Mass General Brigham Cut Marketing Planning Time 40% With a Volunteer AI Champions Program
How did Mass General Brigham get AI adoption to stick in its marketing department? Not with a top-down mandate, but with a volunteer ‘AI champions’ program: younger marcom staff who redesign processes from the bottom up and train colleagues. CMO Mark Bohen said the team cut about 40% of the time needed to complete its roughly 15 annual integrated marketing communication plans, building its own AI agent on Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio to synthesize the underlying data. Bohen cautioned that data quality matters as much as the tool, kept AI out of video and social content to protect brand voice, and named the creative intake process as the next candidate for automation with human oversight.
For marketing leaders, this is a change-management playbook, not a tech purchase. A grassroots champions model drove faster adoption and freed staff from mechanical data work for higher-value strategy, while surfacing the real risks: flimsy data models behind AI agents, protecting brand voice, and the lost ground-up business learning that repetitive tasks once provided.
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How much time did Mass General Brigham save with AI in marketing?
CMO Mark Bohen said the department cut about 40% of the time needed to complete its roughly 15 annual integrated marketing communication plans, using a custom AI agent built on Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio to synthesize the data feeding those plans.
What is an ‘AI champions’ program?
It is a volunteer, bottom-up model. Younger marketing communications staff volunteered to help reimagine workflows and then became the department’s trainers, teaching colleagues skills from prompting to building agents. Bohen said more people volunteered than the team could initially accommodate.
What cautions did the CMO raise?
Bohen warned that some AI platforms are built on flimsy data models, so getting the right data inputs into a custom agent is essential. Mass General Brigham also kept AI out of video and social content to protect brand voice, and noted the trade-off of losing the ground-up business learning that repetitive tasks once gave junior staff.