Cari Tornatta, Account Director
Admittedly, I can be a total nerd when it comes to new tech. A few years ago, a friend of mine was working at IBM and helping develop Watson (which somehow feels both futuristic and quaint at the same time). Around that same period, he showed me this AI creative tool called Midjourney. That was all it took to flip a switch in my brain about the possibilities of AI.
Fast forward to today. Like many people in healthcare, health tech, biotech, and life sciences marketing, I spend my days balancing strategy with execution. And while the strategic parts of the job are energizing, the reality is that the life of an Account Director in healthcare PR and marketing also includes a steady stream of repeatable, necessary, time-consuming tasks.
Meeting recaps.
Key takeaways.
Action items.
Follow-ups.
Task creation.
Due dates.
Assignments.
None of this is optional. All of it matters. And almost all of it is some version of the same workflow, over and over again.
If you work in healthcare, health tech, biotech, medical devices, or life sciences companies, you know exactly what I mean. Documentation, organization, and follow-through are critical.
That’s where a question began to form: Could I build something that would handle this consistently for me? Something that didn’t get tired, didn’t forget steps, and didn’t mind doing the same thing five times a week.
In other words, could I build a smarter workflow powered by agentic AI?
Here’s what I wanted to happen:
A meeting recording gets dropped into a Google Drive folder.
That triggers an automated process.
An agent reviews the transcript.
It generates a clean summary with key takeaways.
It identifies action items.
Those action items are turned into tasks in Asana.
Each task is assigned to the right person, with a due date.
All without me touching it.
For teams working in healthcare marketing agencies, health tech companies, biotech startups, or life sciences organizations, this type of workflow automation would be incredibly valuable.
What I quickly learned is that even though we talk about “AI” as if it’s one thing, in practice it’s a collection of tools that don’t naturally speak the same language. Google Drive does one thing well. Asana does another. ChatGPT does something else entirely. Getting them to cooperate is less like flipping a switch and more like conducting an orchestra.
Enter Zapier.
I’d heard of Zapier, vaguely knew what it did, and I assumed it would magically solve everything. I spent a few hours trying to get Zapier and its AI assistant to connect all the dots for me. According to the platform, what I wanted was “possible” and “easy.”
In reality, I kept getting sent down the same looping path. Over. And over. And over again.
At one point, Zapier’s AI literally paused mid-response and surfaced a message that read something like: “The user is understandably frustrated.” Oh yes, I was.
I wasn’t especially nice to the robot by the end of that experiment. It apologized. I gave up.
Instead of trying to force a fully automated system, I stepped back and asked a more practical question: Where is the biggest time sink, and how much of it can I realistically remove?
That led me back to Asana.
I’d read that Asana was rolling out deeper AI integrations with ChatGPT, but when I was building this, those features weren’t live yet. What was available, though, was Asana’s AI for project setup and task generation.
That turned out to be the key I needed.
Rather than chasing full automation, I built an agent that does the heavy cognitive lifting:
From there, I copy and paste the action items into Asana’s AI, which instantly creates tasks in the right project and assigns them correctly.
Is it fully hands-off? No.
Is it dramatically faster and more consistent? Absolutely.
For healthcare marketing teams, life sciences marketers, and B2B health tech organizations, that kind of operational efficiency can make a huge difference.
One important note, especially for anyone working in healthcare, health tech, biotech, medical devices, or life sciences marketing: you must review AI-generated outputs. Sometimes it’s brilliant. Sometimes it makes no sense at all. Accuracy still matters, and human judgment is still required. Human judgment still matters. And in industries where scientific credibility, regulatory environments, and medical accuracy are essential, oversight is critical.
But here’s the difference: instead of spending 30–45 minutes creating something from scratch, I’m spending a few minutes reviewing and refining.
That’s a trade I’ll take every time.
On the surface, this might not sound revolutionary. But let’s do the math.
Say one Account Director attends four or five meetings per week. Each meeting requires a recap, next steps, and task assignment. That adds up to a few hours of work weekly, per person. per week. Now multiply that across a healthcare marketing agency team, health tech startup, or biotech communications department. The time adds up quickly. And more importantly, that time is usually taken from higher-value work: thinking, planning, advising, and building stronger client relationships.
In industries such as healthcare, health technology, biotech, life sciences, and medical devices, where accuracy, documentation, and follow-through are critical, agentic AI can serve as a stabilizing force. It brings consistent quality to processes that are often handled differently by each person on a team.
A few takeaways from this experiment:
These tools are powerful, but they’re not intuitive yet. Expect trial and error.
What worked for me might look different for another team, whether you’re working in healthcare marketing, life sciences communications, biotech PR, or health tech marketing strategy.
When you remove repetitive work, you create space. Space to think. Space to respond instead of react. Space to do the work that actually moves the needle.
My goal was simple: reduce the time spent on repetitive workflows so more time could be spent on strategy, collaboration, and client work.
It turns out, with the right tools and a realistic approach, that’s entirely possible.
When you remove repetitive work, you create space. Space to think. Space to respond instead of react. Space to do the work that actually moves the needle.
My goal was simple: reduce the time spent on repetitive workflows so more time could be spent on strategy, collaboration, and client work.
It turns out, with the right tools and a realistic approach, that’s entirely possible.
For organizations navigating the rapidly evolving intersection of AI, healthcare marketing, health tech, biotech, and life sciences, thoughtful strategy matters just as much as the tools themselves. At KNB Communications, we help healthcare, health tech, biotech, and life sciences companies communicate complex innovations, build credibility, and grow visibility through integrated PR, marketing, and content strategies. As new technologies like agentic AI reshape how teams work, our focus remains the same: helping organizations translate innovation into clear, compelling stories that resonate with the audiences who matter most.