ORLANDO, FL — Artificial intelligence increasingly is being used by senior living operators and the companies that serve them, and those operators that haven’t implemented it risk being less efficient than their competitors — among other potential issues. That’s one message that WiseOx co-founder and CEO Fritz Brumder shared last week at the Florida Senior Living Association’s annual conference.
“You need to start somewhere,” he told Engage 2024 attendees. “If you don’t have AI adopted within your organization — and I’m talking beyond individuals going to something like ChatGPT or Google Gemini; I’m talking about a well-thought-through and strategic business initiative that is utilizing AI — that’s where we all need to get to as soon as possible.”
Initial provider efforts may be successful or may fail, he said. Either way, Brumder said, “You’re going to learn something from that process, and you’re going to better understand what AI is.”
The benefits for employers and employees are “undeniable,” he said, citing 2023 research included in a recent Harvard Business Review article. It found that workers who use AI finish 12% more tasks, complete tasks 25% more quickly and produce results that are 40% higher in quality.
“That doesn’t just make the company more productive and everybody more valuable; it also actually reduces stress for individuals,” Brumder said. In a Microsoft study, more than 90% of employees surveyed said that AI reduced stress, made their work seem more creative and helped them have fun at work, he added.
AI use in senior living
WiseOx creates trained and personalized AI assistants called mascots. Brumder shared examples of the use of such AI at senior living clients, including a provider that loaded its human resources policies and procedures into its AI mascot, enabling employees to consult it when they have questions. The mascot answers an average of 10 questions per day, he said.
“That’s 10 times per day where an individual gets the answer right away, and the manager and HR people don’t have to spend 10 to 15 minutes per query … that they probably get multiple times,” Brumder said.
Another company that performs facility management for providers reviews a building’s equipment, determines whether it needs to be tuned up or repaired, and produces a report for the provider, he said.
“It would take about four hours to review the report and write up an executive summary and recommendations,” Brumder said. “We implemented AI into that process, and we’ve now shrunk down the time from raw report to executive summary and final report from four hours to one hour.”
Another area where trained AI could be helpful to senior living providers, he said, is improving resident quality of life and helping staff members.
“Let’s say all of your resident families were able to load in some stories and tell you, ‘Hey, this resident — they were a Bears fan, not a Packers fan.’ Or, ‘They were a tennis player, not a golfer,’” Brumder said. “You could put all of that information into an AI and then have your staff be able to go into their room and be able to talk about contextually relevant stuff and stories related to that individual. How much more of an emotional impact would that have?”
Rules and regulations
Another example of the way the senior living industry can use AI is the new benefit that the Florida Senior Living Association is offering to members through a relationship with WiseOx. The association has loaded all state rules and regulations into a mascot it is calling Bob — short for “best of the best.” By accessing a private section on the FSLA website, members are able to ask Bob questions about generator requirements, administration training requirements and much more.
The accuracy rate of Bob’s answers is “quite high,” at 90 to 95%, Brumder said.
“You may have heard of hallucinations, or AI making things up sometimes,” he told attendees. “In this type of AI, that risk is very low, because he is trained to either answer the question based on the factual information … or not answer the question at all.”
That doesn’t mean members couldn’t test the boundaries of Bob’s knowledge, Brumder said. “But if you push him in directions like a recipe for shish kebobs, he’ll probably say something like, ‘That sounds tasty, but I’m trained on the rules and regulations of the state of Florida. So if you have questions about that, let me know,” he said.
For answers that Bob is trained to provide, users still will want to fact-check responses, Brumder said, but AI can provide a head start on research.
“A lot of times, we have questions that we just need to get unstuck,” he said. “You think you know the answer in the back of your head, but you can’t really come up with the answer right away. So some of it is just confidence-building for you and your answer.”
4 points to consider
For those senior living providers thinking about implementing AI, Brumder shared four points to consider:
- Safety. Publicly available tools have some security risks, he said. “If your employees or you are going to ChatGPT and putting in any proprietary information from your company or, even worse, individually identifiable information from a resident or prospective resident, that’s a security risk,” he said. “So within our organizations, we need to have a tool that has a little bit better oversight and controls of how people are using AI within your organization so we can track that.”
- Brand alignment. “You want to make the AI that you’re using brand-aligned,” Brumder said. “We all have a mission and a vision and a way of talking within our organizations, and you can teach the AI to do that so you don’t have to keep re-prompting it and telling it, ‘Hey, try it in this different voice.’”
- Simplicity. “You can just pick one use case and one tool to be able to get started with AI, and then you can always expand from there,” he said. “Don’t try to boil the ocean.”
- Support. “Align yourself with an organization, or somebody outside, that knows about AI and has been deep into the space and knows what all the opportunities are, because there’s a lot out there,” Brumder said.
