 Benchmark Reveals

0:00One respondent said, AI certainly saves time on routine tasks, but if it does 80 % of 100 tasks, You still have to do 20 % of 100 tasks. AI has expanded what they can do, but they're busier than ever, and they still don't know the answer to the ROI question.

0:27Welcome to the Health Tech Marketing Show. I'm Adam Turinus. Today's episode is a little different. There's no invited guest. Instead, I'm going to be joined by my colleague, Mark Irwick, who's our Chief Strategy Officer. And we're going to walk through the results of the third wave of our AI benchmark survey across health tech marketing leaders. And here's how we're going to do it. First of all, I'm going to take you through what the data says. And then Mark's going to join me and he's going to talk about what we think it means for you, how it can make you more competitive, and what we'd recommend you focus on.

1:05And we'll also share as part of that a very lively conversation that broke out when we shared it with a group from the Health Tech Marketing Network. It was a really cool discussion. You don't need to take notes, by the way. The results are available down below in the show notes. You can actually download them now and read along. But if not, just sit back and I'm going to take you through the results. A quick word on the survey. We started this benchmark in July of 2025, and then we ran a quick second wave in January of this year. The third wave was closed at the end of September. Across the three waves, we've collected close to 200 responses.

1:51These are quite long surveys, so we're pretty pleased with that level of responsiveness. The survey is built for health tech marketers. So if you work at an agency or consultancy, the survey screened you out. And so apologies if you experienced that, but it was done on purpose so that the results reflect what people who are in a marketing seat today are experiencing with AI. So in this latest wave, about two thirds of the respondents came from health tech and digital health companies, and the rest were spread across devices, diagnostics, and some health systems as well. Three quarters of them work in marketing teams that have between two and 15 people in them, and the rest are mostly in smaller teams.

2:39So this is mostly a world of lean teams being asked to do a lot. All right, so let's get on with the findings. The first finding is that AI maturity is moving much faster than we expected. We ask people to describe where they are and we group the answers into three buckets, not using AI or still exploring it, and then limited tactical use or integrated workflows and then having a strategic roadmap. And so picture, if you like, three sets of bars, one for each wave. In July of 2025, the tallest bar by far was limited tactical use. So that's about a year ago, right? A little bit more than a year ago.

3:25But that was about two thirds of the people were there. And then integrated workflows, well, less than 30 % back then said that they'd used AI to actually integrate it into their workflows. And in January, that actually had barely moved. Now, a year later, so September of 2026, it flipped. Integrated workflows or a strategic roadmap jumped to about two thirds of respondents. And I mean, limited tactical use dropped to about a third. So in one year, the majority went from dabbling to building, which is really exciting. And the group that's not using at all, well, guess what? It's gone to zero. And honestly, I was surprised there was a handful of people who weren't experimenting with it a year ago.

4:16We think the companies told them you can't. One respondent summed up where the front of the pack is, which is their entire company is AI first and has, in their words, moved way on from benchmarking to really using this strategically as a core part of their business. But that really is the tip of the spear. The second finding is the gap that sits underneath the first one. When people say they've integrated AI into their workflows, what they really mean is how their team works, not how their data works. So we ask them how well AI tools are integrated with their core systems like CRM and CMS and analytics platforms like that.

5:07In July 2025, about 3 % said fully integrated. And in September, it's only moved to 11%. So it's growing. But in broad terms, nine out of 10 health tech marketing teams still have AI sitting off to the side of their systems rather than connected to them. And some of that is choice. So one respondent told us flatly that they do not want to connect AI tools to their CRM and analytics or anything that holds proprietary information. And keep that in mind because boy, did that come back when we talked to the rest of the group. There was a really active conversation about whether or not you should do and could do that.

5:54And the teams that had integrated it were on fire in the way that they were using AI. The rest of the folks were either frustrated that they couldn't or concerned about the potential risks of doing it. Okay. The third finding is the one that I would circle in red, and that's measurement. We asked whether people are measuring the return on their AI use. In the first wave, a little more than half said they weren't measuring at all. And in the latest wave, 39 % they still aren't. So that's progress, but it means that four in 10 teams in AI have no idea what they're getting back. And it goes deeper.

6:36This wave, we added two new questions and only about a quarter have actually measured the time that AI saves them. And 55 % said nobody has ever asked them for that number. So the quote that sums this up from the second wave and it's four words, not sure what good looks like. Think about that for a second. Finding number four, the investment people are making is tactical, not structural yet. We asked what organizations actually commit to AI in marketing today. So imagine a bar that starts tall and drops off a cliff. The tall bar is paid licenses beyond the free tiers. So nearly three quarters have a paid Claude license.

7:21Then it falls off. About four in 10 have access to internal data or engineering help. And about a third have a dedicated budget line. About 30 % get protected time to learn and build. Fewer than one in five have any dedicated headcount, even part-time. And only about 15 % have a formal training budget, which is the same share that they said that gets none of these things at all. So think about that for a second. AI literacy has been one of the biggest issues in marketing for two years, and 85 % of teams have no formal training budget for it. One respondent described the gap as having the time to research and learn tools, getting them onboarded in a compliant way, and having budget for new ones.

8:12In other words, everything except for dedicated training, budgets, and resources. The fifth finding is about who holds the keys. We ask people to think about their single highest value AI use case and then tell us whose time outside of marketing they'd need to make it happen. The top answer by a wide margin was IT and engineering at almost 60%. Then data and analytics at about a third. Outside vendors or agency at about 30%. And sales or sales ops at a little over a quarter. Compliance, legal, and privacy came in under 20%. And an executive sponsor at about 12%. So the use case that matters most to marketing usually depends on a team and a queue that marketing doesn't own.

9:08One respondent put it simply, they could not get the data sources to connect. What we don't know yet is whether IT is saying you're not allowed or we don't have the bandwidth. And you know what? It's probably both. So here's the connection I want you to notice. The measurement gap and the IT gap are different sides of the same coin. If you can show leadership what AI is actually delivering, it becomes easier to make the case for resources, the headcount, and the IT team you need to take the next step and connect AI to your sales and marketing data. If you can't show it, you're asking for an investment on faith.

9:53There were some really quite cool open-ended responses that I want to share with you. One on leadership support, this picture is enthusiastic but uneven. One respondent said their leadership is supportive and driving use, but reactive on governance and without a full roadmap. Another said leadership is somewhat supportive and deliriously overconvinced of value. A third just said fully supportive but problematic. So if you're a marketing leader caught between a CEO who expects magic and a budget that doesn't fund it, you are not alone. Then there's what we started calling the AI paradox. One respondent said, AI certainly saves time on routine tasks, but if it does 80 % of 100 tasks, you still have to do 20 % of 100 tasks.

10:47AI has expanded what they can do, but they're busier than ever, and they still don't know the answer to the ROI question. Someone in one of our network sessions said something similar. They've never felt as busy as they do right now. Related to that, the capacity crunch, one respondent described a two-person team that's also building AI tools for leadership and for sales on top of the full stack of marketing. Their words, it feels overwhelming. Another said they'd love to rebuild their entire AI agent workforce. They built for marketing, but they also have a full-time job that they need to hold down.

11:29And finally, where it's quietly working, one respondent said they were not surprised by AI prospecting inside their CRM. Where AI starts acting less like a copywriter and more like a strategic advisor, another used Claude to build a storyboard for an animated video, which saved a lot of back and forth with designers and their agency. So as you can tell, I'm getting a little hoarse. So in a second, I will be glad to bring my colleague Mark to the conversation. Mark, thank you for joining the episode. I'm really looking forward to getting into what you thought about the data. So before we get into it though, So for those of you people who don't know you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

12:21Mark Erwick, Chief Strategy Officer at Health Launchpad. I've been in marketing roles all my life and for the last 25 years or so in healthcare technology marketing. Really excited to be here and particularly on this episode because I'm so looking forward to talking about the data that we got here. Well, it is great to have done the three waves together because we've seen the simulation. that's just so fascinating. So you've lived with the data now for a couple of weeks. And so what do you think about this jump, particularly when it comes to sort of integration and taking a more strategic approach?

12:58What do you find encouraging and what do you think is still to do? I think people were using it very slowly, experimenting with chat and getting some results out of it. And hey, this is like a super Google with now more information in it. And we start to get in towards the phase that people get the, whoa, there's a shift from the chat functionality to collaboration with AI. Whether that is co-work or whatever tool you use. But it's like, so now suddenly people start to really recognize the power. And I think that's the second phase. And we will eventually get towards the third phase where AI becomes your personal assistant, if you will.

13:40And that's the fascinating part. Like, hey, you have this first jump towards, people start to realize, oh, this is really cool. This is a lot of value in here. Start sharing that with their teams. I think that's what we also see here in the data. It's not just an individual, but it's really teams starting to use it and getting ready for the next job. And there were a couple of people in the community who I think have sort of developed like an early version of an assistant. I like that way. It makes it very tangible. that you made you made this really interesting point when we were meeting with the sharing the findings with the community which is is that you know we use ai has stopped being a differentiator so you know for marketing folks where does the differentiation come from well i think there's been a short period of time where you could really be different than your competitors and based on getting faster in the market better understanding of the market and using that but since now every organization pretty much is using AI in some shape or form, that competitive advantage is going away.

14:47I think we're getting ready for this next phase where the smart marketeers start looking at it differently. Gartner, I think last month, had this report where they looked towards B2B buyers and 69 % or so stated that they prefer not to deal with a sales rep. right so this is really interesting because now with ai it allows the marketing people to really get much more control over like the selling process the selling journey if you will and have a more important role in towards this so i think this is the new opportunity to differentiate but i don't think many organizations have realized that as you know adam we experimented some with aeo first and we started to be successful in it and we build that out now with like the search in ai and asking questions about a company but i think that goes way further you will eventually have rather than a purchasing department you have purchasing ai that's ai that starts evaluating different vendors and helps to get out there so yeah fascinating times god it's just it's there's not a day that goes by where I'm not amazed with what I can do with this stuff.

16:04And also terrified about, you know, both incredibly excited and terrified about what the future has in store. Let's get real specific though. So for folks listening to this, what's the number one recommendation for them? I think we speak about this concept of making sure that you have someone in your organization that is appointed towards driving this forward. So in your marketing team, assign it towards someone and empower this person with budget both in terms of hours as well as in terms of money as well as in terms of training so that this person can really drive your AI strategy forward and I think initially many people were looking towards content creation other people were looking towards okay how does AI help us to save money but the point of view should be different.

16:58How do we as a marketing organization get better control in this whole cycle of buying cycle, sales cycle in a world where the buying behavior is so changing? And how do you get more sophisticated with approaching your buyers with the right level of content at the right timing? Because now all of that is possible because of AI. Yeah. And I think the foundation of that is not necessarily obvious. And it seems like one of the biggest gaps, and it certainly seemed to come out, this gap certainly seemed to come out of the research, is measurement. Yeah. And why do you think that is so important? It may seem obvious, but there's quite a lot to it.

17:44I was fascinated that not more organizations were asked, like, hey, what are your results? But I think I see it as a positive thing, or at least as an opportunity for marketing news, right start building your own like dashboard or framework to measure things because that helps you to control the story so that it doesn't become the cfo at some random point asking you as a marketing leader hey how much money are we saving because of ai but you're controlling the story and you start talking about hey what is it doing towards the capability like what is the work that you can do today that was not possible before.

18:22AI now allows you to track your top ABM accounts and making sure that you see what they are interested in, their social posts, their blogs, new press releases, so you can pick up on themes that are relevant and help with that information and power the sales team, but also ensure that, like in your ABM campaign, you reach out with the right messaging. So that's capability. And then two is quality. like the work that we can do better now because of ai i remember the challenges that we had after a trade show uploading lists for instance like you have this 100 leads 200 leads 300 leads that are coming back from a trade show and now you need to upload that in towards your crm and there's all kind of challenges there's duplicates and potential duplicates and all of that and then you want to collect additional data towards it before you upload it now with ai then it's it's the quality of the data that gets into your CRM is significantly better.

19:20So it helps to drive the quality. And then free efficiency. So don't start with efficiency, but really have that as another element towards it. Because if you start with efficiency, and I think that's what, if you look in the press, a lot of the information is about efficiency, like whether that is changes with organizations and job cuts here and there. That is all about efficiency, but it's not the story you want to tell. as the leader of your department, right? You really want to talk about this. Hey, it's helping in the capabilities. It's helping about the quality. Otherwise, it just becomes like a cost-cutting measure.

19:57And that's not a great story. And it's not going to end well for your department either, right? Because now it's saving people. Quality is a, you can softly tie quality to an improvement in results. But do you think we can get to the point where we can measure the impact of using AI has on growing the top line? Oh, absolutely. And not just the top line, the amount, but also the speed. Because we're better able to influence person by person, organization by organization, based on the interest that they have. Now, the right message at the right moment through the right channel. we're able to expedite these these these levels of interest that intend that's out there and get that faster over the finish line and i think that's really that area adam i think there is still a lot of work that that we can do and with we i mean the collective we of marketeers in this space yeah to really be to help drive that right so it's measuring the your ability to do abm for example, in a much more personalized way, which is, you know, the notion of getting the right message to the right person at the right time is an easy thing to say, but very hard to do.

21:18With AI, you can do that more easily. That's right. Yep. Because more scalable. Yep. Yeah. So one of the other things that came out of the research is the fact that only one in 10 teams have fully integrated, connected their LLM to their CRM, the CMS, or analytics. And what's the impact of that? I mean, if they could do that, what would happen? Yeah. So I think it speaks towards the level of maturity of your AI implementation in your organization, right? Earlier on, I spoke about this concept of getting from phase one, the chat functionality towards phase two, towards collaboration and phase three being really like the personal assistant.

22:02In order to leverage a personal assistant, you need to have integration. Like you need to get this connection out of Salesforce, out of HubSpot and out of other tools that you have. You see spikes happening in GA and you have messages towards your team through Slack and you're still in control, but like the way that you're orchestrating your work and the workflows that are out there as a result of the data that you have access to can only happen by integrating with all of those different systems and it changes the way that you're thinking it changes the way that you're like that you're working on a daily basis yeah i can give an example there maybe that that's helpful but i've integrated cloud with salesforce with my email and I see things happening and it's telling me, hey, this is what's like, it's picking up on things that I wouldn't be able to do myself.

23:01It's unbelievable. And so that's where the real power is. And now like when I say personal assistant, it's not a personal assistant sitting there answering your questions. No, it's a personal assistant telling you what are smart things to do today based on the data that it has access to. And so that's why it's, when I say, well, it's a new phase because it's a new approach of working. Now, we presented it back to about a dozen members of the community last week, and it started a great conversation. What were some of the things that stood out to you from what these health tech marketing leaders were saying?

23:42Well, first of all, I was so excited. Like everybody had something completely different to talk about. And every example by itself was just amazing. Like one was very much on the creative side. Another was very much on the personal assistant concept. Hey, it's looking at my agenda the day before. It tells me which meetings I should attend and should not attend based on the context and all of the information it had access to. Another person who shared with us that he had built like actually a complete software package that has access towards information in SharePoint combines it with other information and when he showed it towards the IT department they were scratching their head where is this coming from so like it's amazing the amount of talent and I think that is it's great time that we live in Adam this is like this is amazing you can do things that were not possible before and I think just if you look towards every individual doing something different and is really excited about the results, it's creating a new level of energy in the marketing community and we haven't scratched the surface yet.

24:55Imagine that people start sharing all of these great ideas and then the power that this has is just unbelievable. One of the other things that we talked a lot about is appetite for risk. And there are some folks who were, as you said, were connecting these workflows into SharePoint and into their CRM and others were saying, yeah, I can't go there. And in fact, some folks I could tell were sort of quite surprised that one or two of these folks were able to get away with it. And what's your perspective on the risk here so obviously there's a risk i will not minimize that but on the other hand i think at the early days of i'm that old sorry but at the early days of internet there's like yeah there's a risk you can't do like software in the cloud because then all the information is going over the internet and yes there were cases where information suddenly got in towards the public because there were not private channels used and suddenly information got out there i think this is a similar phase that we're going through eventually like in every b2b organization companies will have ai engines connected towards core systems in order to get their teams in order to give their teams access towards the information that it needs to add it's a great analogy yeah and And I think it is more about what information sits where and who do you give access to is a more important problem that you need to solve anyway, rather than, oh, it's scary.

26:36Now I'm giving cloud access to Salesforce. I don't think that is really the question. The question is much more, well, should you have the forecast of all of your salespeople accessible towards everybody in Salesforce, right? As an example. like there's more thinking about it in that way than what tools do you give access towards it i think that will eventually will be just automatic and i can see a loosening and sort of a de-risking that has been going on so for example there was one company that we work with where a couple of years ago no i think it was last year they were frustrated the marketing folks were frustrated was they wanted to use Claude, but they were told you can't by IT.

27:20You have to use Copilot. Now, Copilot does certain things really well, but it's not as good for a lot of what these guys want to do as Claude. But this year, they were allowed to use Claude. So there's definitely progress towards it. So maybe the next thing is then to be able to connect it to the data. But yeah, I think it was quite clear from those conversations, the marketing teams that have being able to make those connections just to simple things like sharepoint right just on fire i mean it's just it you know it's the early days of transformation i'm going to remember and i don't mention this to to get anybody in danger but like there's different ways of integrating yes you can do api but you can also use the browser that is in most of like in claw there is a browser in chat cpt there's a browser you use the browser you get access through the browser you can import the information in that way that may be more laborious, but still you have access towards it, right?

28:17So there's different ways of getting access towards the different systems out there. Yeah, that's a great point. What do you think this looks like? I was going to say two years. I'm not even sure two years is realistic. Just next year. I mean, like this time next year, what do you think looks different? You asked a question towards the community about the role of marketing. and we had some interesting dialogue on that some people felt well marketing is in a bad spot because with LLM like everybody can suddenly do things like you go towards any table where you have a meeting and suddenly there's all marketing experts because people start creating the ad in cloth and think it's the greatest thing ever right so that was one end of the scale I'm totally on the opposite side.

29:06Like, I totally believe that the great marketing leaders will find this as an opportunity to connect the information that is out there, the data from their clients, like directly looking towards customer experience and prospect experience and leverage AI to get much smarter in these experiences and get more control over the sales cycle and even post-sales of the clients and so it's a great opportunity for marketing leaders to actually like leverage the power that they have that they didn't have ever before and put themselves on the map and if they say well this is not a great time because now the data sheets that we created can be created by cloth and i feel at risk they don't see the true value the true value is really looking towards hey, what is the strategic role that marketing can play in your organization from acquiring clients and post-acquisition, building that experience, leveraging AI, fully understanding that the clients and the value that you bring as an organization and translating that in towards like the campaigns that you're running for each prospect individually based on the needs and the interest that's there.

30:27It's an unbelievable time. So you haven't thought about this at all. have you all right one piece of advice for listeners on what they should focus on to take the next step in this brave new world this journey that we're on one piece of advice i think put two hours on your calendar every week and start thinking about it i think that's where i would start this cannot be an afterthought you need to allocate time to think about and this is not two hours to work with chat but this is to think about okay what's the impact for my organization what is the talent that i need next year based on what i have how do i structure the work within my organization what is it how do the buyers our buyers change their buying behavior as a result of ai and what should we do different there's so many questions and if you just say well i'm going to do that when I get home or later or over the weekend is becoming an afterthought.

31:29You cannot have this as an afterthought. This is a critical change in everyone's business and you need to allocate time to think about that. I think that's a great place to leave this. Mark, thank you as ever. Always enjoy hearing what you have to say about this sort of stuff. My pleasure. Okay, so I've got five takeaways from this. Number one, the majority went from dabbling to building in a year. About two thirds of health tech marketing teams now have integrated workflows or have a strategic roadmap and the not using AI group has basically disappeared. But that also means AI use is no longer a differentiator.

32:11As Mark put it, the new advantage comes from using AI to take more control of the buyer journey from first touch through the whole customer experience. Takeaway two, workflow integration is not data integration. Only about one in 10 teams has AI fully connected to their CRM, CMS, or analytics. And the teams that have made those connections are on fire. So the risk question is really a data governance question. So who should see what, not tools, and not which tools get access? Number three, measure before you ask. Now, this is contentious. There are some folks who just say, you know what, maybe you don't need to measure this at all because it's just obvious.

33:02But, you know, as we showed, four in 10 teams are still not measuring the return on AI, and more than half have never been asked for that number. So, you know, maybe their CEOs aren't asking the question because it's not important to them. But we think that if you do take the effort to measure the impact of AI, it will help you build a case for getting help if your IT team is not providing you the resources that you need. Number four, invest in more than the license. Most teams have paid AI licenses, but AI 85 % have no formal training budget. and the highest value use cases usually depend on IT and data teams that marketing does not control.

33:44So measurement and access are two sides of the same coin. Show what AI is delivering and it becomes much easier to win the resources and IT support to take you to the next step with AI. And number five, make time for it. Appoint someone on your team to own AI and give them hours, budget and training. And Mark's advice is put two hours on your own calendar every week to think about what AI means for your buyers, your team and your business. This cannot be an overthought. You can download the full survey results in the show notes. And if you found this useful, follow or subscribe to the Health Tech Marketing Show wherever you listen to these and share this episode with a colleague who's wrestling with the same questions or who might find the data useful.

34:31So thank you as ever for listening. and see you on the next episode of the Health Tech Marketing Show.