Beyond Chatbots: Why the Future of AI in the Home is Agentic

The home care industry is at an inflection point. Workforce shortages, margin pressure, and surging demand are forcing agencies to rethink not just how they operate, but what technology they can trust. At the center of this conversation is a question that was once abstract but is now urgent: is AI a tool your teams use, or a force that works alongside them?

Few people are better positioned to answer this question than Adrian Schauer, founder and CEO of AlayaCare — a leading cloud-based platform serving home and community care organizations across North America. Schauer has spent more than a decade building technology that doesn't just automate tasks, but fundamentally changes what's possible for caregivers, clients, and the agencies that serve them.

Earlier this year, he was recognized as a winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Eastern Canada.

We sat down with Schauer ahead of his appearance at the Home Care Innovation Forum to talk about the rise of agentic AI, the "flywheel" philosophy driving AlayaCare's approach to continuous improvement, and what the industry's top-performing agencies are doing differently to succeed.

For home care leaders who are still thinking about AI as a tool they interact with rather than one that acts on their behalf, what does the shift to agentic AI look like on the ground, and what should agencies be doing right now to get ready?

Most people are familiar with the prompt-and-response style of AI from tools like ChatGPT or Gemini — that's the flavor of AI most of us have encountered as consumers. What most people haven't experienced yet is handing off an entire workflow to an AI agent that simply takes it on and delivers results. That's agentic AI, and it requires a significant education shift in terms of understanding what it's actually capable of.

We've built AlayaFlow as a platform specifically for this, focused on delivering AI agents that can take on full workloads in the personas of an intake coordinator, a scheduler, and a revenue cycle manager — and we're commercializing those on a unit-of-work-successfully-performed basis.

For agencies that are reticent (to fully embracing AI), the honest message is that your competitors are going to figure this out. If integrating AI lets them deliver a better caregiver experience, better client experience, better health outcomes, and more efficient back office operations, how far behind them can you afford to be?

You've talked about a home care "flywheel" — the idea that small, continuous improvements compound over time into something transformational. How do you help agencies that are already stretched thin build that discipline, and what does it look like when it starts to work?

We help our customers instrument their businesses so they can see in real time how effectively they're performing on the key metrics that drive overall success. From there, we use a customer maturity model that benchmarks them against their peers in the industry, helping them understand what ‘great’ looks like and where they stand relative to it.

Everyone's great at something, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. So there are usually areas where they're leading and areas where they're lagging. We see it as our job to make those visible, and then provide the tools, best-practice workflows, and support to help them close the gaps and exceed benchmarks. That incremental, continuous improvement process is what the flywheel is really all about.

You've said your mission is to "humanize home care through technology." What does that mean in practice, and how do you ensure that as automation increases, human connection remains at the center of caregiving?

Let me give you two concrete before-and-after examples. First, our conversational AI tool, Layla, gives a care worker a full case summary before they walk through the door — what's changed with the client, what the risks are, what they need to know. And when they're delivering care and charting, instead of turning to enter data into a form, they can use our AI scribing tool — just leave the phone on the counter with the microphone on.

What you end up with is a caregiver who walks in with full context, doesn't ask the client to repeat anything the organization should already know, and can be fully face-to-face — present, looking the client in the eye — instead of juggling a screen. That's what humanizing care through technology actually looks like. The tools aren't getting in the way of the human interaction; they're enabling it.

On privacy: consent is fundamental — you always ask before turning a microphone on. And there's also the option of using the voice-to-forms tool after the visit — sitting in the car or at home, while the information is still fresh, dictating in natural language and getting a full SOAP note automatically generated. Either way, it's dramatically better than trying to type up notes unpaid at the end of a long day.

Your company has been vocal about the idea that the caregiver experience is just as important as the client experience. What are the most effective things operators are doing right now to retain and empower their caregivers — and where does technology play a role versus where does it fall short?

I see three principal levers for delivering a great caregiver experience:

1. The first is enabling a great experience at the point of care — tools like Layla, our AI scribe, and a strong mobile app experience.
2. This one is underappreciated: scheduling. Making sure caregivers get good case matches aligned with their preferences and the client's, a schedule that lets them work when they want to work, gets them the hours they need, and minimizes commute time while maximizing time with clients.
3. The third lever is resource allocation. Every dollar spent fixing visit verification errors in the back office or manually rescheduling a call-off is a dollar not going to frontline caregiver wages or to anything that builds a relationship, involves clinical decision-making, or drives better patient outcomes. That back-office spend — what I call "regrettable dollars" — is exactly what AI should be absorbing, so providers can direct resources where they actually matter.

On family caregivers: in an ideal world, this would be a paid activity — and some state Medicaid programs are moving that direction and should be encouraged. But we also have to be realistic. The question becomes: how do we remove all the friction for the family member to be an integrated part of the care team?

Our client and family portal does exactly that — giving full visibility into the care plan and interventions, and allowing families to flag new risks, request schedule changes, and interact more seamlessly with the professional care team.

When you look at home care agencies that are truly pulling ahead right now, what separates them from the rest? For a leader in this space, what's one thing they should start doing differently?

If I had to identify the single factor that best correlates with high performance in home-based care, it's delivering a great caregiver experience. It's a flywheel — hard to say what came first — but if you have caregivers who want to work for your organization and stay, and you've created an environment where they deliver great care, everything good follows from that.

As for what leaders could be doing more aggressively: simplify everything in the organization that isn't in direct service of a client or caregiver outcome. All those back-office processes chasing information, adding friction, creating noise — look hard at them and find modern tools to get them out of the system. Clear the path for your people to do the work that actually matters.