AI Disruption and the Future of Senior Living Tech: A Q&A

DeepSeek unveiled a new AI system last month that disrupted the market and prompted new discussions about AI development and applications. We asked Nitin Somalwar, CTO of Aline, for his perspective on this tech disruption and what operators can expect from AI as it evolves within the senior living industry.

What Was Your Reaction to the News Regarding DeepSeek? 

Nitin: From a technical perspective, it’s an incredible advancement. It looks like DeepSeek has found a way to significantly reduce both costs and time for developing AI solutions.

For those of us in the senior living, assisted living, or post-acute space, we may be able to do a lot more with AI for a lot less than we had expected if its claims hold true. In particular, this lays the groundwork for the potential creation of industry-specific models, meaning that a future AI model could natively understand the senior living industry well and be ready faster to take on specific applications for users.

What Can Senior Living Leaders Take Away From This Disruption?

Nitin: We at Aline strongly believe that AI will continue to change every facet of operations within the senior living space, and we will benefit from increased competition among the AI giants. AI technology is evolving rapidly and offering immense potential to senior living communities — from enhancing sales and marketing to automating leasing, billing, and resident care risk detection. As it becomes more affordable and accessible, operators can move faster to improve outcomes and equip teams with tools that make daily tasks more efficient.

Does This Disruption Show That AI Will Rapidly Evolve in the Coming Months and Years?

Nitin: We are in the early days of AI, and just like in the typical software adoption curve, new or existing entrants will continue to innovate at a pace we have never seen. What’s different and faster about this adoption curve is that now AI can be used to accelerate its own development in several ways, including AI-assisted coding and future AI agent-based development.

The bar for innovation is pretty high already, but with this announcement, DeepSeek has demonstrated that new models can achieve more significant results than the original LLMs from ChatGPT or others. Two days after DeepSeek was released, Alibaba released an open-source mode with claims of better results than DeepSeek.

What Ways Do You See Senior Living Operators Engaging With AI Currently? Do You Expect It to Evolve in 2025?  

Nitin: Aline’s operators are both excited and cautious about AI. So far, we’ve seen them introduce AI to their staff for workflow uses and have seen improvements in customer understanding and efficiency. But we expect that sentiment will rapidly shift to more positivity. The more operators are surrounded by successful use cases of AI, the more they’ll become comfortable with the technology and adoption will skyrocket over the next few years.

How Can Senior Living Operators Work With Providers, Like Aline, to Ensure Ethical and Safe Use of AI? 

Nitin: Data drives AI, and at Aline, as the data custodians, we have implemented robust security measures to safeguard data protection and privacy. As with any technical solution, there’s a shared ethical responsibility, which means that providers need to build safe solutions, and operators need to deploy them safely.

The AI features within the Aline suite are designed to complement an operator’s daily process and not create unnecessary compliance or safety burdens on the operator. To reduce hallucination, or errors, in AI models, Aline has implemented a robust QA methodology to ensure that models are inclusive and bias free.

Can You Explain Aline’s Use of AI in Its Platform and What Main Functions It Supports?

Nitin: We are excited about AI and received a positive response to our introduction of Aline Intelligence at the SMASH Conference last year. We are focused on bringing value to operators by implementing AI throughout the Aline platform. 

Within the Aline CRM, we have introduced AI/ML to optimize the sales process. We have AI-powered lead scoring, powered by machine learning models that use over 25 variables to assess the viability of a given lead. Sales counselors are using AI to be more effective in their communications since we can give a quick and concise analysis of the interchange between sales and the prospect.

Communities often experience high turnover among salespeople, so our CRM is built for ease of use and efficiency. It now has an AI-powered list of top prospects and an analysis to guide the next step in the sales process. 

Lastly, our recently announced acquisition of Roobrik adds a new set of survey data that will be incorporated into our models to further improve lead scoring based on key data points given by the prospect. 

Within Aline Care, we are focused on incident management and risk assessment utilizing AI. We are testing models to determine whether we can successfully alert the caregiver and trigger better resident engagement as well as care based on data points, such as risk assessment, care patterns, food intake patterns, and social engagement. 

Within Aline Leasing & Billing, we are building Aline Intelligence agents to verify the accuracy of monthly billing statements, catching mistakes before they are sent to the residents.  We are also focused on building apartment price advising agents that evaluate units based on multiple dimensions to optimize both pricing and occupancy.  

While these are specific to each of our modules, we have consolidated all of our AI efforts under the Aline Intelligence umbrella and are structuring the company to run faster at taking advantage of breakthroughs in this emerging technology.

What’s Your Outlook for the Use of AI in Senior Living Operations? 

Nitin: We think that AI will be disruptive in a good way, but it will take some time for most providers to build safe and effective solutions. Aline jumped on it quickly; we are very bullish on using AI in our product suite and are highly focused on delivering value to the community’s many functions.

In the AI world, data is king, and Aline is poised to leverage over 25 years of experience with smart data to build AI products that will bring value to the operators, resulting in improved resident outcomes.

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