How healthcare leaders are creating guided, empathic experiences with AI

Every healthcare journey is made up of multiple steps. And those steps don’t need to take place in a hospital, clinic, or consultation room to be critical to patient outcomes.

Whether someone’s searching for the right provider, making an appointment, or seeking more information about their medication, the experience can impact everything from their ability to access care to the success of their treatment plan.

This is one reason the rapid evolution of AI is so exciting for healthcare organizations. Yes, the technology is unlocking headline-grabbing advances in fields like drug discovery and medical imaging analysis. But it’s also helping to transform the patient experience in ways that are no less important.

As part of our annual CX Trends Report, we interviewed 100 healthcare leaders in the U.S. and the U.K. to better understand how they’re building AI into their patients’ experiences. We’ll share some of our key findings here, but if you have time to read the full report, it’s free to download and is packed with additional insights.

Read the report: AI-curated experience in healthcare →

In the next 10 years, the customer experience healthcare organizations provide will either be mostly AI-led or hybrid by design. That’s according to 73% of healthcare leaders.

Here are just three ways they’re already laying the groundwork for an AI-assisted future.

Using AI to guide the patient experience

Would you be happy for AI to monitor your health, make recommendations, and even book appointments on your behalf? To support our research with healthcare leaders, we also surveyed 4,000 U.S. and U.K. consumers, and almost half (49%) told us they would be comfortable with AI steering their healthcare experience in this way.

Healthcare leaders believe, in time, such AI-guided experiences will become the norm. The vast majority (78%) say AI will handle most customer decisions within the next decade, turning brands into silent, invisible advisors. More than 80% are planning to use AI to steer every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to ongoing support.

But healthcare leaders are sensitive to the risks involved and cautious of implementing AI before it’s up to the task. They’re likely to see low confidence in AI decisions as a barrier to the technology playing a more active role in shaping the customer experience, more so than business leaders in any other industry we surveyed.

Our study also reveals a disconnect between what healthcare leaders and healthcare consumers believe matters most when AI is used to guide journeys and decisions.

Healthcare brands are focused on providing transparency – making sure people understand how the technology is steering their experiences, and why. This is actually a relatively low priority for consumers. They place much more importance on being able to retain control and easily adjust or override an AI’s choices.

Building empathic AI-powered interactions

Empathic AI – the kind that reads and responds to your emotions – is a divisive issue. Someone younger than 35, or who actively uses AI, is likely to be accepting of the technology interpreting their emotional state. Someone who’s older than 55, or who has little experience with AI, is likely to bristle at the idea.

But when you present people with a clear, practical scenario, a clearer consensus emerges. A strong majority (67%) of all the people we surveyed agree: when they’re stressed, they want digital services to act more like a human, not more like a robot.

Healthcare leaders understand this very well; 78% say brands that automate without empathy won’t survive the decade. What’s more, building more empathic and emotionally aware interactions is the highest CX priority among healthcare leaders for the next two to three years.

But the road to empathic AI isn’t straightforward. Almost all healthcare leaders (94%) say building emotionally intelligent AI into customer interactions presents a challenge for their organization. Customer acceptance is the most commonly cited obstacle, followed by the risk of the technology providing problematic responses or simply failing to perform.

Unifying the platforms that support patient journeys

From reviewing your blood test results in one app, to joining a telehealth call in another, and filing a health insurance claim in a third, modern patient journeys can involve hopping from platform to platform.

Many healthcare leaders are now looking to AI to help bridge the gaps by orchestrating journeys across touchpoints and partners. They’re taking a host of other steps, too – even if they’re being a little more cautious in their efforts than brands in other industries.

In this era of large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI, healthcare leaders also have strong opinions on AI’s potential to offer patients a single, universal interface. Eight of 10 (79%) believe agentic AI is set to streamline customer journeys, for example, but at the cost of customer choice.

Our study’s findings underline the link between successful CX transformation and progress toward the broader objectives of modern healthcare organizations, as enshrined in frameworks such as The Quintuple Aim.

Indeed, the majority of U.K. healthcare leaders say their CX strategy is being driven by the need to deliver better patient outcomes at a lower cost. Almost half (44%) of our U.S.-based respondents say pressure to improve care equity and better serve diverse populations is shaping their CX strategy.

Wherever a healthcare organization’s strategic priorities lie, they’ll need to build their AI implementations on a solid data and identity foundation. As they strive to create guided, personalized, and secure experiences that patients quickly come to trust, they’ll find that the support of an expert data and marketing technology partner is invaluable.