#242: How Baptist Health’s Marketing Team Took the Lead on AI Transformation

Christine Kotler (0:00)

This was something that was going to truly fundamentally change how we worked, which was both exhilarating and entirely intimidating at the same time.

Mike Kaput (0:10)

Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived the real AI transformation, including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today. So join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all, as part of our AI Transformations series.

Welcome everyone to Episode 242 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. Now, today's episode you're starting to probably get familiar with. This is a little different from your regularly scheduled programming. It is a special episode in a limited series that we're running called AI Transformations presented by Google Cloud. So in this series, we are spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. In each episode, we explore how leaders at some of the world's most innovative companies are actively using AI to transform how their teams, departments, or even entire organizations work. And we do that by interviewing those leaders firsthand right here on the show, including Christine Kotler from Baptist Health who is here with me today. Much more on Christine and Baptist in a minute. Just to kind of reiterate for folks who are new to this series and this format, the reason we're doing this in partnership with Google Cloud is simple because AI transformation can feel very abstract. Everyone is talking about the importance of AI, but far fewer people are showing what it actually looks like in practice inside real companies, real teams, and with real constraints and real business outcomes. So the goal of all these conversations is to make AI transformation much more concrete. We want you to hear how other leaders are approaching it, what they're learning, and what practical lessons you can apply as you think about AI inside your own organization. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

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Now, today we are talking with Christine Kotler, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Baptist Health South Florida. Baptist Health is South Florida's largest health care organization with 12 hospitals, more than 30,000 employees, 4,500 physicians and 200 outpatient centers, urgent care facilities and physician practices spanning four counties. Now, Christine is here with us today because Baptist Health's marketing and communications team has spent the past two years building an AI adoption model that began with literacy, then moved into peer support, workflow integration tool pilots, and marketing and comms taking a broader leadership role in supporting the organization's AI journey. Now, that journey began way back in 2024 with what Christine describes as a eureka moment about AI. So rather than starting with a broad technology rollout, her team created a customized learning syllabus using outside programs and Baptist Health's HR and IT resources. Then they connected that learning to performance evaluations, so AI development became part of the job, rather than an optional activity. As the program progressed, the team learned that people did not adopt AI at the same pace. Baptist Health, in fact, identified a group of early adopters called AI Sherpas, then added weekly learning labs, office hours, and AI Council and focused work streams around learning tools, use cases, and governance. The department also began running short pilots to determine whether a tool should be used by everyone, a smaller group, or even no one at all. So the transformation is also changing who leads and what skills matter. For instance, one team member actually came in with a background as a restaurant entrepreneur with no healthcare marketing background, then actually became a leader among the AI Sherpas and began building new solutions around marketing technology and enablement. Baptist Health is now developing new roles and job descriptions around work like this. That work is spreading. Strategy, finance, HR, other corporate support functions have begun joining the learning sessions and asking marketing and communications for help. So in this conversation with Christine, we're going to unpack what sparked this transformation, how Baptist Health has built its learning and support system, how AI is changing actual work, and what Christine has learned about leading people through this change. Christine, thanks so much for being on the show. It's such a pleasure to have you.