If you work in later living communities, you already know the familiar 3pm scene. A contractor is on the phone about the heating system when a resident appears at the desk with a washing machine manual in hand, looking lost. Behind them, another resident wants to know whether bridge club is still on tonight. At the same time, an email pings in with guest parking queries.
The questions are reasonable. The problem isn’t the residents or the staff. It’s that information is scattered across handbooks, portals, noticeboards and emails. Everyone knows it’s “there somewhere” but finding it is often slow, frustrating, or dependent on the right person being on duty.
I’ve spent a career making new tech usable, from publishing some of the UK’s first computer games to co-founding an early email marketing business and building online education platforms. More recently I’ve been learning and experimenting with AI myself, writing about it for older adults and running a YouTube channel to share practical tips. So, when I moved into a later-living development and saw residents and staff wrestling with handbooks and noticeboards, I wondered if this was exactly the kind of problem AI could help solve.
Asking if AI could help
Like many others who’d tried ChatGPT and similar tools, I knew how powerful they were. But I was also aware of their limitations: they could just as easily invent an answer as deliver a useful one. Residents and staff needed something they could rely on, not a chatbot confidently guessing or brightly insisting the yoga class was taking place in the bin room.
The idea that emerged was simple: what if we trained a voice-enabled AI concierge on the actual knowledge of a single community – everything from manuals and rotas to event schedules and procedures? The aim wasn’t to replace staff, but to give residents an accessible concierge for reliable answers around the clock. Not another clunky portal, not another “helpful” PDF. Instead, a friendly voice – one you can have a proper conversation with on your phone, laptop or tablet. It chats back, follows your train of thought, and politely explains the same thing three different ways without ever rolling its eyes.
Building a trustworthy concierge
From the start, voice was central – indeed essential. For older adults, typing can be fiddly while talking is natural. They want to ask in plain English, “What time is yoga?” or “How do I test my smoke alarm?”.
But voice alone isn’t enough. Large language models are brilliant at conversation, but only if they can be trusted with the right knowledge. So, we built a curated knowledge base specific to the community and then ran structured evaluations across many conversations. We weren’t just checking if an answer was technically correct. We were watching how well the dialogue held up: did it make sense across a back-and-forth exchange, did it sound natural, did it give residents confidence?
That process – curating, testing and refining – was what turned a powerful but generic AI into a concierge residents could trust. And for residents, that is a critical factor. As one put it: “The thing that’s great is that we know it’s trustworthy.”
What happened when we piloted it
In our pilot community (where it’s known as “Peggy”), the results were striking.
One resident
described Peggy as “my hero,” after “she” calmly talked her through what to do when her oven tripped the fuse box late one evening: “Without her, I’d have been stumbling around in the dark.”
The Assistant General Manager summed it up neatly: “It’s not flashy or technical. It’s like having a helpful assistant who can find the right answer in seconds. For us, she’s a huge time saver.”
And critically, there was no learning curve and no IT project to wrestle with. Residents could access their AI concierge on any device with an internet connection. For staff, it meant fewer interruptions. Not every resident used it straight away, but that was expected. Adoption takes time, but once a few trusted it, others begin to follow. Within the community, you’ll regularly hear someone say, “Just ask Peggy”.
Why this matters for marketers
The Silver Marketing Association exists to improve how older consumers are understood and reached. In my experience, far from being resistant, older adults are old hands at adapting to new technology – as long as it’s presented in ways that feel straightforward and genuinely useful.
There’s also a sales and marketing dimension. In our pilot, the AI concierge has been asked to introduce itself to prospective buyers and describe the benefits of living in the community. It already had the knowledge to give a clear, persuasive answer, and prospects were genuinely impressed. That was an unexpected bonus: not only supporting residents day-to-day but also helping to showcase the community to future ones.
We’ve just begun piloting it with incoming residents too. By giving them access before they move in, it should reduce the flood of pre-move queries directed at the sales team.
And that, of course, has led us to discussions with those pursuing a rental model, where a constant flow of newcomers inevitably ask the same first questions.
The bigger lesson
For property managers and marketers alike, the lesson is clear. If you want older consumers to adopt new technology, don’t sell them “AI”. Sell them simplicity. Sell them the relief of getting an answer instantly, without feeling awkward for asking.
AI isn’t going to be optional. It’s already woven into search engines, banking apps and customer service. Whether they think of it as AI or not, residents are meeting it daily. As with new tech of the past, the pattern is familiar: at first, people dip in occasionally; then gradually it becomes the obvious, default choice.
The real question is how to start in a way that’s safe, useful and doesn’t demand major integration projects. That’s where a voice concierge comes in. It’s a straightforward first step that sits on top of your existing systems, with no integrations, no data clean-up, just the knowledge you already have made accessible through AI.
An AI voice concierge may be a new concept, but it doesn’t feel out of place. Residents see the benefit, staff welcome the help, and the community gains a quiet nudge towards the future.
Vicky Carne
3A-AI Ltd
https://www.3a-ai.chat
