More AI, More Problems: Why One CMO Says Slow Down

The Gist

• Healthcare AI has to solve real workflow failures. Kavanagh says the value of AI in healthcare comes from closing dangerous follow-up gaps — not simply adding more automation or more detection tools to an already crowded radiology environment.
• Clinical buyers want proof, not polish. Chief quality officers and patient safety executives respond to peer-reviewed evidence, credible press coverage and peer validation far more than branded case studies or polished marketing materials.
• More AI content does not guarantee better outcomes. Kavanagh argues that marketers chasing scale — in both SEO and AEO eras — need to stay focused on brevity, proof and outcome-driven storytelling instead of flooding the market with AI-generated volume.

When AI Meets Healthcare, the Stakes Change Everything

Allison Kavanagh didn't come to this conversation to celebrate AI. The CMO of Inflow Health came to interrogate it. Her company exists because follow-up care gaps — the kind where an incidental imaging finding gets lost between a chart, a referring provider and a patient — can turn into a life-threatening failure. That's the standard she holds AI to: not whether it can generate more output, but whether it can close a dangerous gap that costs lives.

Kavanagh traces her thinking back to her own career arc — from a writer at Deloitte to co-founding an AI healthcare company in 2011 focused on preventable care events. At Inflow Health, the mission is specific: use AI to help health systems track and close missed follow-up care after incidental imaging findings. The pitch is about helping organizations make sense of an already crowded AI environment in radiology, where detection algorithms have multiplied but the workflow to act on them hasn't kept up.

And she's equally clear that even the best AI in that pipeline still needs a human in the loop — someone to clarify, reassure and build trust with the patient on the other end.

Trust Is Built With Evidence, Not Enthusiasm

For Kavanagh, the go-to-market lesson in healthcare is about proof that travels. Clinical buyers — chief quality officers, radiology leads, patient safety executives — are weighing liability, workflow disruption and long-term patient impact. They don't respond to polished brand materials the way a typical B2B buyer might. They respond to peer-reviewed journal pieces, credible press coverage and client voices that carry independent weight. Kavanagh says she'd rather send a prospect a strong healthcare news article than a beautifully designed case study.

That same skepticism shapes her take on answer engine optimization. She's not chasing algorithm tricks. She's focused on showing up wherever buyers might be asking early, quiet questions — before they ever land on a company website. But she's quick to warn against the assumption that AI makes more content automatically better. That logic failed in the SEO era, she argues, and it's equally flawed in the AEO era. Scale without brevity, proof and distinctiveness just adds noise.

The deepest trust signal in the conversation had nothing to do with strategy. It came from the story of Jill — a nurse and Inflow team member whose missed breast lesion went uncommunicated after treatment for appendicitis. By the time the issue resurfaced 18 months later, the cancer had advanced. The team lost her in 2022. With the family's permission, that story now sits at the moral center of everything Inflow Health does. It's not a case study. It's a reminder that follow-up gaps aren't an operational inconvenience. They are an obligation — and for Kavanagh, the most powerful marketing asset the company has.