By Kesha Tansey, Senior Director - Client Partnerships
ESMO 2026 in Madrid was not without its own focus on digital innovation and AI. One of the biggest takeaways from the digital health session wasn’t simply what AI can do in cancer care. It was the growing focus on what it actually changes.
The session included examples spanning clinical decision support, patient engagement, and applications in radiology and oncology.
One particularly interesting example came from Dr. Ashraf in Birmingham, who described the challenge of information overload in multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings. Every piece of patient information can matter, yet missing data can contribute to decisions being deferred.
Their team developed an agentic AI prototype designed to bring that information together — synthesizing patient data, flagging what is missing, identifying potentially relevant open clinical trials, and creating summaries for the MDT.
Importantly, the ambition isn’t for AI to make the decision. It’s to help clinicians get to the information they need faster and more robustly.
Another study explored the use of LLMs alongside chemotherapy care. While the technology showed potential in identifying toxicity, this didn’t translate into improvements in quality of life or clear patient care benefits.
And that distinction is an important one.
Technical capability ≠ clinical utility ≠ patient benefit.
For those working in healthcare marketing, there’s a parallel here.
It’s easy to become excited by what new technology enables — more sophisticated targeting, faster content creation, greater personalization, and new ways to engage HCPs and patients.
But capability alone isn’t the outcome.
The more useful question is: What becomes meaningfully better for the person at the other end?
Does an HCP find the information they need more easily? Does a patient understand their treatment better? Does an interaction become more relevant, accessible, or useful?
As AI becomes embedded across healthcare, proving that connection between capability, utility, and human benefit may be just as important in healthcare marketing as it is in clinical practice.
And, as the ESMO discussion highlighted, there are also less glamorous but critical questions to solve around data security, patient anonymity, and integration into existing systems.
The opportunity for AI is huge. The challenge now is turning what’s technically possible into something demonstrably valuable.
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