Paul Sponcia, CEO of The IT Company, gives a high-level overview of the magic and mystery that is AI and how it can positively impact the senior living industry.

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Welcome to season six of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, Patriot Angels, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. The contributors are brought to you by Peak Senior Living and produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Josh 00:49

Welcome to Bridge The Gap podcast. I'm your host Josh and I have a special guest and friend with me today. Paul Sponcia, CEO of The IT Company here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Paul and I have had a lot of good times together. I forget how we actually met.

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Paul 1:07

Dean Cooper.

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Josh 1:08

Dean Cooper. That's right. Another great IT guru here in town.

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Paul 1:13

That's right, yep.

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Josh 1:14

That I worked with some and a good friend of ours, but we've known each other for years and you've been a huge help to me and my family of companies on a personal level and work together. But recently I had the opportunity to attend a webinar that your team put together. I think it was in conjunction with the University of Tennessee.

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Paul 1:36

Yes.

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Josh 1:37

And the topic was AI and we got into the weeds of a lot of different things. And I just remember while I was listening to that and watching that and hearing all the dialogue and the questions, I thought, "Man, this is something that we should be talking more about in senior living." And I've seen a few shows and podcasts, newsletters and pieces of content coming out, but it's definitely something that piqued my interest and I know people are talking about. So you have a lot of expertise in this area and have your pulse on this topic. So thanks for joining us today.

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Paul 2:14

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited.

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Josh 2:15

Let's first just kind of go high-level and as I would say, kind of AI for dummies because I'm a dummy on this topic and feel like I'm just in kindergarten trying to figure out what I need to know and how it applies to our industry, how it applies to my businesses. So help us kind of define and get our arms around the topic of AI. How should we be looking at it? How should we be defining it?

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Paul 2:40

Yeah, I mean I think the good example of how we've already been interacting with it, so maybe it's applicable, is think about your Amazon Alexas, Siri on your iPhone. That's a version of artificial intelligence, right? Your voice activating something, you're asking it a question, it's responding with an answer. It's using some level of artificial intelligence and AI is artificial intelligence. It's some machine generated and it's taught, it can self-learn, but it's not human obviously. It's artificial. You're teaching it to respond with and the more that you teach it, the better and the smarter it gets. So I guess to some extent, like a human, if we train the human, the human becomes more intelligent, understands better how to respond. That's what these machines are doing too. But in ones and zeros. I think in the world we're in today, if we look at this whole chatGPT thing, that's probably the one that people are attaching themselves to understanding the most is this. And it's called a large language model which has come out and you can type in these really crazy prompts of just about anything and it will come back and give you a very intelligent response. So if I said, "write me a poem about my friend Josh Crisp and his love for riding road bikes in the mountains of Tennessee," it's going to write me a really good poem about my friend Josh Crisp. And that's an example of artificial intelligence, right? I'm asking it to do something. It's using all that it's learned. The prompt that I gave it to return back something that is useful and intelligent.

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Josh 4:25

Well, and I think that's a really good intro and summary is you're hearing so much, I feel like everyone in every industry is talking about AI and then ChatGPT. But also you're hearing, I think there's kind of some fear and apprehension around it and what could go wrong with it and things like that. How valid is all of that and where do you think that's really kind of coming from?

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Paul 4:52

Probably those of us above 45 have maybe watched War Games from back in the day with Matthew Broderick where the computers took over and tried to end the world. Maybe that is realistic, I don't really know, but that's the kind of danger and fear that it becomes weaponized. So there are examples where AI has been used to write malware, ransomware software that can do bad things. So an example of AI where this applies to your question is the future of driving is probably autonomous. There probably will be a realistic future. Maybe our grandkids or maybe our great grandkids, there's a good possibility that it'll be autonomous. Well the only way that works is cars that have sensors, sensors all over the place and artificial intelligence making decisions based on all the information that it's getting to decide when to come, when to go, when to stop, when to accelerate, all the stuff. Well that is an example of where, can you imagine if that was weaponized in a way where creating car crashes and so we take nine 11 where humans crashed airplanes into buildings. Well if we have drones and cars and all these autonomous things, then somebody has the capability to teach it to do something bad. That's one of the fears of where it could be used in a really negative way as an example. I mean, there's countless ways that could happen. So it is a reality. I think you probably have to think of the possibility probability scale, the possibility and the risk is really high. Don't know that the probability is really high yet, but as we go through these iterations of it, if we don't elicit what's called responsible AI where we're being responsible, we're developing it in a responsible way, we're learning to use it in a responsible way, it could become very dangerous.

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Josh 6:37

Well, so now that we've scared everybody to death and we've talked about some of the negative things, really, let's talk a little bit about what is exciting to me and that's any new opportunities to have new technology and tools and how you potentially can be on the cutting edge to help improve things. I'm sitting here right now as we're talking and I'm putting myself as a senior living professional in the seat of an administrator or a regional director, a COO that has maybe a small organization or a large organization that is already probably feeling a lot of stress around all the fast emerging technology and how to be strategic in implementing the right technology and the right systems. You work with organizations all the time, helping guide them to implement the right things and then manage it and keep it secure and all those things that you could talk more about. But putting ourselves in that organizational leadership role, tell me a little bit about what you think a leader needs to be doing to position their organization to whatever level of AI, chat GPT that they're going to use. What do they need to be doing to make sure they're educated and implementing the right systems and processes and tools and technology for their organization?

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Paul 8:08

I think in the senior living space specifically, where I think one of the ways that AI can make an impact and where like you said senior leaders need to be paid attention to is in this idea of resident safety. There's a lot of development going on, as I mentioned, sensors in cars, there's a lot of development going on around sensor technology inside of facilities to track behavior in an effort to improve resident safety. So that's different than this idea of chat GPT, which is a large language model. This is actually taking AI and training it about what's happening based on what it's getting from the sensors to begin to make decisions and to alert somebody about something that's happened. So if it knows that this is the motion that somebody uses to take medicine, they reach into something and grab it knowing that yes, they took the medicine, you know, whatever it may be, fell out of a bed, got out of their bed at three in the morning, tried to go out a door, having that type of AI to know that this is something that is not supposed to happen or this is a good behavior. And then being able to alert and make decisions and provide the data also to say this is what happened when it happened and this is what we need to keep up with in the future to provide better safety for the resident and everyone else. I think in medicine too, like that's going to be a big category where AI and the large language models like a chat GPT is going to begin to help physicians, nurse practitioners, et cetera, evaluate what's going on with a resident or a patient. By using the data to say, we've seen this type of behavior, we've seen this happen a hundred times, the model would tell us that this is actually what's taking place and so we need to do x, y, and z. Whether that's medicine or therapy or whatever it is. So I think there's gonna be a big convergence of a lot of that from a technology perspective.

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Paul 9:59

As a professional the first thing I would think is, there's probably going to be a lot of players in the field who are going to rush to it. So you're going to have to be very discerning from that perspective to discern whether or not this is a flyby night thing? How far advanced are they in the technology? Do you want to be on the forefront, the cutting edge, or do you want to be a little bit behind and make sure that the technology is where it needs to be? There's a lot in the marketing space where what you guys are doing on the Solinity side and what these facilities need, where this technology's going to be able to be leveraged to provide really good data, but also to present really good information to people to understand thought leadership facility information, et cetera. Where AI is going to make a huge impact in that category. Just like I said, it could write me a poem. It can do a lot more than just write a poem.

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Josh 10:53

So while you're talking, I was biting my tongue because you're provoking some questions and when questions come to my mind they leave just as fast. But on helping to be involved with the sensors that potentially helps a lot of the issues that I've seen through the years in our industry, it's getting better, but this could potentially really advance us. You've got all these technologies, right, that are collecting data and they're pushing data to the providers that are providing the hands-on care. But a huge gap I've seen is we're having to spend a lot of time rather than doing care, trying to interpret what data is telling us. What does that mean? All of these numbers, all of these sensors that are going off. So if I'm hearing you correctly, there's potentially an opportunity where this could greatly increase that curve to help inform the staff on what really is important, what's really not, what's critical, what's not critical and maybe what you should even do about it. Am I hearing that correctly?

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Paul 11:57

I think combining all that information and using that data in an analytical way is like sleep, how much they're getting up to go to the bathroom or are they falling often? Are they cruisers, are they walking around the facility? What time do they do that? And then begin to make decisions on how we could better care for this resident. My mom has been in a facility and now she's in skilled nursing. There's a lot right that goes on and they're telling us a lot of information and talking to us about stuff. But I think a lot of the questions from the other side is, "Well what do we do about it?" The technology and the data and the ability for AI to begin to give us interpretive information is going to change the way that care is administered in the long run. It's going to take some time because it needs the data and it needs to be able to rely on that data and be trained on what to do with it. But as it becomes more intelligent, then it'll provide better information for the folks that work there, the families, the physicians, everybody to make better decisions to help better care for those residents.

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Josh 12:57

I call these communities, most of them are healthcare coordination centers. I mean the team members, they're really coordinating every level of non-medical and medical service to those residents. I think one of the challenges is and has been currently there's no one system or software that is used to do everything. And so a big part of it is you've got your pharmacy partner that's managing pharmacy and they've got their system that's talking. You've got another system that's managing and monitoring falls and you've got another system doing this and it requires a lot of manpower and thought and intuition to understand what is the correlation between all these things. Do you foresee that AI is potentially the answer that helps to pull multiple systems, multiple processes, multiple caregivers for lack of a better term together and technologies to actually interpret what's really going on holistically with that? Is that an opportunity there?

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Paul 14:06

I think the answer is the last thing you said. It's an opportunity. This has been tried so many times with the HIEs, Health Information Exchanges. That has been very difficult for those to become successful because there's so many competing demands and systems, integrations. None of these companies work together, even though there's a common language called HL7 that they can all communicate in, it just becomes very complicated. So AI has the potential to interpret the data, but the exchange of the information is still the complicated part. I could see a scenario where in a senior living facility where the data, when the resident goes to see their physician and being able to provide the most recent information over the past 60 days of how much they've been up, how much they've slept, their medication, so that the physician has a better look at what they're talking about. I could imagine all the times that my mom's been to the doctor, the emergency room, having some of that information and not my sister or me or somebody having to say, "This is what happened and oh yeah, there was this thing and this happened. They fell this time." Having all that information would be pretty powerful.

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Lucas 15:19

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Josh 15:35

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Josh 15:56

So let's talk a little bit about risk mitigation. Anytime you're implementing, vetting new systems, processes, technologies, whatever, there's a lot that goes on there. I would have to say most senior living operators or operating platforms don't have a high level of skill in that expertise. They don't have folks like yourself on the team. And so they're outsourcing to a managed service provider, technology provider many of the services that you provide. But are there specific risk associated with AI, with ChatGPT, with your teams using that with some of that should be hedged with some systems you put in place, some policies, some processes for your company, your community that is just kind of high level that we should all be thinking about.

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Paul 16:48

Across the board as it relates to ChatGPT you need to be super careful about relying on that information. I saw a recent article about a law firm that relied on some data that came out of ChatGPT that was inaccurate. The AI is only as intelligent as the information that you give it. So if you give it false information, it's going to give you false information back. I would say be really cautious about exploring ChadGPT as answers, especially because that particular tool has data that's been given to it that may have nothing to do with the stuff that we're talking about. So the real power of that is a system in a senior living facility utilizing the technology behind chatGPT to be able to type in questions and it gets answers out of the data that's already in there. That's what would be really powerful. But I don't think that exists to date. And so I would be very cautious. I would put policies in place. I've had this conversation with others, law firms, doctors practices, marketing firms about putting things in place and educating your staff that while this technology is really powerful and it can help you, we can't rely on diagnostic clinical technical data because it may seem very right and be completely wrong. And that would be devastating to make a decision based on that.

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Josh 18:13

Another piece as we start kind of rounding out the show a little bit, but a lot of us, like myself, see this shiny new object that makes a lot of promises and you're like, I gotta have that. And I suspect there's already a ton of organizations out there, potential partners with great intentions that are rolling out new technologies that are going to solve all of our problems. And the person walks in our office tells us what they're going to do for us, we don't know any better and we just say, let's do it and then it's a nightmare. When we talk about vetting, what are some practical high level things that regardless of what tech we're vetting, but specifically on AI related things, questions we should be asking? Things we should be looking for?

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Paul 19:01

I think first and foremost, if it's in this category, I would be asking a lot of questions about their history. Do they have customers? Are you going to be their first customer? And it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad that you're their first customer, it's just that you need to understand that you're a Guinea pig. And that's really, really important is to understand how many customers they have. I think the second is we talked about responsible AI, like I would want to know a little bit about what are you doing? How are you protecting the data? How's the data being utilized? Who owns the data and what are you doing with it from that perspective, this is a little bit harder one, but like, how are the models trained? Are they just learning based on the information that's coming in? Are you doing something to train the model? And then basic stuff like how big is your team? How are you funded? Is this something that you're trying to go private equity or IPO? Those are important things. When you're the new one you're gonna be very nimble and you're going to be able to do anything, but as that progresses, you're going to find, become more rigid, more difficult to deal with. So you want to just understand what that journey looks like. I think the biggest thing right now, because this is so emerging, is really understanding are you customer number one? Are you customer number 10? And depending where you're at in that journey, making sure that you have conversations with customer 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5to understand how their journey has been and how it's worked, how it hasn't worked, what the challenges are, the smaller the company, the bigger the challenges are gonna be around support and stuff like that.

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Josh 20:31

Well this is kind of one of those topics, anytime I think of new technology, I think back to in the early two thousands when I first got in the industry and I remember and this really ages me, but I remember asking my CEO at that time as a young operator, "Hey, I think we should explore this thing called Facebook. Maybe we should get a Facebook page and that might help us in our marketing efforts." The quote, "That social media stuff's never gonna go anywhere." And I remember we missed a great opportunity and we were way behind the eight ball when everybody else was implementing stuff cautiously. I almost feel like that is kind of where we potentially are with this. It's going to be, I think, revolutionary to not just the way we do life, but to everything, that we're going to really face some challenges if we don't have a plan for how we are going to adopt it. It seems to me this is not something we can say that's just going to be a fad. What are your thoughts on that?

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Paul 21:37

Well, it's now baked into everything. If you look, we talked about Siri, we talked about Alexa, Google Home, if you have that, I mean your car, all these things it's being baked into. ChatGPT is like the toothpaste is out of the tube. That's now all of a sudden this realization that we can type really complicated questions or ask it to do something really complicated and it can return a really intelligent answer. So this is far from a fad. Microsoft has already made a 10 billion investment in open AI, which is the company that made ChatGPT. They've built a huge supercomputer to run this on top of. And so when companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google are putting all their money behind something like that, you can guarantee that it's here to stay.

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Paul 22:25

Google's going to change the way that the Google search engine works and move towards that type of large language model for the way that you interact with the Google search engine, which is going to change the way that we search for things and the answers we get and the way marketing works and there's no stopping it at this point. I think the question now is how do you leverage it? And I would say, I don't know all the listeners you have, but I would really encourage the folks that are in the vendor side of the industry writing software, that is where there's a lot of potential. To take the data that's in there, apply what open AI has done with ChatGPT to begin to have practitioners and operators leverage that data in ways they never could leverage it before by asking it intelligent questions. Tell me how many times Ms. Sponcia has fallen in the past 90 days, it tells you. Right now with HubSpot, HubSpot has a thing called ChatSpot. You can ask it all these interesting questions about the data that's inside of HubSpot that is really hard to find otherwise and it will return the answers. So thinking about that as a vendor it would be a really powerful way for them to harness the data that they have and return it back in a meaningful way that people could act on it. Versus now it's probably hard to act on some of that data. It's reactive in the way they act on it. Something happened. I need to go find out why that happened versus becoming predictive or analytical in the way that they look at it.

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Josh 23:50

Well, we are only scratching at today's conversation. We're going to give our listeners, our viewers an opportunity to connect with you and a plug for you also outside of The IT Company is I got the opportunity, gosh, I don't know how long it's been.

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Paul 24:06

It was a year.

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Josh 24:08

Made for Knoxville.

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Paul 24:08

Made Right Here.

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Josh 24:09

Made Right Here! But I say Made For Knoxville. We're in Knoxville, Made Right Here. So I messed up your plug - Made Right Here. So you've even got the coolest swag that I still wear, but you've got your own podcast and talk about a lot of amazing stories about entrepreneurs here in East Tennessee and leaders. I appreciate all you're doing for the business world here for our industry. And we will give our listeners the opportunity to connect with Paul and his team in our show notes. It's been awesome having you on the show. Thanks for actually being in the studio here in Knoxville.

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Paul 24:42

It's fun.

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Josh 24:42

A rare treat for me. Usually me and Lucas are out on location at events, which we will be very soon at another event, a tour coming to the city near you, our listeners, thanks for being on the show and thanks for listening and viewing another great episode of Bridge The Gap.

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Paul 25:00

Thanks for having me.

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25:01

Thanks for listening to Bridge The Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at btgvoice.com.