By Kristin Ryan, EVP, AI Transformation & Acceleration
For years, digital marketing has been built around a simple challenge: How do we capture attention?
The rise of agentic AI points toward a different question: How do we become useful when someone expresses an intention?
AI is evolving from something we prompt for an answer toward something that can understand context, maintain awareness of a goal and help people accomplish it. This could have significant implications for healthcare marketing.
Traditional digital experiences are largely designed around attention: rank for the keyword, earn the click, drive someone to the website, serve the message, optimize the conversion. Agentic AI could begin to reorganize that journey around intention.
Instead of searching “high cholesterol treatment,” someone might tell an AI, “I’m worried about my cholesterol and want to understand what I should do before my next doctor’s appointment.”
The AI doesn’t just see a keyword. It can begin to understand the goal behind the question—and potentially help the person navigate the steps required to achieve it.
From SEO to GEO to Outcomes
That changes the job of healthcare content.
We have been talking about GEO as a shift from optimizing for search rankings to optimizing for answers. Agentic AI suggests the next evolution may be optimizing for outcomes and action:
SEO → discovery
GEO → answers
Agentic AI → action and outcomes
For healthcare marketers, I think this raises a few important questions:
Is our content structured so AI can understand not just what we say, but when and why it is useful?
Are we creating content around keywords and campaign messages—or around the questions, decisions and jobs people are actually trying to accomplish?
Are our omnichannel strategies prepared for a world where an AI agent may increasingly sit between the customer and our digital ecosystem?
And perhaps most importantly in healthcare: How do we earn enough trust and authority to become part of those AI-mediated journeys?
The attention economy rewarded brands that could interrupt effectively. The intention economy may reward brands that can understand, anticipate and help.
That is a much bigger shift than a new search interface or another AI platform.
It means we may need to stop thinking about the customer journey as a sequence of channels and start thinking about it as a sequence of intentions—questions to answer, decisions to make, barriers to overcome and outcomes to achieve.
And that may leave healthcare marketers with a more important question than simply “How do we get found?”
When someone, or their AI agent, is trying to accomplish something, are we useful and trusted enough to become part of the answer?
Interested in hearing more? Connect with us here.