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There's lots of talk these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here's what folks who care for older and disabled people need to know.
When you watch Netflix and it recommends what you might want to watch next, when your phone lets you in with FaceID or a fingerprint, when you're writing an email and it suggests how to finish your sentence, or when you deposit a check on your phone and it knows how to process it, these are all everyday examples of AI. The key here is that AI is mainstream and you should embrace it.
The examples above use a type of AI called Machine Learning (also called ML). Without taking credit away from the wonderful innovations described above, they're mostly applications of statistics. Specifically, a lot of data (like what everyone else is watching on Netflix) is compared to what you've been watching and based on that it tells you what you'd like to watch next.
A new breed of AI has emerged and the poster child for it is called ChatGPT. You can get to it by typing chat.openai.com in your browser. It will make you sign up (which is fine and no risk). A very similar service, created by Google is called Bard and you can get to it by going to bard.google.com (this works with your Google account such as if you use Gmail). The difference with these services is that they perform research and "generate content" for you. For example, you can ask it something like "Using the perspective and writing style of a first year college student, please write me an 800 word essay on how the
movie Avatar relates to colonialism." It will write this for you with perfect English, then you can ask it to make revisions and fine tune it. Similar technologies that are available for free can generate images, simulate voices, create videos and more. The image on the right was generated for free by AI (in canva.com).
This is driving lots of conversation ranging from "How will kids ever learn to write now that the computer can do it for them," to "If you look at the big tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook (now called Meta), and Google, they haven't innovated in a long time and this is the first major tech innovation that we've seen.
We all deliver hands on human services so your initial thought might be that this doesn't apply to our industry at all. If that's how you feel, than you can pretty much stop reading here and the next time you go to a cocktail party you'll be able to talk about what AI is, where we see it every day, and what's new with it.
But every other industry is now thinking about how AI can change their world, and home care should do the same. Here are some specific things we should be thinking about.
Looking at the questions above, here are ways we can benefit from AI now.
The set up and operations in your office will be as follows:
This is a very important question and each of you will need to answer it for yourself. My answer is that it's an opportunity. Here's why?
"Computers and Robots can't provide supportive services, home care or day care BUT agencies with computers and robots will ultimately do it better than those who don't have them"
"People vs. People will be a tie. Computer vs. Computer will be a tie. Computer + People will beat both"
Our industry has a wonderful and bright future. We hope that this article has given you the tools you need to understand what AI is and how tech enabled agencies will win in the future of supportive services and care.
We at Ankota provide software for home care, disability services and adult day services and we'd love to help your agency thrive, please reach out to us for more information or assistance.
Ankota provides software for organization who enable older and disabled people to live at home, rather than in a nursing home or other institutional facility. We provide software for Home Care, EVV, Disability Services, Adult Day Services and other related needs like PACE Programs, Centers for Independent Living, and Area Agencies on Aging. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.