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September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Cath Anderson has spent 20 years leading product, policy and corporate communications at Apple, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Cityblock Health. Today she is Chief Communications Officer at Akido, one of the first AI-native care providers. She serves on the board of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai'i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, and advises Mission North's Health practice.
We talked about AI's influence in healthcare, why having AI in a product isn’t a differentiator on its own, and how the CCO job is changing. Our conversation has been edited for this format.
In healthcare there's no shortage of AI pilots that never make it to wide-scale adoption. What gets a company past the pilot?
A lot of it comes down to what you're doing with your own employees and what culture you're driving. At Akido, every doctor who joins us is trained on Scope AI. The super-users are the ones willing to rip the Band-Aid off. And that mentality goes well beyond our medical network to our corporate and operational teams. I'm constantly trying new things to make AI work for me, and if it isn't working in one part of my day, I try it somewhere else.
Pilots aren't necessarily a bad thing. But if you want AI to become part of the fabric of your organization, you need a culture where it's supported in your internal operations, not just your customer-facing product.
If you want AI to become part of the fabric of your organization, you need a culture where it's supported in your internal operations, not just your customer-facing product.
We tend to treat adoption as a product or operational challenge. Where can communications drive it, rather than telling the story after the fact?
An article by Zeke Emanuel, Neil Khosla, Vinod Khosla, and Abe Baker Butler is getting a lot of attention recently when it comes to the question of how autonomous AI can be. This is driving a robust dialogue that is becoming part of the current zeitgeist. One thing that I’ve been following for a while is how more people are recognizing how much behavior change is required to actually implement AI into care delivery. At Akido we've made change management a priority; it’s just as important as the product, if not more. Our teams will often embed with clinicians for months at a time to work side by side with doctors, learning just as much as the doctors are. It's a feedback loop, not a one-way street, and it requires a lot of curiosity and humility. You have to challenge your assumptions regularly. I have a lot of respect for the work that they do.
The communications role in all of it is the narrative. We have one core narrative, but how we approach telling the story of our work evolves daily across our audiences. One of the most important audiences is our internal employees. You've got folks coming from all different facets of tech, traditional healthcare and digital health. It’s important that everyone shares an understanding of where you've been, where you are, and where you're going, as well as a line of sight to adoption and the metrics driving business success. The shared narrative is Comms 101, and yet, one year in, it's something I wish I'd addressed sooner.
Rock Health says it will stop categorizing digital health companies as "AI-enabled" because AI has become so ubiquitous. Has AI stopped being a meaningful differentiator?
I don't see AI as a differentiator. It's a very important component of Akido’s product, but with my bias, I think the way we use it is very unique. We use AI in the exam room to coach an AI tech through the investigative portion of a visit. Scope leads the investigative intake and drafts diagnoses for the doctor to review.
Across our 100-plus clinics there are things we're still ahead on. But everyone's going to have AI embedded. AI is becoming more ubiquitous daily and the frontier labs will continue to make the models better. We build on them with a proprietary LLM that layers onto our large dataset and makes the AI work. That’s the infrastructure portion of Scope AI. Building on models from OpenAI and Anthropic makes sense for us; we're not trying to jockey to be a frontier lab. Are we looking to put forward a model built on Claude that competes with Google's AMIE? Absolutely. Most important is how AI shows up in the output: delivering care differently, affecting patient outcomes, adding more healthy years to all people’s lives—not just the wealthy. In short: I don't think anyone, Akido included, should be anchoring in AI alone as a moat.
Most important is how AI shows up in the output: delivering care differently, affecting patient outcomes, adding more healthy years to all people’s lives—not just the wealthy. In short: I don't think anyone, Akido included, should be anchoring in AI alone as a moat.
If AI isn't the differentiator, what should companies build their stories around?
Get creative in how you explain your value proposition. Are you solving a pain point that has yet to be solved? Are you creating new job categories? We’ve seen a bit of a trend where retired doctors are interested in coming back to practice—not necessarily as a doctor, but partnering with AI to deliver care the way they always wanted to before burnout got in the way.
The biggest thing as a brand is to create a persona and a narrative that is helpful. This is my own personal nit, but I think there's a lot of competition and snarkiness out there. When it comes to innovation storytelling, I think there’s a lot of value in the collective. And, if you show empathy and care and stay authentic, that goes really far.
Can trust itself become a competitive moat in healthcare?
Trust has always been the most important currency in healthcare. It can be a new type of differentiator if you can build it as an AI-forward company, and a lot of that comes down to having an authentic brand. Leading with transparency and bringing people along are both key tenets. Trust takes a long time to build and can be lost in an instant, and how you pick yourself back up from a crisis matters hugely.
One of the ways we’re building trust with doctors is by opening up a dialogue: engaging them as a critical group of stakeholders and influencers. Nurses don't always get the credit they deserve, and doctors and clinicians are one of the biggest unlocks to AI for healthcare. I think establishing an AI council or a clinical council, which we've done recently, matters more than ever. Doctors are paying attention and they're open to technology, but it has to help them. You can't address their pain points if you don't listen.
I think establishing an AI council or a clinical council, which we've done recently, matters more than ever. Doctors are paying attention and they're open to technology, but it has to help them. You can't address their pain points if you don't listen.
Is the CCO's job evolving from telling the company's story to shaping the business itself?
Communicators are tasked with building a trusted brand, which is equally as important as product and business outcomes, and that's one of the reasons the role has been elevated post-pandemic. My role is absolutely a business role: advising from a brand perspective on how we enter a market, how we talk about it, and who we partner with. It’s a big job—I'm bringing in product partnerships and mitigating risk on business deals; it's not just about building the comms plan anymore.
Who else is doing communications well right now?
My favorite example to this day is Bobbie, which sells baby formula. A recent competitor’s recall meant parents suddenly didn't have formula—and when you have young children, you have a matter of hours before the next feed. This is a household crisis in every sense of the word. Bobbie showed up. They didn't dwell on the competitor's pitfalls. They said, "Tell us what you need, and we'll get formula to you." That "how can we help" mentality is something I appreciate so much.
Nothing in comms is guaranteed, but also, it’s never too late to shape the narrative. You could think something's a huge home run and it flops. The flop is your moment to act; pivot to tell the story you want to tell. Always stay hungry and humble.
Cath Anderson is Chief Communications Officer at Akido. This interview is part of Signalmakers, a Mission North series exploring how modern communicators blend curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity to lead in an AI-driven world.
