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This article was written for Greystone.Net by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer and event strategist. 

You’ve probably seen this headline, but just in case you missed it, according to a study by MIT Project NANDA, 95% of enterprise GenAI initiatives deliver no measurable return.

John Davey, Vice President, Marketing Technology, Mount Sinai Health System, who will be speaking at #HCIC26 (Oct. 25-28 in Orlando), has seen this statistic play-out first-hand in his marketing department at Mount Sinai Health System.

“So often we don’t talk about what happens when AI goes wrong or doesn’t work like vendors say it will,” Davey says. “Even with all the pilots we’ve done and vendors we’ve spoken to over the years, any concrete wins with marketing AI have been few and far between. But despite that, I’m not giving up on the potential of what AI can bring to our marketing team.”

Davey’s going to speak on an #HCIC26 panel about how to win in a zero click world. The AI search game is something that keeps him up at night.

For example, Mount Sinai Health System’s website traffic had climbed steadily, quarter over quarter, for years. But once zero-click AI search results started rolling out in 2025, those page views were significantly reduced within six months.

Losing many of these people is a big problem for healthcare marketers because top of funnel visitors are the ones we’ve traditionally nurtured: the undecided, the researchers, the people who came to learn and left with a stronger sense of your brand. Saying goodbye to them means missing the opportunity to shape the earliest stages of patient decision-making.

Recently, Greystone.Net partnered with Klein & Partners and Aha Media Group, LLC on a national study that asked consumers about their AI search behavior. The survey showed 38% of consumers said they have already made a healthcare decision based on an answer from an AI tool or AI overview.

So, what does Davey tell other marketers wrestling with the same search problem? He wishes he had an answer that would fix everything, but unfortunately, there’s not a definitive solution.

“It's almost like we all have to reset what our expectations are with AI, at least at this moment in time,” Davey says. “No algorithm currently keeps pace with how fast AI search itself is changing, which means a strategy that works one week might not work the next.”

He also wants to share a few lessons about what he’s learned about implementing AI with Mount Sinai’s 90-person marketing and communications team:

Use multiple vendors to help you navigate what you need. The health system’s website is going through a major overhaul. After a few false starts, Mount Sinai’s team realized the need to engage additional resources using AI agents to research competitors, audit the existing design and map out what was missing. As one example of this work, four hours of work produced roughly 80% of what a full team would previously deliver in four weeks.

AI guidelines for staff aren’t enough to inspire usage. The team rolled out AI use guidelines early and assumed that was all they needed to do. Nope. “You can't assume that people will understand the tool and then understand how they can use it to help them do their work,” Davey says. Now, the IT department hosts regular AI training and a network of “super users” embedded on each team act as guides for people who have questions or concerns about AI.

Recognize that Gen Z is resisting AI. In a recent survey, 44% of workers surveyed admitted to intentionally sabotaging their employer's AI rollout, worried it would eventually replace their job. “That was a real eye-opener to me,” Davey says. “This perspective informed much of the messaging we have developed and are creating for any audience that includes this cohort, as well as individuals in other age groups who share these concerns.”

At #HCIC26, we’ve got a lot of sessions about AI, and we think this panel discussion is one of the highlights on our agenda. Davey will be joined by Matthew Pinzur, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Jackson Health System, Julie Spencer Washington, Chief Marketing, Communications and Customer Experience Officer at Trinity Health, and Stewart Gandolf, Founder & CEO at Healthcare Success.