By Jack Cumming
Like insurance, senior living is a sales-driven industry. It’s often said that life insurance is not a product that people buy. It has to be sold. There’s some truth to that, though it’s less true for property and causality insurance. Some might say that it’s more true of senior living. Personal, human relationships make the senior living sale … most of the time.
Radical Change
With that thought in mind, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal was striking. The article reported a change in State Farm agents’ compensation that has the potential to dramatically reduce their earnings. At an all-agents meeting, State Farm’s CEO announced, “Next Gen – Good Neighbor,” a program to increase agent productivity by using AI to enhance human interaction.
State Farm has roughly 19,000 agents, and you can imagine the reaction across the sales force. It’s not positive, and it’s not pretty, but it may be necessary. Progressive® Insurance has been moving forward faster than State Farm. The WSJ cites “analysts” for a report that “Progressive sells over half its personal auto policies direct to consumers, using AI and tech to keep costs low.”
Wake Up
This can be a wake-up call for the slow-moving senior living industry, at least technologically speaking. Already, many shoppers for senior housing or other senior living services start their search online. Those shoppers can move past a particular community’s webpage very quickly if it doesn’t instantly engage them and get them thinking positively.
AI has great promise to help with that instant engagement, especially if what is on offer has distinct differentiating advantages over competitive alternatives. Here’s where know-how and ingenuity come into play. If all a community does is shop for a vendor to meet the challenge, then their offer is unlikely to be any better than that of all the vendor’s other clients. The vendor’s purpose differs from that of the buyer.
Better? or Good Enough?
The alternative is to develop a unique AI response that may use tools provided by the big players such as OpenAI, Google, Grok, and Anthropic. After all, they are pouring all that optimistic capital into LLM development and data-center processing that today’s AI requires. They differ from each other, but that doesn’t make your message unique. To be unique means that you have to have AI understanding and creative genius in-house. You needn’t settle for being just like all the others.
To prepare for this future, which is coming sooner than you can imagine, organizations need help identifying the talent that can give them that unique, differentiated advantage. Joe Velderman, for one, has the eye and maturity to recognize that kind of talent, so it was no surprise recently when he left the single-site community where he had long worked. The opportunity to lift the industry is vast.
Integrated Marketing and Tech
It will require marketing genius combined with technical genius. Progressive® outmaneuvered State Farm with (1) an effective TV campaign starring a single spokesperson and by (2) embracing direct sales mediated by a robust commitment to technology. The back-office matters, but it’s of no value unless the public knows about it.
Progressive® found Stephanie Courtney through an audition process, shaped her persona as the upbeat face for a previously little-known insurer, and the rest is history. Could something as imaginative as that give senior living the credibility it needs? So far, the media trend and the public perception have not been moving in a positive direction.
Could a high-tech approach and a creative marketing presence be the catalyst to move senior living out of the shadows of institutionalization and into the mainstream of empowered aging? Time will tell. For now, it’s not clear that anyone even has the vision to give it a try.
Gambling on Vision
State Farm is gambling that making its sales force more efficient and more up to date will revive the lead that the company once had with its “good neighbor” image. That might be a positive gamble for a transformative senior living entity as well. The expectation is that State Farm’s sales force won’t be disadvantaged over the long term. New tools will give them the chance to prove themselves and prosper. AI with a human touch may be our new good neighbor.
