The year 2025 will likely be remembered as the point when artificial intelligence (AI) became an integral part of medical marketing teams. According to the MM+M/Publicis Health 2025 Innovation Survey, one-third of industry respondents believe their companies are “right where they need to be” in AI utilization, and 40% report AI is “deeply embedded in everyday workflow”—both significant increases from 2024. Healthcare’s AI investment is surging, projected at $1. 4 billion in 2025, nearly triple that of 2024. While marketing is a smaller segment, AI spending on patient and payer engagement rose sharply from $30 million to $175 million in that period. New AI products aimed at enhancing marketing efficiency are announced daily, though some claims merit caution. Still, several innovative tools have been vetted by MM+M and endorsed by clients: **Lirio’s Digital Nudges** Lirio combines AI and behavioral science to engage patients via personalized reminders—such as checking blood pressure, refilling prescriptions, or visiting doctors. It customizes messages based on individual responsiveness to channels like email or text. Amy Bucher, Lirio’s chief behavioral officer, explains the platform uses 20 to 30 behavior change techniques tailored to specific barriers patients face, refining approaches with each interaction. Even subtle elements, like button wording or image types, are optimized to promote healthy routines until nudges become unnecessary. Founded in 2017, Lirio is widely adopted by payers and health systems. For example, Cone Health in North Carolina saw significant success: over 9, 700 patients reminded about hypertension checks resulted in 6, 100 kept appointments and meaningful blood pressure improvements in 40%; diabetes outreach yielded over 2, 500 kept appointments with 54% showing hemoglobin A1C improvements. Lirio also reduces communication burdens on care teams, especially benefiting underserved populations. **Invoca’s Customer Journey Streamlining** Invoca uses AI to connect marketing technologies, enhancing insights in call centers by capturing HIPAA-compliant first-party data to identify effective campaigns and optimize outreach. It claims up to a 50% increase in booked appointments, leads, and sales via paid search, and doubles call center close rates, proving especially effective in healthcare. Christus Health System employs Invoca for comprehensive tracking—from funnel entry to call center interactions—including identifying caller sentiment and routing calls properly. Marla Armstrong, Christus’s marketing operations director, highlights Invoca’s analytics capabilities as transformational, enabling measurement and expansion of outreach efforts. **Axonal. AI’s Decision Systems** Founded in 2024 by pharma marketing veteran Larry Mickelberg, Axonal. AI addresses the challenge of “smart people slowed down by slow systems” by building enterprise-grade “decision systems” that accelerate evidence-based decision-making under regulatory constraints. Unlike generic generative AI models prone to hallucinations, Axonal. AI uses “specialist agent swarms” that apply structured reasoning for defensible, audit-ready outputs critical for pharma’s medical, legal, and regulatory processes.

Its flagship platform, Strategist+, ingests vast internal and external data to rapidly generate strategic foundations. Notably, during a pitch, small agency The Considered used Strategist+ to simulate future strategy performances between 2026 and 2029, enabling data-backed recommendations within minutes instead of months. CEO David Hunt credits Axonal. AI with dramatically improving work quality. The key metric is “Time to Insight, ” compressing research cycles from weeks to hours and accelerating time-to-market for therapies. **Odaia. ai’s Commercial Engagement Intelligence** Founded in 2018, Odaia. ai leverages AI, including machine learning and generative AI, to streamline pharma and biotech engagement with healthcare professionals (HCPs). Its MAPTUAL platform overlays multiple data streams—prescriptions, claims, sales, marketing, and third-party sources—to generate dynamic, predictive insights on HCP engagement preferences and prioritize actions for sales reps. This system transforms static brand strategies into “living systems, ” automating workflows to convert insights into actionable behaviors quickly. Clients like GSK, Novo Nordisk, and Verona Pharma attest to Odaia’s positive ROI impact. Its tools integrate seamlessly with platforms such as Veeva and Salesforce, helping reps prepare by generating concise summaries of HCP activity and guiding omnichannel marketing with data-driven recommendations. Co-founder Philip Poulidis emphasizes closing the gap between brand intent and field execution to ensure doctors receive timely information and patients start therapies sooner. Odaia focuses on acting on the right data in real time rather than merely gathering data. **Publicis Health and Razorfish’s FDA Warning Letter Analysis** Following the FDA’s September 2024 release of numerous warning letters concerning pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising violations, Publicis Health and Razorfish developed Next DTC, an AI-powered tool to analyze these letters, identify recurring issues, and monitor affected companies. Building on AI investments starting in 2017 and the Core AI tool developed in 2024, they trained Next DTC on around 300 letters to produce actionable insights within days. According to Olivier Zitoun, Publicis’s chief strategy officer for health, the tool helps strategy and creative teams identify “watch out” areas—especially how safety information is communicated in TV ads, such as minimizing distractions during voiceover, enlarging font size, and moderating efficacy claims. Offered free to Publicis’s top 20 global pharma clients, Next DTC continuously ingests new letters and supports scenario planning workshops to prepare clients for various futures, including more FDA scrutiny or regulatory changes affecting DTC media, influencer use, and adequate provision removal. This proactive approach aids clients in refining marketing strategies, shifting toward unbranded DTC or HCP-focused efforts, and enhancing AI utilization across marketing functions. In summary, 2025 marks a transformative year where AI technologies—from patient engagement nudges and call center analytics to strategic decision-making systems and regulatory compliance tools—have become deeply embedded in medical marketing workflows, empowering companies to operate more efficiently, effectively, and compliantly in a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.