Why Are Three-Quarters of Home Care Agencies Hitting a Wall With AI?

​By Brian Cavoli, host of the Home Care Agency AI Acceleration Series
 
AxisCare's recent research study on AI in home care surfaced encouraging findings: 91% of home care agency leaders are using or planning to use AI in their business, and 94% of those adopting AI are seeing benefits. The optimism reflects a shift in how our industry is thinking about technology.
 
But another number jumped out at me: 76% of those same leaders say they're facing barriers slowing their adoption, including vendor confusion, ethics concerns, employee resistance, and privacy worries. Most agencies are somewhere in the middle of crossing the gap between believing in AI and capturing its value. That's exactly what I'll be exploring with four AI-forward agency leaders July 23.

In the first webinar of HCAOA's AI Acceleration series, Margaret Haynes of Right at Home, Clay Foutch of Home Matters Caregiving, Ramzi Abdine of Comfort Keepers, and Matt Ericksen of Griswold Home Care will share what's working, what they've learned, and their guidance for agency leaders at every stage of the AI journey — which you can apply to forge your own path forward in four operational areas.

Sales and Marketing: AI as Your First Conversation
AI is delivering the most immediate, measurable impact right now in business development, with well-defined workflows, traceable ROI, and tools mature enough to deploy without deep technical infrastructure.

Our panelists who've deployed AI in their intake and inquiry process aren't only responding to potential clients faster, they are also improving their sales conversion rates and uncovering blockers they didn't know they had.

One panelist saw care consultations jump significantly after deploying AI on inbound calls. We'll cover tools that analyze your business development pipeline, filtering, prioritizing, and surfacing where your team's time is best spent. We'll also dig into AI as a coaching tool for sales staff: role-playing with different client personas, generating scorecards, and building individual coaching reports that improve performance on an individual level.

We'll get into AI calling for lead response: when it works, when it doesn't, and why speed-to-lead turns out to be one of the highest-leverage variables in home care sales.

Recruiting and Retention: Closing the Caregiver Gap
Recruiting, retention, and caregiver happiness consistently top the list of our industry’s workforce challenges.  The most compelling application of AI in recruiting isn't automating tasks. It's what AI frees your recruiters to do instead. When AI handles procedural onboarding paperwork, your team gets those hours back for proactive engagement with new hires during the window when they're most likely to leave. Less time processing means more time building the relationship that makes someone want to stay.
 
We'll talk about how home care providers are using AI today to identify the most motivated applicants, prioritize screening, and personalize outreach, helping them move faster and stay more responsive than the competition.  We'll get into something that doesn't get discussed enough: AI's ability to reduce unconscious bias in the recruiting process, picking up on signals that a human interviewer might miss.

Scheduling and Operations: The Hardest Problem and Biggest Opportunity
Most agencies identify scheduling as a growth constraint, and AI promises significant operational leverage. There are many options and implementation considerations.  
 
One of our panelists deployed AI to help fill open shifts, reducing a previously 40-60-minute process to a couple of minutes. Scheduling AI doesn't live in isolation — it has to connect to your electronic medical record (EMR), and the quality of that connection varies enormously by platform. The agencies making the most progress didn't start by picking an AI scheduling tool. They started by understanding what their current tools and operating platforms could actually support and expanded from there. We'll discuss how to think about that decision, what questions to ask vendors, and what a realistic integration roadmap looks like.
 
When scheduling works well, AI changes the way you think about capacity and staffing benchmarks, shifting your team's attention toward client-facing work and reducing burnout in ways that compound over time.

Clinical and In-Home Support: Where AI Gets Personal
This area generates the most complicated emotions, for good reason. Home care may be one of the most human businesses there is, and 57% of agency leaders worry that AI will erode the human connection with clients. That’s the central question in applying AI to a business whose entire value proposition is human presence.
 
Our panelists will share their thinking about how AI can make the human interactions better.
Ambient monitoring is one example: passive, wearable devices that track client movement patterns and flag changes in condition. In practice, systems like this are surfacing client insights and caregiver signals so we can update care plans, prevent hospitalizations, and deliver more personalized care.
 
Governance: Moving Fast and Building Trust
The AI landscape is moving quickly, and the agencies capturing the most value are the ones learning faster, operating more consistently, and iterating more deliberately than their peers. But speed without guardrails is a liability to your brand.
 
Governance isn't just about risk management. It's about giving your team clarity and confidence. We'll discuss how to build a framework that fits your business, your comfort level, and the laws in your market. We'll take on the fear factor directly: what drives resistance to AI adoption inside agencies, and how leaders have gotten past it.
 
Are you part of that 76% who believe in AI but are still working out where to start, or want to pressure-test your thinking with peers? Join us July 23. Your ticket includes access to a second session October 20 covering vendor services to consider for turning your plan into action.

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Brian Cavoli leads strategic marketing for Tribute Home Care, where he’s helped double the organization's size since 2021. With a 30-year background spanning growth marketing, AI-powered operations, and digital transformation, he’s a certified AI practitioner, HubSpot Customer Advisory Board member, and judge for the Aspect Marketing & Advertising Awards.