The "Silver Tsunami" in Healthcare and Pharma: Turn Crisis into Opportunity with AI
By Anand Subramaniam -November 23, 2025
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Introduction
The "Silver Tsunami" or "The Great Retirement" is already here in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries with baby boomers exiting the workforce in droves. A recent survey of 88 companies in this sector by APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) reveals a crisis hiding in plain sight: 52% percent of the workforce in these sectors will retire or leave within five years. That's half the organizational brain trust walking out the door-taking decades of regulatory expertise, patient care protocols, drug development knowledge, and compliance wisdom with them. A knowledge hemorrhage that healthcare and pharma companies can "ill"-afford, no pun intended!
Worried and Paralyzed
Leadership knows there's a problem. 85% of C-suite respondents in the APQC survey said this was a mission-critical, moderate, or strong concern. But anxiety without action is just futile hand-wringing amid the knowledge bleed. In fact, 83% of respondents said they do not capture knowledge consistently from departing employees, a lifestyle that is not good for business health.
Sore Throat and Onion Syrup
The precious few healthcare and pharma organizations capturing knowledge capture are medieval in their methods with 77 percent still relying on manual people-to-people expertise transfer-like in the olden days when sore throat patients drank sugar-laden onion syrup to cure it. No wonder time (55 percent), resources (47 percent), and organizational priorities (42 percent) topped the list of barriers to knowledge capture, challenges that AI-the modern-day throat lozenge-can solve in one fell swoop with automation. Antiquated knowledge capture methods are self-defeating in that they create barriers for themselves!
AI Ambivalence
While excited about AI, healthcare and pharma organizations are also concerned about it with data privacy (44 percent), incorrect answers (41 percent), and compliance issues (36 percent) most mentioned by survey respondents. Only 20% of responding organizations have operationalized AI. The bright spot is that these early adopters know that AI supercharges knowledge management with the automation of discovery, creation, synthesis, curation, and analytics being the top AI use-cases in the context of knowledge management.
The Modern Cure: AI + KM
AI automates knowledge management, and knowledge management makes AI trustworthy. This symbiotic relationship works because robust content management practices ensure AI has clean, accurate, well-governed data to work with. Meanwhile, AI handles the heavy lifting of knowledge capture, retention, publishing, and optimization at speeds that manual methods can't touch.
Think about what that means for your organization. Faster regulatory submissions. Reduced clinical trial delays. Streamlined patient care protocols. Accelerated drug development cycles. These aren't incremental improvements-they are imperatives in an industry where knowledge gaps can cost lives.
Success Story
A next-gen healthcare provider (and an eGain client), serving patients across 200+ care centers, was experiencing rapid growth and needed a scalable, sustainable knowledge solution to deliver trusted answers to patients and contact center agents.
The company took advantage of eGain's Innovation in 30 Daysâ„¢ pilot to experience the eGain AI Knowledge Hubâ„¢ solution in a production environment and selected eGain for its comprehensive functionality, pre-built connectors to existing systems, and risk-free adoption.
The organization mines "star" questions (i.e., the most frequent and/or valuable and/or complex questions) from customer conversation stores, creates knowledge articles, generates answers from trusted content, and optimizes knowledge, all with the eGain AI Knowledge Hub. The hub orchestrates AI, using the right AI for the right task. For example, it uses GenAI for content creation, synthesis, and curation with experts in the loop as well as generating trusted answers for customer queries with eGain's Instant Answersâ„¢ capability, while using eGain's case-based reasoning to handle compliance-heavy and/or high-stakes customer interactions. The results? Easy knowledge capture from departing talent, boomers included, effortless knowledge maintenance, and superior experiences for end-customers and contact center agents!
The Tsunami Tide is Rising. Act Now!
Every day you delay implementing AI-enabled knowledge capture is another day of irreplaceable expertise vanishing. That regulatory specialist who knows exactly how to navigate FDA submissions? Retiring. The clinical researcher who understands your trial protocols inside-out? Gone next month. The time to act is now!
