Roshni Dutta's career path tells a story that many healthcare marketers overlook: she deliberately rejected marketing roles early in her career until she secured a strong sales position. This decision, influenced by advice from senior FMCG marketers, was rooted in a simple principle - to be effective in marketing, one must first understand the challenges salespeople face on the ground.

"If you do want a career in marketing, do not ever begin with a marketing role," she recalls being told. "It's very important to begin with a sales role, to be very grounded, and understand the challenges at a grassroots level."

Now, as Global Head of Brand and Marketing for Varian (Siemens Healthineers), Roshni faces a different challenge: providing adequate marketing support to sales teams operating in resource-constrained, highly regulated healthcare environments. The answer, she believes, lies in artificial intelligence, not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a tool to finally bridge the gap between what sales teams need and what lean marketing departments can deliver.

The Resource Gap: Why Healthcare Marketing Can't Keep Up

"Every single time we have to create a simple creative for a digital campaign, hours and hours of work go into that creative design." 

Healthcare marketing operates under constraints that don't exist in most other industries. Unlike consumer technology or FMCG companies, which often have large creative teams, healthcare organizations typically run lean marketing departments. Every piece of content requires an extensive compliance review, verification of medical accuracy, and regulatory approval.

The result is a significant bottleneck. Roshni identifies this clearly: "Do we produce three pieces of content similar to that in a year? Of course. Do we produce 300? No. That's what I'd like to get to."

This resource limitation directly impacts sales effectiveness. In smaller markets or regions, salespeople often become "semi-marketing people" by necessity. "That salesperson is pretty much the CEO," Roshni explains. "So that salesperson will then have to think of programs or think of communication or think of maybe they are participating in an event."

These salespeople need marketing materials, campaign assets, and content to support their customer conversations - but the centralized marketing team cannot produce at the speed or volume required. This is where AI presents a transformative opportunity.

AI as the Scaling Solution for Content Production

"If those are processes I can simply hand over to AI, that'll be amazing, because then we can scale up."

Roshni sees three primary use cases where AI can immediately provide value: content generation, digital campaign development, and visual design.

Content generation addresses perhaps the most pressing need. Healthcare companies sit on vast repositories of valuable information—clinical publications, research papers, and case studies. The challenge is not the absence of content but the capacity to transform this material into sales-ready assets. AI tools can help marketers rapidly repurpose technical documentation into customer-facing materials and create multiple variations for different audiences.

Digital campaign development represents another area where AI can accelerate production. Sales teams operating in different regions often require localized or customized campaign materials. AI-powered tools can generate multiple creative variations quickly, allowing marketing teams to support more sales initiatives simultaneously without proportionally increasing headcount.

Visual design, particularly for digital assets, consumes substantial time in the current workflow. By automating routine design tasks - social media graphics, presentation templates, digital ads - AI frees marketing teams to focus on strategic work while ensuring sales teams have the visual assets they need for customer engagement.

The cumulative effect is significant. Rather than being limited by how many designers or writers a company employs, marketing output becomes limited primarily by strategic direction and compliance review capacity. This shift fundamentally changes what's possible in terms of sales support.

Where Human Judgment Remains Essential

"In the foreseeable future, no matter how advanced we get in terms of AI tools, that one part - we have to have a human in the loop." 

Despite AI's potential to solve the scaling problem, Roshni maintains clear boundaries about where automation should not extend. Medical regulatory strategy, compliance review, and content accuracy verification must retain human oversight. The stakes in healthcare are simply too high to rely entirely on algorithmic output.

This perspective reflects lessons learned from her sales background. Sales teams don't just need more content - they need accurate, compliant, strategically sound content that builds trust with healthcare professionals and institutions. A single compliance error or medical inaccuracy can undermine years of relationship-building and damage brand credibility.

The solution is not AI replacing marketing teams but AI augmenting them. Human marketers set strategic direction, ensure medical accuracy, navigate regulatory requirements, and apply contextual judgment. AI handles the repetitive, time-intensive production work that currently limits output.

This approach also addresses a fundamental insight from Roshni's sales experience: the importance of understanding customer interactions and feedback. "Listening to all of these helps kind of help you become a better marketer," she notes. AI cannot replace this listening and synthesis - it can only help marketers act on what they learn more quickly and at greater scale.

Enabling Sales Through Intelligent Automation

The healthcare industry faces a unique challenge: sales teams need sophisticated marketing support, but traditional resource constraints make adequate support impossible. 

AI offers a path forward - not by replacing human expertise but by amplifying it. By automating content generation, campaign development, and design production, marketing teams can finally provide the level of support that sales teams have always needed, while maintaining human oversight where it matters most: strategy, compliance, and the deep customer understanding that comes from direct sales experience.