Overview
A regulated global healthcare organisation wanted to understand where artificial intelligence could improve its marketing operations without compromising medical, legal or regulatory oversight. Over six weeks, Arinco mapped the end-to-end marketing workflow, prioritised more than a dozen AI use cases and developed a phased roadmap supported by a quantified benefit model. The engagement gave the organisation a shared view of its marketing operation and a practical basis for future governance and investment decisions.
Business challenge
The organisation operates in a highly regulated healthcare environment, where promotional materials must undergo medical, legal and regulatory review before publication. A relatively small local marketing team supported a broad portfolio, while technology decisions, platform ownership and release schedules were governed centrally outside the local market.
Campaigns could take at least 14 weeks from brief to delivery, with significant effort spent coordinating disconnected systems, suppliers and approval processes. Approved content was difficult to find across multiple repositories, leading teams to recreate existing materials, while separate planning and reporting systems limited the use of performance insights.
Limited internal design capability and a lack of reusable templates increased reliance on external agencies. Manual claim and reference tagging also created additional effort and rework, while every asset depended on sign-off from a limited compliance review team.
Together, these constraints reduced capacity, increased costs and placed growing pressure on employees. The organisation needed an experienced partner to assess the operation end to end, identify where change could create the most value and shape a practical path forward within its regulatory and governance requirements.
Solution
Arinco worked with the organisation to build an evidence-based view of its marketing operation and identify where AI could deliver the greatest value. Over six weeks, the team used a Double Diamond approach, combining stakeholder research, service design, technology assessment, prototyping and benefit modelling to move from understanding the current state to defining and prioritising future opportunities.
Creating a shared view of marketing operations
Arinco interviewed stakeholders across marketing, digital, data, compliance and information technology, then brought those perspectives together through focused working sessions. The team examined how work was meant to operate, how it happened in practice and where people experienced the greatest friction.
Arinco used these findings to develop a connected set of service design artefacts. Personas captured the responsibilities, needs and frustrations of people involved in planning, production, review and supplier management. An end-to-end service blueprint traced work from planning and content creation through approval, publication and measurement.
The team also created an ecosystem map showing how people, systems, suppliers and outputs connected. This made unclear ownership, manual hand-offs and coordination pressures easier to see. Arinco then assessed the capabilities needed to improve the operating model, separating foundational requirements from more transformational opportunities.
Together, these artefacts gave stakeholders a shared evidence base for discussing priorities, investment and future ways of working.
Assessing the environment and prioritising opportunities
Arinco reviewed the marketing technology environment to understand the purpose of each tool, who used it, how systems connected and where employees experienced friction. The team combined input from marketing users, information technology stakeholders and the central owner of the organisation’s customer engagement platforms.
Arinco also assessed two leading content platforms against the organisation’s regulatory review requirements. Neither met the practical needs identified during discovery, helping the organisation avoid progressing options that would not resolve its underlying operating constraints.
Building on this current-state assessment, Arinco facilitated co-design workshops to explore how AI could support planning, content development, compliance review, publishing, workflow coordination and performance improvement.
The team refined these ideas into a prioritised portfolio of more than a dozen use cases. Arinco assessed each opportunity against potential business value and readiness across data, compliance and technology, while documenting key dependencies and required foundational work.
This gave the organisation a clearer view of which opportunities it could validate sooner and which would require further platform, data or governance work.
Defining the technology approach
Arinco assessed several technology approaches and recommended building on the organisation’s existing Microsoft environment. The team proposed Microsoft Copilot Studio for initial employee-facing AI experiences, with Azure AI Foundry to be considered as requirements and solution complexity matured.
This would allow the organisation to use existing investments, connect future AI experiences with current systems and strengthen governance as adoption expanded. The organisation would still need to complete detailed technical design, security review and central technology governance before implementation.
Bringing the roadmap to life
Arinco developed two concept prototypes to help stakeholders explore how future experiences could work. The Smart Assistant showed how employees could use a conversational interface within familiar tools, while the Smart Workbench brought planning, content and performance information into a connected view.
Stakeholders used the prototypes to test assumptions and provide feedback before implementation decisions were made. Arinco also recommended an “innovation lane” that would give approved local pilots a governed pathway towards broader deployment while maintaining compliance, security and central platform oversight.
Arinco then brought the prioritised use cases, capability requirements, technology recommendations and pilot concepts together in a phased roadmap across three horizons. The team included relative effort, dependencies and readiness considerations to support sequencing and investment decisions.
Arinco also developed a bottom-up benefit model for a subset of the use cases. The team modelled each opportunity using available workflow information and public salary benchmarks, while leaving use cases without enough evidence unmodelled. The model combined estimated time savings across several prioritised use cases, reduced agency spend and a 15% efficiency assumption for workflow orchestration. This kept the business case focused on benefits supported by the available information.
Outcomes
The healthcare organisation gained an evidence-based view of its marketing operation and a practical path for evaluating future AI investment. Key outcomes include:
- A shared view of the operation: The service blueprint and ecosystem map brought previously disconnected perspectives into a single end-to-end picture of how marketing work moved through the organisation.
- Clearer investment priorities: More than a dozen opportunities were assessed against business value, data readiness, compliance requirements, technology readiness and key dependencies.
- A phased roadmap: Opportunities were organised across three horizons, with relative effort estimates and dependencies to support governance, planning and investment discussions.
- A practical path to validation: Several pilot concepts were scoped in detail, supported by a recommended Microsoft technology direction and the dependencies that would need to be addressed before implementation.
- A quantified benefit case: Modelled potential annual savings of more than $500,000, thousands of hours of manual effort and capacity equivalent to multiple full-time roles across several prioritised use cases, including knowledge discovery, content generation, compliance intelligence, asset tagging and workflow orchestration.
- Modelled workflow efficiency: Applied a 15% efficiency gain to workflow orchestration as one component of the broader benefit model, alongside estimated savings from other prioritised use cases and reduced agency spend.
- A path to lower production costs: Reusable templates, approved content patterns and AI-assisted workflows could reduce reliance on external production services while retaining human review, brand control and compliance oversight.
What's next?
Arinco recommended validating a small number of prioritised opportunities through targeted pilots. These pilots would help the organisation test user value, integration requirements, platform dependencies and governance processes before making broader implementation and investment decisions.
