Sep 24, 2026 · 44 min
Baptist Health turns marketing into an AI transformation engine
#242: How Baptist Health’s Marketing Team Took the Lead on AI Transformation
Healthcare organizations face unusually high privacy and integration barriers, making Baptist Health’s people-first approach a useful test of how AI adoption actually scales.
- 1Baptist Health replaced tool distribution with a structured learning journey that built literacy, experimentation, and practical confidence.
- 2Internal AI Sherpas helped colleagues navigate adoption by combining judgment, hands-on support, and lessons from real experiments.
- 3Year two exposed the harder work: integrating systems, addressing privacy constraints, and redesigning roles around AI-enabled workflows.
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Kotler’s clearest leadership advice is to go first: develop AI literacy personally, listen to employee concerns, and participate in the transformation rather than outsourcing it.
The brief
Christine Kotler describes the late-2024 moment when generative AI stopped looking like a technology-stack issue and became an urgent organizational priority for Baptist Health’s marketing leaders.
Rather than hand employees new tools, Baptist Health built a structured learning journey and an internal hub combining modules, use cases, outside resources, and lessons from failed experiments.
AI Sherpas became the transformation’s human infrastructure: trusted internal guides who helped colleagues build judgment and confidence, often emerging from curious employees with entrepreneurial instincts.
The practical work ranged from managing online listings for locations and providers to producing templated creative, freeing employees to redirect effort toward higher-value work.
The harder second year brought privacy constraints, disconnected systems, and anxiety about redesigned roles; Kotler’s advice is for leaders to go first and model AI literacy themselves.