How the Netherlands' largest university hospital built an AI-driven marketing team

UMC Utrecht is where cutting-edge medicine meets education and research. Over 12,000 employees. 228,000 patients a year. Six medical specializations — from oncology to child health. Located in the heart of Utrecht Science Park, part of Europe's most competitive health region. Its mission is clear: advance healthcare through the integration of care, research, and education.

The marketing team — just 60 people — was responsible for communicating across the entire organization. Every department, every specialization, every audience. They had invested in all the right tools: Google Analytics, SEMrush, social dashboards, media monitoring. But the data sat unused. Insights were ad-hoc, person-dependent, and always came too late. The small digital team became a bottleneck, not an enabler.

Els Timans, who joined from Unilever to lead digital marketing, saw the disconnect immediately: "We couldn't really work data-driven, because the team was too small. And honestly — marketing was a bit of a dirty word in the hospital."

The question was never "What can we do with AI?" It was: how do we increase our communication impact without adding people or budget?

In a hospital, every euro spent inefficiently on marketing is a euro that could go to patient care. UMC didn't need another dashboard. They didn't need another platform. They needed a system that would bring relevant insights directly to the people who needed them — without requiring anyone to learn a new tool.

Together with Lerai, UMC Utrecht built a team of specialized AI agents — each with a clear responsibility. One monitors news developments. One analyzes search behavior and identifies opportunities. One interprets website performance. One tracks social signals. A coordinator brings it all together, cross-references the findings, and produces a weekly intelligence report for each medical theme.

These reports — called Pulses — land directly in the inbox of theme teams. No logins required. No dashboards to check. Each Pulse contains trending topics, keyword opportunities with real search volumes, quick-win content ideas with effort estimates, and competitor analysis. The team also gets custom AI assistants for writing, social media, and SEO — so they can act on every signal immediately.

"Bring the work to the person," says Els. "Not the person to the system."

Within weeks of acting on a Pulse recommendation, UMC Utrecht ranked #1 on Google for "bacteriofagen" — a topic with 1,600 monthly searches and zero competition that the system had flagged as a quick win.

But the real transformation was cultural. Spokespeople who had never worked with marketing data started engaging with the Pulses. A cardiologist's spokesperson saw a connection between heart rhythm disorders and a trending smartwatch story and said: "Wow, this is really incredibly fun."

In February 2026, Els and Tijs presented the case at Emerce AI Agents Day — the largest marketing technology event in the Netherlands — under the title: "6 new team members. None of them is human."

"AI doesn't make things more complicated," says Els. "It makes things easier. It reaches people you'd normally never reach with data."