The Top 5 Gen AI Use Cases for Your Senior Living Staff 

AI is seemingly everywhere, from your phone to your car to your television screen. But it’s generative AI that’s driving the most interest right now, especially in the workplace. Case in point: in a survey earlier this year, 65 percent of respondents said their organizations were regularly using Gen AI – nearly double the percentage from the previous survey just ten months prior. 

Gen AI holds a lot of potential for senior living communities. It can help staff save time every day and even improve their experience – both invaluable benefits amid ongoing staffing shortages. To realize that potential, though, it’s important to understand the highest-impact use cases. In this piece, we’ve got five you should consider folding into your senior living technology plan.

1. Fast-Track Your Communications 

From activity reminders to internal memos, your staff writes a lot of short-form messages – and that time adds up. But with Gen AI, employees can do the same work in a fraction of the time.

For example, by using ChatGPT or other similar AI in senior living, you can quickly turn a few words into fully coherent writing. Suddenly, something like an announcement about a new wellness program or a half-page update on visitor parking restrictions can be created in seconds – and edited in just minutes. These time savings can really add up when you have dozens of similar messages to produce every week. 

It’s worth noting, though, that this Gen AI wordsmithing should always involve human oversight. Be sure to have staff review your AI-generated content to make sure your community’s distinct voice is still coming through. With all of the time you’re saving in crafting these messages, after all, those quick read-throughs will seem like nothing!  

2. Make Gen AI Your Marketing Assistant

Gen AI isn’t only good for short-form messages. Let your brilliant marketers come up with a few topic areas or attribute lists to help sell your community, then let ChatGPT or other Gen AI tools transform those into marketing copy for things like…

• Promotional emails.
• Social media copy.
• Digital flyers and brochures.

Gen AI can also help your team brainstorm ad campaigns and copy edit employees’ own writing to punch up and streamline the messaging. 

Here again, while a Gen AI tool can do a first pass, your marketing team should always be responsible for reviewing that output for tone, brand correctness, and general human readability. 

3. Make Data Analysis a Breeze

Senior living communities have a wealth of data – from patient activity preferences to popular entertainment or dining offerings to family satisfaction scores. But with staff often stretched thin, most communities don’t have the time to really dig into this data for valuable insights. 

One way to speed up the process? Use Gen AI to…

• Clean large data sets.
• Refine unstructured data.
• Identify trends.
• Create tight summaries.
• Brainstorm next steps based on the data.

Instead of lines and pages and mountains of raw numbers, you suddenly (and quickly) have a clearer picture of what your data is telling you – which means you can more clearly see where opportunities exist and then take action.

As with any senior living technology, though, data privacy is a must – especially if you’re using free tools like ChatGPT. You’ll need to redact any personally identifiable information (PII) before feeding it to a chatbot. Depending on your objective, it might be worth working with synthetic data (i.e., fully AI-generated data) to approximate what you have on hand. You can use it to craft things like hypothetical care plans for a range of medical conditions without compromising your data.

4. Beef Up Your Staff Training

The first 90 days can make or break an employee’s experience in senior living. To keep them around, it’s crucial to have training that’s not only adequate but engaging. Efficiency is also important when you’re short staffed – the faster employees are trained, the sooner they can balance out your team’s workload.

With a Gen AI chatbot, you have a tool that employees can interact with to learn in bite-sized chunks and ask follow-up questions as needed. Managers and supervisors should still be involved, of course, but AI-supported onboarding can deepen learning and engagement, both of which are critical in those first 90 days.

Again, data privacy is crucial here if you’re working with sensitive resident information. It might be worth using synthetic data to create, say, detailed resident profiles for training purposes. A bonus? You can create countless profile iterations – and save hours in the process.

5. Build Out Your Life Enrichment Calendar

If you want to use Gen AI to spare staff from repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks, then AI-assisted activity calendar planning is something of a no-brainer.

A great activity calendar usually has a wide variety of life enrichment programming for residents to choose from. But writing up descriptions and event info takes a lot of time. A Gen AI chatbot can help by spinning just a few basic notes from your staff (time, place, location, etc.) into full descriptions in just seconds. It can also create promotional copy that will get your residents excited about these activities.

(Want to save your staff even more time? Consider using Smart Aging™ technology on the front end to fast-track your calendar planning. Here’s how.)

Focus on Gen AI That Can Have An Impact Today

Despite all the buzz, today’s Gen AI still has a long way to go for many use cases – like, say, an AI resident companion that could help alleviate loneliness. That said, there are plenty of high-impact ideas out there – like the ones we’ve shared here.The best part? Some senior living technology vendors – like Icon – already have Gen AI built into their platforms. If you want to learn more about how AI-powered senior living technology can benefit your staff, reach out to start a conversation.