By Laura Hill
Design in the healthcare space used to be pretty straightforward (and let’s face it: boring): clean fonts, a stock photo of people smiling while wearing lab boats, and maybe a swoosh or swoop for flair. With the emergence of AI, those days are long gone. Your brand needs to be as dynamic and responsive as the tech it’s marketing. And now, with AI, it certainly can be.
AI has completely flipped the script on what’s possible with design, especially when you take budget and scalability into account. For healthcare brands, from startups to pharma giants, this shift is critical.
Let’s see how AI is revolutionizing AI visual storytelling across healthcare health tech, biotech, life sciences, and pharma, and how the best marketers are putting AI to work without losing the human touch! And of course, I have examples, pro-tips and a few warnings for you!
Healthcare: from brochure-ware to bedside brilliance
In traditional healthcare, like hospitals, clinics, and provider groups, AI is helping marketers simplify the complex. Whether it’s patient education or provider recruitment, clean design is essential. Now let’s take it a step further.
There are so many amazing tools emerging that are getting better and better every single day. Don’t be afraid to explore the tools (and definitely share your insights on LinkedIn to build your own thought leadership).
Pro-tip:
Use AI to test visuals on different literacy levels. You can run them through the Flesch-Kincaid score or simulate what they will look like for colorbind users. Great healthcare design is about aesthetic AND accessibility.
Health tech: fast-paced visuals for fast-moving brands
Most health tech companies live at the speed of startups. IYKYK. Products pivot, brand voice evolve, and you’re constantly iterating. AI is the tool that can help you as a marketer move just as quickly.
Pro-tip:
Create visual sprints. Use AI tools to explore dozens (and dozens and dozens) of conceptual directions in just a few hours. This is something that normally would’ve taken weeks or months and one too many brainstorming sessions. Once you’ve explored those directions, narrow it down to the top three for your team to refine. You don’t need to choose between speed and quality when you can have both with AI.
Also, if you happen to have a graphic designer on your team, you need their input. The graphic designer can likely tweak the AI outputs to ensure the colors and design elements fit your brand to a tee.
Biotech: visualizing what lives under the microscope
Biotech companies often have to communicate the incredibly complex, like RNA, proteins, molecules, and mechanisms, with audiences who don’t share the same scientific fluency. AI design tools can support you in translating technical breakthroughs into visually compelling, high-level narratives for stakeholders who don’t necessarily speak “gene sequence.”
Pro-tip:
Pair your scientists with your creatives. AI can help you visualize scientific concepts, but be sure to always run the outputs through (multiple) human reviews to make sure the visuals reflect actual science and not science fiction.
Life sciences: communicating across silos
In life sciences, innovation is the product, but explaining that innovation? That’s the challenge. Whether it’s early-stage discovery, translational research, or commercial readiness, most of the work happens in a black box that’s hard to visualize—and even harder to market.
That’s where AI-assisted design shines. It helps translate scientific progress into visual stories that make sense to non-scientists without dumbing anything down. You can turn a complex R&D pipeline into an interactive timeline, or depict the journey of a molecule from lab bench to bedside using clean, on-brand visuals.
The best part? AI shortens the gap between scientists and marketers. You no longer need ten rounds of back-and-forth to get a single diagram right—you can prototype in minutes and refine from there.
Pro-tip:
Use AI to mock up complex processes like target identification, clinical trial design, or regulatory milestones. Then bring in your scientific or medical affairs team to polish the accuracy. You’ll move faster and communicate smarter—without compromising substance.
Pharma: coloring inside the lines (of compliance)
In the pharmaceutical world, creativity and compliance don’t ever seem to go hand in hand. AI can help with this by streamlining workflows, accelerating concepting, and building modular components that will make your design more nimble without stepping outside of regulatory boundaries.
Pro-tip:
Use AI to generate reusable design templates and visual elements that have already been reviewed and approved by your regulatory team. This helps you move faster on new campaigns without rehashing the entire approval process.
What to avoid
01. Do not (I repeat: do not) let AI freestyle medical illustrations.
We say this with love: AI is NOT your in-house medical illustrator. It can whip up a “heart” in .0.2 seconds, but it might have four ventricles, be located in the abdomen, and glow like there was some kind of nuclear incident.
Some other “fun” variations we’ve seen:
- Skeletons have extra limbs or more than 206 bones.
- Lungs with three lobes… on both sides.
- Microscopes that are IN the scientist’s eye
- DNA strands that twist in the wrong direction and break out into figure eights
- Brain diagram with the cerebellum labeled as the “emotion hub”
- Chromosomes with more arms than an octopus
- PPE gear that looks like jousting armor
- IV bags connected to the elbows
- Lab coats with 13 buttons on each side (and no pockets)
- Stethoscopes with ear tubes on both sides
Why it matters:
First and foremost, health visuals must be accurate. If you’re explaining a mechanism of action or patient anatomy, even the smallest visual inaccuracies can create massive credibility issues, cause distrust, or spread disinformation.
The workaround:
Use AI for idea exploration and concept generation. Then it’s time to pass the idea to your design team or an agency with a professional medical illustrator (like KNB Communications).
02. Do not trust AI to write your calls to action.
Left to its own devices, AI will churn out CTAs like “Explore our innovative healthcare optimization paradigm” or “Download your precision-integrated wellness solution today.” It’s basically a parody of every IG video, making fun of corporate buzzwords in healthcare marketing.
Why it matters:
CTAs need to be clear, actionable, and HUMAN. In healthcare, AI can sound like an over-the-top caricature of a used car salesman. Only humans can truly understand the nuance between offering encouragement without overpromising results or sounding too salesy (for now, at least).
The workaround:
Write your CTAs yourself, just like the good old days. Write them like you’re speaking to a real human person. Be helpful, direct, and empathetic. You can use AI to brainstorm options, but make sure someone with a heartbeat approves the final version.
03. Never, ever skip human QA
This is a biggie. No matter how advanced your tools are, human oversight is a non-negotiable. In industries with regulatory, clinical, and ethical considerations, it is imperative to always have robust human review. AI doesn’t always know when it’s crossing a legal line, implying medical claims or mislabeling a body part, and I can guarantee that none of us wants to find out AFTER publishing.
Why it matters:
As a healthcare, health tech, biotech, life sciences, or pharma market, you shape patient trust, public perception, and brand integrity. These aren’t just embarrassing mistakes. They can be costly to you and your organization.
The workaround:
Sorry, there’s not a workaround for this one. Establish a process. (Hey, you can have AI help you develop a process!) AI drafts > human edits > legal / compliance review > final approval. Smart governance is everything when it comes to AI.
04. Don’t automate the soul of your brand
You can input your brand guidelines, including brand tone and voice, into AI, but it just doesn’t get it right every single time for every single ask. The efficiency of AI can be quite seductive, but remember, your target audience is human. If you use AI for every single asset, it turns into a vaguely robotic-sounding brand tone with soulless uniformity.
Why it matters:
In healthcare marketing, empathy matters just as much as information. People don’t just want facts—they want to feel seen, understood, and supported. If your brand voice starts sounding like a chatbot from 2011, you’ve gone too far.
The workaround:
Use AI as a launchpad, not a loudspeaker. Let it suggest, inspire, and assist—but keep the emotional intelligence firmly in human hands.
05. Don’t assume AI understands your audience
AI is trained on everything and everyone… which means it’s not specialized in your audience unless you teach it. It might default to tech jargon for patients or oversimplify when speaking to researchers.
Why it matters:
Each stakeholder in healthcare—whether it’s a payer, a provider, or a policymaker—has a unique language and set of expectations. Miscommunication here doesn’t just cost engagement—it costs credibility.
The workaround:
Feed your AI prompts carefully. Context matters. Better yet, build brand voice and audience personas into your creative brief before involving AI at all.
If there’s one takeaway here, it’s this: AI is not here to replace marketers, designers, or scientists. It’s here to help you move faster, think bigger, and tell better stories—if you use it with strategy, empathy, and a healthy dose of human oversight.
AI is your co-pilot, not your creative director
If there’s one takeaway here, it’s this: AI is not here to replace marketers, designers, or scientists. It’s here to help you move faster, think bigger, and tell better stories—if you use it with strategy, empathy, and a healthy dose of human oversight.
Healthcare, health tech, biotech, life sciences, pharma—these industries are built on trust. That means your design can’t just be beautiful. It has to be accurate. Inclusive. Intuitive. And human.
AI is just the tool. You bring the understanding of your audience. You bring the nuance. You bring the soul.
So go ahead—experiment, prototype, iterate. Let AI help you push boundaries. But when it comes to the final mile? Let a human drive.
And if you need a creative partner who speaks both healthcare and human, we’re right here, ready to jump in.
P.S. Don’t forget to share your favorite AI design wins (or horror stories) on LinkedIn. The industry is evolving fast, and we’re all learning together.
AI disclosure: This blog was developed using a collaborative process between human expertise and AI drafting tools. The concept, structure, and core arguments were created independently by the author, who provided an outline, guided the flow, and directed the content strategy. AI was used to assist with drafting and wording efficiency. Final corrections, clarifications, fact-checking, and refinements were made by the author to ensure alignment with KNB Communications' standards and voice.
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