AI Transforms Customer Experience and Marketing at LabCorp

Dylan Cosper:

I'm Dylan Cosper with the Infosys Knowledge Institute and today I'm here with Amy Summy from Labcorp. Amy, thank you for joining us today.

Amy Summy:

Nice to see you, Dylan. Thank you.

Dylan Cosper:

So today we're talking about AI and marketing. So for you, how would you describe your marketing organization's use of AI today?

Amy Summy:

I would say about a year and a half ago, we started experimenting with AI. So it's fairly common in our organization to leverage AI for content creation and content generation. We're starting to look at other use cases for AI. And I would say the pace of change is, if you ask me this question in six months, it'd be a totally different answer. I think we're getting a little bit more mature in using AI tools for content, some creative, some standard fare kind of things like that.

Dylan Cosper:

You mentioned content generation. What would you say has been the most value that you and your team have gotten out of AI in marketing so far?

Amy Summy:

Well, on the content side, it's actually been pretty phenomenal. One of my responsibilities outside of marketing is to lead our consumer business, and that is around health content. So you as a person, we're trying to educate you and get you tested for whatever ailment you're thinking about. And before we started using AI, I think we were at maybe a blog every couple of months. Now we're at 50 to 60 within a timeframe of maybe seven, eight months. And what that's done is it's changed the engagement with us. It's changed our revenue. It's also, as the AI search engines are going now, we've been looking at search very specifically because that's really important to any business. Whether it's Google or ChatGPT or whatever people are using, we have to show up in those engines. So content generation is not just about the productivity, it's about how much can we get out there?

And then what's it doing to search? Is it driving engagement? And in this case, it's driving revenue. I definitely am excited about what it's going to do. We're a global business, so I'm excited about what it's going to do to translations, to personalization and markets. I mean, it's pretty difficult right now to translate for different markets. This is just taking something that could have taken a group of people a couple months to six, seven minutes.

Dylan Cosper:

In previous conversations with some other folks here at ANA, we've been hearing about localization of content. Is that kind of part of your AI use right now is trying to connect at a more localized level?

Amy Summy:

Yeah. The technology has advanced so much now and some of the standard sets of tools that a lot of marketers use now have these embedded in their tool set. So there's really, frankly, no excuse for us not to localize because we have the tech in place. So when you can think about Japan versus China versus Germany versus Switzerland versus the US, that's pretty amazing. And even imagery, having localized imagery. So I feel like it's going to be table stakes. One of the interesting people I heard speak at a conference was the chairman of Coca-Cola and he said it's going to get so personalized that the consumer's going to realize what we're all doing as marketers. And then we're all just going to be onto the marketing engines and we're going to want in-person meetings and in-person, because we're all going to be like, "Okay, that's an AI engine doing that to me."

And I could see that coming. It's getting so personalized and all the brands are doing it. At some point, I would think the consumer is going to be like, "I'm not sure I want to do this, everything on my computer in AI." I think we'll see an interesting mix of in-person things happening.

Dylan Cosper:

In the next year, where do you see your marketing organization using AI the most?

Amy Summy:

I really think it's going to be in customer experience and that's very wide. But take, for example, how people come to Labcorp, we have 6,500 tests on our menu at any given time across every disease state, right? If you come to our website today, honestly, it's fairly difficult to find what you're looking for unless you're a specific expert in what you're looking for. And imagine you can go and just type in what you're looking for and it gives you like, "Oh, for that disease state, these are the kind of things that you might want to consider for your patient," for example. And I think that improving the customer experience by helping them find what they're looking for much faster, much easier, delivering it to them instead of having them search on your site. So things like that, I really think are critical. And in healthcare, a lot of us have so much data.

And one of the big issues in healthcare has been not, do you have data? But how do you mine that data for use? And that's another place that AI is going to help us understand what data we have that can help healthcare, patient health. So I look forward to a game-changing customer experience. I think that's really where it's going to be at. I think the brand personalization, campaign personalization is all about that experience. So it's pretty wide-ranging in what we can do.

Dylan Cosper:

Do you all take an approach of having kind of an experimentation budget for AI just so you can get your hands on this stuff?

Amy Summy:

Yeah. I wish I had an experimentation budget. I don't. I think you have to make room in your budget for this, which means you deprioritize other things. I mean, that's just the way it goes. So for example, and I know this isn't popular, but it's very rare that we're actually adding to our staff right now because we need to look at these new technologies. We're renegotiating what we're doing with our existing vendors and we're looking for alternatives because frankly, some of the existing models have gotten so expensive that you have to look at new areas of opportunity, but yeah, I don't have the experimentation budget. As an enterprise, all of Labcorp, we are looking at AI and making strategic investments in AI, but those are really to our core business processes right now.

Dylan Cosper:

So you mentioned staff and talent. I mean, I think that's a great transition point. We have a pretty large need for skills around AI, scientists and things like that. So how are you within your team handling that, ensuring that you have some of that talent within your marketing organization?

Amy Summy:

I think first of all, our team needs to just understand and dabble in this stuff, right? Obviously, in a safe and private way and with the right tools and things like that. So empowering people, giving them the education, the training. I'm not insisting on it, but I'm sending emails to the entire marketing organization at LabCorp like, "Look at the article I just saw." So when you're getting an email from the CMO, you might want to interpret that to mean that's high on our mind. So I think the last couple years it's been, we are talking about it all the time. We're showing examples within our own organization all the time. So that is sending a message, I hope, to our team like, "Get on the bus because you need to understand this." That said, as we've been going through this, I started thinking about that what AI is really doing is transforming the organization. So I used to think of it as this is a set of technologies and tools.

As I've matured in my understanding and talked to other people, I'm like, "Wait, this is marketing transformation." And marketing transformation means we're going to have to look at how we are staffing across the board, new roles and responsibilities. What does AI do that we were doing in another way with a person, for example? But we have really good people that understand our business, so how do we take that person, let's say, that job can be done with AI, well, that person's knowledge and experience, how do we leverage them and grow them? So one of the things I'm pretty cautious about right now is adding to our team because if we have a people transformation happening, I want to make sure that I equip my existing team to be successful and that's what I'm thinking about. But yeah, we are going to kick off an effort on marketing transformation probably in the next month, and it's going to be looking at the effect on budgets, staff, roles and responsibilities, the whole thing. We can't keep looking at this as a technology suite. And I think that's what we've been doing up until recently.

Dylan Cosper:

For you and Labcorp, where are you seeing the biggest challenges with AI, at least with AI marketing? I mean, you mentioned budget earlier.

Amy Summy:

Yeah, it's expensive.

Dylan Cosper:

Yeah.

Amy Summy:

I don't think people realize how expensive it is. You go on ChatGPT and people feel like it's free, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about data that stays within your walls, that's secure, that's not part of someone else's data set, right? You're talking about changing the way you think of processes and whatever. But those companies are, the fees are pretty high, so you do have to make room and figure that out. So I think budget will definitely be something that we all have to look at. There are people that are not getting on the bus and it's fascinating to me because these tools, I use them every day. I'm like, "This is so great." Now, I don't originate content using the tools, but I will clean up something using a tool. And I don't understand why I still get documents that haven't really leveraged the tool set.

So there are probably going to be a set of people that don't want to do it. And I hope that's a really, really small group of people or maybe nobody, but I think that's going to be a challenge as well. And I think you hit on something else that I do worry about. So I think another challenge with AI, it's a little bit of like kids in a candy box. There's so many technologies which you hit on and people get enamored and then people want me to talk to people or I have to bring in our CIO sometimes or privacy people.

It's spending a lot of time and it's like, which of these technologies are really going to be the ones you want to invest in? So that is a little difficult because there's a lot of hype out there right now. The consulting firms have their own hype. And you really do have to spend the time and listen and see and vet it yourself, but I think that is probably one of the difficult parts of it is just like everybody's so excited and you don't want to put the brakes on that at all, but at some level you can't do it all. So you have to prioritize.

Dylan Cosper:

So when we think about risk, I think there's a lot of risks associated with AI. How much of that would you say is around the technology or is it other factors such as like change management, culture, you did mention. Not everyone is getting on the bus. But how is risk for you and your marketing organization, what you're seeing as kind of the threats into the ways of working or just that you're open up to with AI?

Amy Summy:

We're constantly putting things out to physicians, to pharma, to patients about healthcare, right? A pretty serious thing for most people. There are a lot of companies though mature as well as startups that don't have the rigor that you have to have in healthcare and that scares me. So for example, in our consumer business, we're very specific about what we will put out into the general public around anything because you're relying on us. We're a trusted brand and we want to make sure that whatever we put out is accurate and clinically backed. We have competitors that don't care about that. There are AI agents doing that. And so I feel for the consumer and the patients and the physicians who are now getting the AI version, so think about they've had social media, now they have AI stuff, and it's all coming at them and like, how do they deal with this whole thing?

So I do really worry about that because I see evidence of it every single day in my job. In terms of my organization, I'm not super worried about it. I think that we need to move faster. I mean, if there's any anxiety I have, it's move faster and stop being manual. Like everything we do is kind of like an old way. Even a new role, we have a role opening right now and we're having this internal debate, should it be this or should it be that? And I'm like, "Where's AI in this conversation?" And, "Oh, okay. Wait a minute, we got to rethink that." So you really have to change your habit. And I'm not in every single conversation in my organization, so I don't know what's happening half the time. Only the stuff that comes to me do I get to see. And so you have to really influence that change. But yeah, I think the anxiety is just move fast.

Dylan Cosper:

How are you approaching responsible AI within your organization?

Amy Summy:

So health data privacy and security is important to you and everybody else. It's like incredibly important to Labcorp. I mean, our emphasis on this is really critical to everybody's health and welfare and all of that, but also our reputation. We can't really afford anything to go wrong, honestly. So we're always on top of privacy and security. I definitely think our CISO and all of our IT people are on high alert to make sure that we're doing everything we can to secure data. What we are doing so far in AI is within our own environment. So we're not going and sharing data to outside entities. So I think that helps to protect us. The other thing is in marketing, we haven't lost the legal and compliance reviews. So we're doing some of the stuff with AI's help, let's say a blog or content or whatever, but it still has to go through legal review and it still has to go through compliance.

Now, at some point, legal and compliance are going to have... We are talking to them about an AI tool that looks for just the basics, like spits out the basics that are not compliant. So we'll see where that goes over time. But I think right now we have controls in place to make sure we're not putting generated content out there that doesn't make sense and things like that. We just still stick with the existing processes we have. We're just making our legal team a lot busier, I think, because we're putting out a lot more stuff.

Dylan Cosper:

That does bring me to kind of a question around what keeps you up at night about AI?

Amy Summy:

It's, are we moving fast enough? When I talk about changes that we're doing to customer experience or campaigns or content generation, we have competitors. They're thinking about that too. So I don't want to lose a customer because we didn't get there fast enough. And that is what really keeps me up at night. I would say secondarily, trying to figure out what the organization of the future looks like and how to get from here to there with respecting people, giving them opportunity, looking out for their careers, all the things that as a people leader, you're responsible for. And I'm not one of those people that's like, "AI is going to take away everybody's job." I think those kind of statements are fairly irresponsible. They may, it may, but what are you going to do about that? Is there something you can do? There might be things you can't do and that's the reality of it, but how you treat people and give them insight and work through the change, I think is so critical.

Dylan Cosper:

No, truly. I mean, I think that's an awesome point to come to a close to really, Amy.

Amy Summy:

Yeah, thank you.

Dylan Cosper:

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Amy Summy:

Thank you.