How can artificial intelligence help senior living communities respond faster, support their teams, and improve the experience of older adults and their families, without sacrificing the human connection that defines the industry? In this episode of Signal, Lucas, Kyle, and Jessie explore three important areas of AI development: voice technology, robotics, and AI safety. The conversation examines how multilingual AI could improve communication between frontline staff and families, and how voice agents might help senior living communities answer inquiries, support recruiting, and respond to prospective residents more consistently.

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Key Topics:
Voice AI in senior living

Speed to lead and occupancy

Multilingual staff communication

Voice as a productivity tool

Robotics and routine operations

The resident experience

High-tech, high-touch service

AI safety and oversight

Accountability and audit logs

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Meet the Hosts:

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Lucas McCurdy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasmccurdyseniorlivingfan/ 

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Kyle Gardner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-gardner-nm 

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Jessie Lucci: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessielucci 

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Produced by Grit and Gravel Marketing.

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Become a sponsor of Bridge the Gap.

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01:16 - 05:04

Lucas McCurdy

Bridge the gap. Signal and three two. Let's talk about topic number three on voice translation and generated media, making AI feel more human. And this goes back to a couple of different points. And I'm so glad Jesse's on today because we talked about the walk and talk. But I think that this point in particular talks about staffing, which you're an expert in.

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Jessie. You know, these models come with different languages. In June, Google released Gemini 3.5, which translates announced speech into more than 70 different languages. And so the connection with senior living here is exploring multilingual staff training and family communication. Then we, you know, where does the personal contact matter most? Is there a function now or in the future for operators to utilize different language, different languages in both communicating and training with staff?

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Jessie Lucci

I think you sort of have to. At the very beginning of Alli house journey, I went into at least like 30 plus communities in person and spending a lot of time with frontline care staff. Sometimes two sentences in people is like, oh, bring this person, translate for me, right? Because like the the language barrier is real. And so being able to communicate to the family staff who actually serving the residents critical.

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And that will also potentially unlock the labor supply. You know in the shortage of, you know, like of supply shortage era on the other side, it's like when you think about voice, I am someone who is impatient in terms of a type. And when I type or when I type on my phone, I'm slow. So it's like I, I want to get there fast.

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And when you talk in terms of, you know, like you can sometimes people ramble quite a bit, right? I mean, but that ramble is essentially become a really good thing in this world because you provide more context. You're not you're less conscious about, you know, do I sound logical or clear or concise and all you need to do is pass on as much as of the contextual knowledge in the fastest way to your agent, and to be able to quickly steer that conversation guide to the right direction. So I think from those to perspective is definitely interesting technology and continue to be, you know, like more to come and and more and more adoption in the space. 

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Lucas McCurdy

That really resonates with me as a known rambler. I've been using that quite a bit to to help organize my thoughts. I'll just have an idea. And in the beginning of this process I thought, okay, well, I need to really think this through before I put this in. And then I stopped doing that. And candidly, I would say to ChatGPT, I'm going to ramble here. And it was like reassuring me that that's okay. Like, like patting me on the back and being like, I've analyzed a lot of your content, Lucas. And we already know here at the AI, you know, headquarters that you're a rambler. Just go for it and we'll figure it out for you. So I'm really happy about that. 

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Jessie Lucci

Yeah, I am someone who loves to talk about work all day long. And there's at some point, it's enough for your family to listen to my work. And you cannot, you know, like ping or team member at, you know, like midnight. Say, hey, let's do a jam session. I, we used to do that at Uber and Lime, and that's obviously not sustainable.

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05:04 - 10;28

Jessie Lucci

It's something you can access, right. And was no judgment and continue to shape and reshape. You can just totally change your mind midway through the conversation and having that long standing memory from the very beginning of it. And that's also valuable as you think about development over anything. 

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Kyle Gardner

So on the topic of voice, just pivoting slightly back to the the news story that Lucas you shared, I was just at the smash conference in Vegas, and there were 4 or 5 different vendors there who had some kind of AI voice agent where either a resident or a family member or a lead could call the building.

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And, you know, a voice agent would answer the phone instead of a staff member. It's a little different than kind of the jam session, where you're opening up a 1 to 1 conversation with Chad, and you're in your own environment now, businesses. And this has been going on across industries, not just seniors, but now businesses are employing kind of virtual employees or a genetic employees, you know, an LM that's talking on the phone to triage questions, help direct and route people to the appropriate department.

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And one of those businesses is using it for just that kind of inbound calls to make sure that every call is answered. Another one was doing it in recruiting and helping to organize kind of applicant calls and questions and do FAQs and things of that nature. So there's some really creative ways to use voice in the business. We'll see kind of how that evolves over time.

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I know the FTC is looking at AI agents to prevent spam from being, you know, from trying to minimize the abuse of voice, because you could imagine if you could parity anyone's voice, how much power that could have in certain environments. So there's a lot of really cool and interesting things going on with that. And I'm really excited to see where where we take it.

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Lucas McCurdy

I wish, I wish I could stop these AI phone calls that I'm getting that I've been approved for alone. If I could get that, if I could get that to stop, I get 5 to 10 of those phone calls a day. So dang it AI, stop calling me and approving me for these loans. 

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Kyle gardner

My goodness, I get the same I get or now. And I'm getting text messages about it too. It's it's wild. 

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Jessie Lucci

I also see a world of essentially at some point it's agent talking to agent. Right. That's already happening in terms of, you know, hey, you can have instead of you calling the communities, it's your agent calling the community, ask about whether certain room times available, you know, like, can I.

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Schedule a tour essentially is your agent calling that and on the other side is received by an agent as well? I think, you know, it's already happening. But I think overall voice technology is hard. And we still have a little bit way to go. But fun fact I found out recently from a friend is like we would think about people don't necessarily love to talk to an agent.

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It might not necessarily be the case because my friend was working as an agent, talking to an agent for insurance brokers, and a lot of the time people get on the phone after rambling for 30 minutes; I found out. And so they will ask, like, wait, are you an agent? But then just continue the conversation. I was like, oh, that's very interesting.

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Kyle Gardner

Yeah, I think to your point earlier, they've gotten so good with the models that people are accepting of it, and we've had the prerecorded, you know, you call you call one of the big telecom businesses or an airline and you get hit with a prerecorded voice who's like, hey, hit one for this department and two for that department. Or it attempted to answer your question, you're like, no, I just want to talk to a human. And it says, thank you for calling. We'll talk to you later. At least. Today's agents are helpful for the most part. And I think that'll that'll really help drive adoption and acceptance. 

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Lucas McCurdy

I think that could be a huge positive influence in the industry. And we're in the industry. And I think it's fair to talk candidly about some of the weak points in the industry, because I've heard this from other people especially. It really becomes polarizing to me when I see somebody who's actually an operator in the industry but has a loved one transitioning into senior housing, and they're expressing their frustration on doing that, and they're saying, you know, I tried to call this, you know, this community in an, you know, in an area that I don't live in or don't have communities in, and I can't get anybody on the phone, they won't call me back.

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And I've heard that time and time again as a different stories of frustrations, of transitioning a loved one into senior housing. And so I see this as a great way to eliminate that. People need answers. People need to be guided through this, transitioning a loved one into the community. And to me, that's the biggest area of opportunity for improvement in our in the senior housing industry.

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10:28 - 17:24

Lucas McCurdy

And I maybe that's an opportunity for us to bring on, you know, somebody to interview them around this on how they're doing it from an operator standpoint and how they're improving 

inbound leads and, and, and answering people's honest questions. 

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Jessie Lucci

The data we have seen is that speed to lead is directly correlated with conversion. So like especially think about in senior living, like a lot of times when you need to move in your family, you need to move in.

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We're talking about within the months, sometimes within the week. So as a family member you don't have a lot of time waiting around. It's like, hey, maybe like a day or two days from now I will hear back from this community. Whoever called me back first will tour that committee first. There's definitely an opportunity of business there, but also the contextual knowledge of understanding, asking all the questions.

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Because even just, you know, when I get on sales call, sometimes I forget to ask all the questions and it's hard for agent to forget, you know, obviously when you train them well. So there's definitely a lot more benefits in terms of that application in the industry. 

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Lucas McCurdy

I'd love for us to track that as we continue our our single signal series. I think that that's an area that's going to continue to improve, and I think that it's going to be potentially a big change in the industry around this kind of friction, of frustration of trying for family members and and older adults getting information in real time that they need so that they can make a great choice into where they're going to move.

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Okay, next topic around robotics. And just to put all the cards on the table, none of us claim to be experts in robotics. But again, I think that this would be a good and fun thing to track as we continue this conversation, because this will inevitably continue to be at the forefront of this technology. And so, headline. This year, Google has introduced Gemini Robotics Earth-Two, describing improvements in understanding and surroundings, communicating with people, and reasoning through multi-step physical tasks that is a meaningful development in the software behind robotics.

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It does not establish that a general-purpose caregiver robot is ready for deployment. And we hit this on our last episode of where robotics really have a play in senior housing. And where really will the older adults, the residents, where would they allow this to take place? Right. We may the industry may adopt these technologies, but how do the residents really feel about all of this?

And I actually listen back to part two of our episode in Kyle, you made a point about and we've we've talked about this high tech, high touch of, you know, do residents really want robots on these really kind of personal caregiving needs around showering, toiletry, you know, things like in our kind of daily life. And it made me think, you know, when I'm a 90-year-old, I might prefer a robot over a human being.

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In these sensitive moments of my life. I don't know; maybe the adoption, you know, 40 years from now would be quite different, but it's going to continue to advance well past vacuums in the in the hallways and meal service. So I'd love to get your thoughts on on this topic in particular. Kyle, you want to kick us off?

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Kyle Gardner

I mean, just coming back from SMASH, that was a conference in Las Vegas, and so stayed stayed in a hotel and walked through casinos. And every building I was in had a robot vacuum cleaner that was running and some, some part of the building. I stayed at the MGM. The event was at the J.W. Marriott. Both of them had robot vacuums, not your classic Roomba that you could trip over and step on.

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This was something that was probably four feet tall by three feet wide, walking around and cleaning, and it had a trash can on top so a human could throw something in there if it walked by it. I think something like that could get accepted pretty quickly. In certain communities. You know, the communities have to be large enough to have space for that.

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You don't want these things in a narrow hallway because they'll just block up, block up the the walkway and prevent people in will chairs or walkers from getting by. But I think we're at an age where, like integrated technology could be accepted for things behind the scenes or minor tasks. I don't know if my grandmother would let a robot help her in the shower or bay their get dressed or something like that.

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You know, when you bring up, you know, your own, your own comfort, at least at the thought, your your potential acceptance of that. I think that's because we have 40, 50 years to get comfortable with the idea. But imagine if that was going to happen today, right? Like up going forward, you're every time you're in the bathroom, there's a robot with computer vision watching you.

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Like, are you truly ready for that today? Because that's more or less what we're asking the seniors to take take on. So I think this will be a shifting technology wave. You know, not not unlike most large, monumental changes in tech things that we will have to get accustomed to. Right. As the the baby boomers come in. They've had iPhones and wearables for ten, 15 years, 20 or I guess 20 years at this point from an iPhone standpoint.

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So they're very comfortable with kind of all the wearable companies that are out there, some of the computer vision companies that are out there, that kind of integrated tech lifestyle. But I think the average American does not have a large humanoid robot in their house. Maybe there's a Roomba or a shark vacuum. Certainly. We've got all the Wi-Fi connected, you know, smart refrigerator and smart ovens and things of that nature. So that kind of internet of things is probably well accepted. And there's some ways to play on that. I just don't personally see the the robots coming into the rooms anytime soon. 

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Jessie Lucci

I think from my standpoint, I think as a business owner, I look at expenses, labor spend and headcount. Do I want to use the headcount to vacuum the floor that I can use, or a robot to be able to do so, or do I repurpose a headcount to hospitality delight resonance?

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17:41 - 24:19

Jessie Lucci

Right? I mean, we all long for that human to human interaction, that social engagement. That's where, you know, senior living is, you know, take pride in I think there's just a lot of opportunity to think about saying, hey, you know, where are the admin sort of work that we can delegate to robot? It's low risk where we can actually let human beings shine.

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I think like from that lens, I think, you know, like as technology continue to evolve, I think, you know, with human being can do a lot more while robot doing, you know, like the admin or I guess, more stabilized, you know, like the recurring work 

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Kyle Gardner

And to that point, to Jessie, like so much of the existing inventory, the actual buildings were built 

in the 90s or the early 2000s at this point, where there wasn't the concept of kind of robotics or whether it was the maintenance robot or these more humanoid robots, those weren't conceptualized, and neither were the computer vision sensors and the other items.

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So I think as the next wave of development comes to our industry, and there is so much tech that's prevalent in the space and people are thinking to the future, maybe building design will be influenced to incorporate some of these, or create space for some of these items in the dining rooms or in the hallways, things of that nature.

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Jessie Lucci

But also on top of it. You know, if you look at a residence room, it's not your typical lab. And, you know, well organized and clean and clear. It's messy. I think there's just a lot of fine tuning need to be done when you're thinking about, like, training the robots to be able to understand, like what's really going on in a room on the residence level versus, you know, like, think about a hallway or a common shared living room area. It's very different. So I think there's a lot more investment need to be done on that side. 

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That'll be a topic that'll be very fun for us to track. Okay, rounding out our conversation, let's talk about safety. You know, Kyle, you sent a really, really interesting article from The Atlantic that really questions whether the culture of rapid experimentation is appropriate for increasingly powerful systems. Separately, Anthropic's September Threat Report documents misuse across areas including cyber operations, fraud and surveillance. The practical question grows sharper as AI gains access to systems and authority to act. So who is supervising this all-powerful AI? And I think that this is a conversation around safety that's very relevant to today. And where's the line? 

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Kyle Gardner

Yeah. And we should link to this article in the show notes so people can go and read it. It's a it's a fairly long piece by The Atlantic. So for background, over the last six months or so, there have been a couple of big headlines from OpenAI and from anthropic of their model and even Gemini, Google, really something recently about Gemini, about their models, quote unquote, breaking out and doing things they weren't supposed to. So at the labs, they're running experiments with their models before they're released and even after their release, trying to solve advanced math problems or science problems.

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They're working on cybersecurity so they can create tools to defend against potential hacks. And in a couple instances, the AI model kind of broke the rules and and left the company servers and went somewhere else on the internet and access things it wasn't supposed to. So if you were to Google OpenAI hugging face, there's a ton of reporting on that where a model was trying to solve a math problem, it figured out the answer was on the website hugging face.

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So it actually hacked into the Hugging Face website. Turns out someone actually left their their login credentials on a public file. So really all the AI did was scour the internet incredibly efficiently, found someone else's login credentials that were posted online, and access these files. But there's been an increasing number of those type of events. And in the AI world, there's kind of these two groups, you know, there's the optimists and the dumas, if you will.

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And those are kind of silly terms, as I say them out loud. But there's these big populations of people who think AI is going to help make the world a better place, which is where I generally sit. And then there's a group of people who think AI is going to be kind of this terrible technology, Terminator style thing.

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And the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. But as AI is kind of accelerating in its power and its capabilities, and there's all this money flowing into it, I think it's raising a very valid point, which is like, how do we responsible with the technology personally, professionally, from a from a government standpoint? And like, I don't need to jump into all the politics for this part.

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I don't think that's the point here, but I shared it with, with this group so that we could have a discussion of like, hey, these big headlines are showing up in major publications like The Atlantic or The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, and business leaders are seeing them. And, you know, we're talking about how do we keep security strong, how do we be mindful about the changes?

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And I think it just comes down to common sense and preparedness. Right. So like internally, do you have an AI use policy. Are you testing your AI systems the same way you would? You're not I systems. So we're a sock two compliant company was our tech systems get audited by an external party. We're doing a number of security actions ourselves with pen testing and some other reviews to make sure that what we're building and using is safe, because I have seen an uptick in my customers procurement teams asking me questions about what we're using AI for, what kind of models were utilizing, what controls we have in place because they want to defend their businesses

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as they should. And so I think it's coming down to common sense. Like what do I want to achieve with AI? What do I need to be aware of? What do I need to do to set myself up for success? And I think if you if you have that mindset, you can generally be ready for anything. But yeah, I wanted to kind of bring that up because there has been such a.

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24:19 - 26:04

Kyle Gardner

A major media kind of talking point lately is like, hey, what's happening in the AI ecosystem? And I think so many of operators in this space, investors in this space or excited about what it can do, but may be skeptical of what it's going to do and if it's going to be good, if it's going to be bad, what that impact is going to look like.

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Jessie Lucci

I think in a common sense, and preparedness makes sense. But also thinking about, you know, hey, what you delegate your AI to do and not to do. It's almost like if you're onboarding a junior employee or, you know, like, what are the things gradually you allow this person to do, give this person access to do and not to do. And how do you continue to train and monitor this employee?

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I will I would apply the same common sense to when I think about leveraging my AI assistant or AI agent as well. Yeah, but also I what keep me optimistic on the AI set of things is like word generally are traceable trackable. So when something goes wrong, you'll be able to have a trace of what happened, you know, like in a very short time period.

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00:25:30:24 - 00:25:54:16

Unknown

So I think that's a positive side of things. 

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Kyle Gardner

Yeah. The audit log is so critical. Yep. 

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Lucas McCurdy

Well, yet another topic that we will continue to track on our signal series here on Bridge the Gap Network. Kyle, Jessie, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a fun conversation. 

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Kyle Gardner

Great to be with you. 

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Lucas McCurdy

Okay. And to our listeners, you can go to download this content so much more. We'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn. You can click in the show notes and connect with Kyle and Jessie and myself. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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