opportunities
New technologies continue to transform the care experience, particularly with AI evolving into a personalized care partner.
Care is ripe for the personalization of AI
The care economy is filled with highly personal problems to be solved, from managing family finances to navigating complex health conditions. Consumers crave highly personalized solutions and support: products and services they feel like an extension of how they’d care and that take into consideration their unique needs and context. According to McKinsey, “Organizations that use AI to tailor healthcare experiences to individual needs, preferences, and goals, while mitigating potential risks, have the potential to benefit from more trusting relationships with consumers.” AI and other emerging technologies hold incredible potential to personalize the care experience, from family companion apps organizing family chaos (like Asha AI) to smarter hardware making it safer for dad to age in his home from afar (like ElliQ).
The admin burden of care may finally be lifted
Care has also been one of the most underlooked opportunities and underinvested systems of the last century. Many of our care workers, such as overstretched doctors and unsupported home health aides, have been asked to do too much with too little. AI equally holds incredible potential to provide leverage to these care workers and the care systems they’re a part of. Think: optimized aging care facilities, doctors that never have to spend nights doing notes again, and home health aides who are supported by AI-driven scheduling. This leverage returns the focus of care workers’ work back to the stuff that matters.
Who is talking about this
Chris Waugh Sutter Health
Elana Berkowitz Springbank
Jessie Wild Sneller Clover Health
Julie Wroblewski Magnify Ventures
Louise Stoney Opportunities Exchange
Michael Skaff Sequoia Senior Living
Niki Manby Mutual of Omaha
Shyamal Anadkat OpenAI
Multi-model AI systems can now integrate diverse data sources—like sensors, caregiver notes, and daily routines—to provide tailored, real-time interventions that reduce caregiving burdens. For unpaid caregivers, this might mean tools that offer predictive insights or automation for routine tasks, freeing up time and reducing stress for families managing care at home. [...] The democratization of AI tools—such as open-source frameworks and cloud-based services—means that small companies and startups can now leverage these tools to build tailored caregiving solutions without having to invest in expensive infrastructure or technical expertise.
Julie Wroblewski
Co-Founder and Managing Director
magnify ventures
The acceptance of "copilot" type models, where AI augments rather than attempts to fully automate clinical judgment is a tailwind. The shift toward collaborative, human-in-the-loop AI is making these systems more adaptive and encouraging the embedding of these technologies in standard practice.
Shyamal Anadkat
Applied AI
OpenAI
Allowing AI to not just transform operations, but more importantly, scale the personalization of care is a huge opportunity.
Jessie Wild Sneller
VP and Chief of Staff
Clover Health
I think we'll see a continued increase of ‘Dr. Google’ but now with a lot more AI sophistication in parsing complex medical journals and better evaluating trustworthy sources. DIY healthcare will only increase with patients and caregivers stitching together information from many sources as well as diverse clinical and sub-clinical interventions. There is so much to build for all the questions that burden caregivers which are incredibly diverse. If your loved one, for instance, has cancer — you can use AI to understand scans and results, identify the best doctors, hopefully have better prior authorization experiences, identify promising trials, and even find the best recipe for a healthful dinner while undergoing chemo.
Elana Berkowitz
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
springbank
A growing number of state staff, industry intermediaries, providers and technology vendors support the notion of a linked Early Care and Education (ECE) Technology Ecosystem and are engaged in early-stage implementation. Government agencies are increasingly interested in funding SaaS products like off-the-shelf Child Care Management Software (CCMS) and have begun to explore strategies to use data dashboards to streamline accountability and reporting. The tech companies that build CCMS are building better, more comprehensive products and are open to crafting APIs to enable data-sharing with other software.
Louise Stoney
Co-Founder and Senior Consultant
Opportunities Exchange
challenges
Leaders grapple with the challenges and unknowns of adopting new technology in caregiving environments.
Humanity outsourced?
As leaders navigate the immense opportunities presented by emerging technologies, they also wrestle with the profound challenges that come with them—ethics, privacy, security, algorithmic bias, equitable access, and the ever-present risk of unintended consequences. For example, the use of AI-powered monitoring devices in home-based care can inadvertently capture information about individuals who have not consented to monitoring. Perhaps the most fundamental risk is the dehumanization of care—the possibility that AI, if implemented without foresight, could erode the very relationships that define caregiving.
The tech gap increases
The care economy has long been seen as too fragmented for major technological investment, leaving many systems outdated and inefficient. From home health to early childhood education, critical sectors still rely on antiquated tools that limit their ability to respond effectively to needs. AI has the potential to change this—but only if we invest in both technology and the cultural readiness to use it. Care workers must be empowered not just with new tools, but with the training and intuition to integrate AI-driven insights into their decision-making. All of this is uncharted territory, raising complex questions about how we adopt AI in ways that enhance care rather than disrupt it.
Who is talking about this
Louise Stoney Opportunities Exchange
Maria Thomas Sunday Health
Sara Mauskopf Winnie
Shyamal Anadkat OpenAI
The promise of LLM-driven solutions is enormous, but frontline care professionals and patients continue to worry about the reliability (evaluations, quality, hallucination, etc.) of these tools [...] We rarely address the deeper work of preparing professionals/care workers — across all levels — to partner effectively with AI. This isn’t just about training staff and nurses to read outputs; it’s about cultivating a new kind of intuition that integrates AI-driven insights into care decision-making. Without actively shaping that cultural readiness, even the best AI solutions could fail to deliver their full impact.
Shyamal Anadkat
Applied AI
openai
It is difficult to fully comprehend the depth and breadth of benefits generated by technology advancements – from the longer-term impact of genetic engineering and regenerative medicine and their impact on longevity, to the more near term impact of sensors and AI deployed to support in-home care.
Niki Manby
Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer
Mutual of Omaha
One of the paradoxes of introducing AI into caregiving is that the very systems designed to enhance care could, if not carefully implemented, create new forms of invisibility. When decisions are increasingly shaped by algorithms, there’s a risk that the nuances of individual patient needs—subtle cognitive changes, emotional well-being, or contextual factors—get flattened into data points that don’t tell the full story. Technology should be seen not as a replacement for human intuition, but as a way to sharpen it—helping caregivers see more, not less, of the people they serve.
Maria Thomas
Co-Founder and CEO
Sunday Health
I think the rise of AI is a tailwind but maybe not in the way you might expect. With so many jobs getting replaced by AI, we will start to place more value on the jobs that cannot be replaced by AI, like child care and early education.
Sara Mauskopf
Co-Founder and CEO
winnie
ECE is one of the last sectors of the US economy to benefit from a technology transformation, and it’s holding us back. The problem is at all levels. Government is still requiring a lot of paper and using antiquated, siloed tech systems that are hard to use, and most data in them is very dated and lacks the specificity the field needs to make smart decisions. Most child care providers aren’t using CCMS technology at all and those that do typically don’t harness the full power of the tool or use ‘bits and pieces’ of multiple tools. Most industry intermediaries (CCR&Rs, CDFIs, Training and TA orgs, etc.) don’t understand the value of CCMS technology and are often using outdated (or no) technology for their own systems. Most funders don’t understand the need to encourage and fund adoption of modern technology.
Louise Stoney
Co-Founder and Senior Consultant
Opportunities Exchange