Insights from Inizio Evoke’s fireside chat at Fierce Pharma Week
At this year’s Fierce Pharma Week, Inizio Evoke brought together three of its experts for a powerful fireside chat on the future of healthcare communications in an AI-driven world. The panel featured Will Reese, Chief Innovation Officer at Inizio Evoke; Theresa Dolge, EVP, Chief Media Relations Officer at Inizio Evoke Comms, and Kelly Cusumano, EVP, Growth & Client Innovation at Inizio Evoke Comms. Together, they explored how communications professionals can lead the way in shaping credible, discoverable, and resilient brand presence - both for human audiences and the AI models increasingly influencing them.
Here are five core takeaways from their conversation that communicators should carry forward as they rethink visibility, content, and risk in the age of AI.
1. Visibility and Nodes
AI engines are now shaping how stakeholders perceive brands - and those engines rely heavily on earned media. In fact, up to 90% of the data feeding large language models (LLMs) comes from public, earned content.
What does that mean for healthcare communicators? If your brand isn’t visible across scrapable sources - like press releases, advocacy commentary, or news coverage - it simply doesn’t exist in the context AI is creating.
More than ever, it’s essential to audit how your brand appears across both open and closed ecosystems. That means assessing what’s accessible to the public - content that AI can freely scrape - and what lives behind paywalls. Each environment offers influence, but they serve different strategic purposes.
Visibility must be intentional, dimensional, and credible. It’s not just about the format your content takes - it’s about where that content lives across the web. AI engines treat information more favorably when it appears across multiple nodes - that is, different credible sources and digital locations (such as corporate websites, earned media, advocacy sites, and news outlets). While press releases, articles, and website pages still matter, what’s more critical is that the same factual, well-sourced information exists in multiple places and is structured clearly to be machine-readable. Third-party validation and problem-solution framing further enhance credibility and increase the likelihood of being recognized and cited by AI.
2. Content Needs Both Depth and Breadth - Thin and Thick Matter
Communications today must meet two demands: visibility and substance. AI engines digest “thin content” (short, overview-style material like headlines or executive quotes) and “thick content” (deep, credible, well-cited information) to inform their responses.
Thin content builds ambient awareness - it shows up in summaries, snippets, and FAQs. But thick content is where trust is earned. It's what AI pulls from to validate that ambient content and decide what’s credible.
The takeaway? A layered content strategy is no longer optional. Communications teams must not only build assets that engage broad audiences - they also need to ensure that content is thick in the right ways. Thick content doesn’t necessarily mean long-form, but it does mean substantive, well-sourced, and clearly structured to provide authoritative answers to specific questions. This is the kind of content AI prioritizes when determining credibility. It’s an opportunity for communicators to think beyond brief headlines or overviews and embrace more in-depth, feature-style storytelling when appropriate - stories that explore context, offer solutions, and add real value to the conversation.
Just as important: structure and schema play a critical role. Yet nearly 70% of pharma websites still lack the technical formatting needed for AI to properly interpret and connect their content.
3. Risk is Faster - and More Complex - Than Ever
With the rapid evolution of generative AI, the speed at which misinformation and visual disinformation spreads has become nearly unmanageable using traditional PR playbooks. Deepfakes, manipulated visuals, and false narratives can now be produced in minutes, by anyone.
What used to be a manageable issue response is now a full-time visibility and accuracy challenge. Today, effective communications require real-time media monitoring, AI-powered risk tools, and a redefinition of what preparedness truly means.
Communicators must track both media mentions and social virality, across public and gated platforms. And organizations need to prepare advocates, KOLs, and third-party validators in advance - those who can publicly stand with the brand when risk emerges.
Importantly, many companies are still too siloed in their risk approach. Communications often hold the strategy - but legal, marketing, and operations must be integrated into a unified, forward-facing risk framework.
AI won’t slow down. So, your issues planning can’t either.
4. Owned and Earned Media Must Be Built into Omnichannel - and Attribution
In many pharma organizations, omnichannel strategy is still overly focused on paid tactics. Yet owned and earned media have an outsized role in influencing both human audiences and AI engines.
Communicators must advocate for inclusion of these channels in omnichannel and marketing attribution models. Currently, earned media is often invisible in performance measurement, which underrepresents its true impact on awareness, perception, and trust.
Equally important is optimizing content technically. Many organizations don’t apply schema or structured metadata to their owned properties - making it harder for AI to understand and elevate their content.
In short: communications should not be an afterthought in digital transformation. Owned and earned media must be made discoverable, measurable, and strategically supported by tech partners within the organization.
5. AI is Powerful - but Human Intelligence is Irreplaceable
Despite the power and potential of AI, one consistent truth is that AI is only as effective as the humans guiding it.
Tools like digital twins, AI agents, and share-of-model trackers offer immense utility. You can simulate how a journalist might respond to a pitch or understand your brand’s visibility across multiple LLMs. But these tools are not decision-makers - they are decision-supporters.
Great communicators still matter. Curiosity, questioning, and creativity are the core skills that AI cannot replicate. The most effective organizations won’t simply automate communications - they will augment it.
AI should make humans smarter, faster, and more impactful - not replace them. The brands that invest in both technical infrastructure and human insight will rise above the noise.
And perhaps most critically, communicators must get out of their silos - asking better questions, collaborating across departments, and remaining connected to the full spectrum of innovation happening across their organizations.
Final Word: Brand Authority Must Be Both Earned and Engineered
In an AI-powered world, the rules of engagement have changed. Authority is no longer built solely on what you say - it’s defined by what AI can see, verify, and replicate. Visibility without credibility falls flat. Credibility without accessibility gets buried.
The opportunity for communicators is enormous. By showing up in the right places, with the right content, structured in the right way, we can ensure that our brands are not only seen - but trusted.
At Inizio Evoke, we believe this is the future of healthcare communications: deeply human, intentionally digital, and engineered for trust.
Interested in hearing more? Connect with us here.