Agility Philadelphia 2025: From Hype to Hope to Health

At this year’s CMI Media Group Agility Philadelphia event, the theme “Hype to Hope to Health” came alive through candid discussions and powerful storytelling. Leaders from across healthcare, technology, and innovation challenged the industry to rethink not only how we communicate, but how we act — balancing the transformative potential of AI with the human values at the core of medicine and media.

Attention, Humanity, and Thinking Like Founders

Daymond John, star of Shark Tank, set the tone that “attention is the new metric.” In an environment saturated with content and technology, volume is no longer the measure of success — connection is. For healthcare, that means moving beyond campaigns and touchpoints to design truly human-centred systems that resonate with people’s needs and values.

On top of this, John urged organisations to cultivate the mindset of founders: agile, resourceful, and unafraid to take risks in pursuit of impact. Founders build solutions from the ground up, guided by urgency and purpose rather than bureaucracy. The challenge for healthcare companies is how to embed that mentality within large, complex organisations — scaling the founder’s drive to innovate while staying anchored in the realities of patient care.

AI and the New Shape of Journeys

The energy shifted as the conversation turned to AI’s role in reshaping media. Tara Sparks, Paid and Earned Media Director, Novo Nordisk, captured the moment with a grin: AI has put the sexiness back into search. Once seen as a utility, search now feels alive again… but with a new approach and plenty of uncertainties around its future shape. She also highlighted Reddit as one of the most influential and underestimated sources fuelling large language models — proof that the messy, everyday conversations people have online are now shaping how brands are discovered, understood, and remembered.

Building on this, solli Elevate profilee Gozde Dinc, Director, Media, Strategic Partnerships, & Innovation, Digital Marketing, Genentech, broke away from the long-standing metaphor of the linear funnel. Today’s customer journey, she argued, is less a neat path and more “a bowl of spaghetti”: tangled, chaotic, but rich with insight if you know how to read it. That’s where AI shines — parsing the casual, colloquial ways patients and HCPs talk about health, brands, and choices. The opportunity is no longer about forcing people into funnels, but about listening and learning from the natural pathways they carve.

AI and the Realities of Healthcare

But while AI dazzles in media, its role in healthcare calls for humility. Dr. Chadi Nabhan, Chief Medical Officer and Head of Strategy at Ryght AI, struck a chord with a simple reminder: love AI, but don’t forget the human side of things. In medicine, technology nor humans should stand alone — because human + AI is always stronger than human alone.

That theme echoed across the stage. Nadia Khatri, Director, Worldwide Media and Planning, HCP, Bristol Myers Squibb, underscored that AI’s power is only as strong as the quality of the data it learns from — and the training of the people who wield it. Meanwhile, various HCPs across sessions reminded the audience that medicine is built on nuance: conditions differ, patients are unique, and context matters. Hyper-personalisation is not a math problem alone. The future lies not in AI replacing expertise, but in human + AI working together — augmenting judgment, not erasing it.

David Minkin, General Manager, epocrates, closed the loop with a reflection on trust. In healthcare, trust is the rarest commodity: hard-won, easily lost. He urged vigilance around expert human-vetted AI, not only to avoid the dangers of hallucination but to ensure that each application makes people’s lives “just a little bit better”— a small shift that can deliver enormous value. In a space where impact is measured in health outcomes, that “little bit” might mean everything.

The Impossible Made Possible

If the day began with AI’s disruptive force, it ended with Mick Ebeling’s, Humanitarian and Founder of Not Impossible Labs, deeply human provocation: commit to the absurd, then figure it out. From creating the Eyewriter to designing food-delivery systems that provide 50,000 meals a month through Bento, Ebeling showed what it means to live “Help One, Help Many.”

His rallying questions resonated long after:

• Who is your one? Solve the problem for them, and tell their story.
• What is your victory? Measure success not by scale alone, but by impact.
• Name something possible today that wasn’t impossible first. Clue: There isn’t anything.

Ebeling’s reminder: “Impossible is a fallacy.” It is through beautiful, limitless naïveté that breakthroughs happen.

(Stay tuned for our full feature on Mick’s inspiring interview with solli CEO Rich Springham — coming soon to solli.)

From Hype to Hope to Health (Media)

Agility Philadelphia 2025 left its audience with a clear mandate: cut through the noise, put humans at the centre, and dare to think like founders. AI may be rewriting the rules of media and medicine, but trust, nuance, and impact remain the compass. And as Mick Ebeling reminded us, the future belongs to those willing to embrace the impossible — and make it real.