Jerry Vinci (01:24.6)

Hi, Jerry Vinci here, host of From Leads to Leases. This week I’m sitting down with Benjamin Ekstrom, Senior Vice President of IT at Sincere Senior Living. Benjamin is doing some critical work helping modernize the tech backbone of nearly 80 communities while navigating AI, automation, and cybersecurity in one of the most compliance heavy industries. So in this episode, we talk about why AI governance, not AI adoption,is the real frontier, the steep cost, the steep cost of outdated tech infrastructure in senior living and what it takes to future-proof systems in a field where innovation is overdue. So if you’re in senior living operations, IT or strategic planning, this one’s packed with clarity, caution and next-gen thinking. So tune in this Wednesday on your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the episode.You can also watch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it and I’ll see you there.

Jerry Vinci (02:31.062)

What happens when AI hype meets real world healthcare compliance? Today’s guest isn’t just thinking about innovation, he’s managing the risks, rethinking governance and bringing strategy to the chaos of emerging tech in senior living.

Jerry Vinci (03:07.758)

Welcome back to another episode of From Leads to Leases, the podcast that dives deep into the senior living and senior care industries, bringing you insights, strategies, and stories from the experts at the forefront of innovation, leadership, and care. I’m your host, Jerry Vinci, CEO of CCR Growth. And for those of you who don’t know about us, CCR Growth is a full service marketing and growth agency exclusive to the senior living industry. Through this podcast, I’m here to guide you through the evolving landscape of senior care, exploring the innovations, strategies, and leadershipinsights that are shaping the future of the industry. So whether you’re a provider, a caregiver, or industry leader, this show is here to help you make informed decisions and create meaningful impact.

Jerry Vinci (04:15.147)

Jerry Vinci (05:15.32)

Benjamin.

Jerry Vinci (05:21.07)

How you doing, sir?

Benjamin Exstrom (05:24.162)

Not bad, how are you?

Jerry Vinci (05:25.794)

Good. Good, good, good. It’s almost Friday. We’re getting there. Are you, well, I guess you’re not. Where are you located?

Benjamin Exstrom (05:28.752)

Guess my volume. Almost.

Benjamin Exstrom (05:39.26)

I’m in Longview, Washington.

Jerry Vinci (05:41.078)

Okay, you’re in Washington. I curious if you might be heading out to the AI conference in San Francisco in September.

Benjamin Exstrom (05:48.924)

No, is going to be pretty busy for us, so probably not going to make that one. It’s usually about the same time as the Security Congress for the ISC squared organization. yeah.

Jerry Vinci (05:54.232)

Yeah.

Jerry Vinci (05:59.584)

Okay. Yeah, it’s supposed to be pretty cool. So it’s first time checking it out. But I don’t know how applicable it’ll be in my space or your space yet. But I’m definitely gonna be taking notes and seeing there’s gonna be a lot of big names there. So was curious.

Benjamin Exstrom (06:15.29)

Yeah, we’ll see what some of these companies are planning to come up with and how they’re going to ruin my day next, right?

Jerry Vinci (06:20.886)

I know. Exactly. All right. Let’s get into this here. So, so you’re good with the outline. There was nothing in there that popped out at you. Okay.

Benjamin Exstrom (06:33.658)

No, I think we’re okay. Do I need to change that background? I kind of got a weird effect going.

Jerry Vinci (06:42.696)

Sometimes it’s hit or miss with the virtual backgrounds.

Jerry Vinci (06:58.872)

And I pronounce your last name, Ekstrom, right?

Benjamin Exstrom (07:00.953)

X-Groom, yes.

Benjamin Exstrom (07:06.556)

turn the camera off maybe the gear has it there we go

Benjamin Exstrom (07:18.78)

There we go, just small effects button at the top. It’s grayed out, so.

Jerry Vinci (07:25.282)

You may have to go out and then change it in the lobby and come back in if you want. Okay.

Benjamin Exstrom (07:29.66)

Okay, let me do that, be right back.

Jerry Vinci (07:40.824)

I saw aBenjamin Ekstrom, Senior Vice President of IT at Sincere, Senior Living, two decades leadership experience across healthcare, finance, education, and agriculture. Benjamin has become a go-to expert in digital transformation, cybersecurity, and IT governance. At Sincere, he oversees tech operations across nearly 80 communities and is helping lead the organization through a critical evolution, integrating AI with caution, with care, and strategic foresight.

Benjamin Exstrom (08:43.063)

I guess I was trying to move too much that video effect just seems to hang in there.

Jerry Vinci (08:48.822)

Yeah, it may not be so bad in the final recording. It might just be this low, low res recording that’s doing it.

Jerry Vinci (08:59.447)

Here we go.

Jerry Vinci (09:12.95)

All right. Let me get my timer going. All right. Today’s guest is Benjamin Ekstrom, Senior Vice President of IT at Sincere Senior Living with more than two decades of leadership experience across healthcare, finance and education.and agriculture, Benjamin has become a go-to expert in digital transformation, cybersecurity, and IT governance. At Sincere, he oversees tech operations across nearly 80 communities and is helping lead the organization through a critical evolution, integrating AI with caution, with care, and strategic foresight. So, Benjamin, welcome to the show. Absolutely.

Benjamin Exstrom (09:51.735)

Thank you for having me. That was pretty impressive when you read it off.

Jerry Vinci (09:58.478)

I mean, this is going to be such a great conversation. Everywhere I go, all I hear about is AI. So I want to get to the get to the underbelly of AI and see and see what we can see from an IT perspective on things here. One of one of the big aspects of of IT, I’m sorry, of AI is AI governance. And so.with your organization, why is AI governance a bigger priority than AI capability right now?

Benjamin Exstrom (10:31.959)

You know, I heard a quote the other day that AI is a new organic, right? It’s everywhere. And now you can’t even buy Doritos without it saying organic someplace on the packaging. Right. And I think that’s, that’s pretty indicative to where AI is at the moment is it’s everywhere. Everyone wants to have a piece of it and everyone wants to use it. But at Sincere, and at least my approach has been to treat it like another software package, right? Just, just say, Hey,AI is just a tool, it’s an IT tool. Yeah, it’s got some pretty awesome capabilities and we’ve seen some really spectacular stuff coming out of the generative arena, but it’s a pretty broad definition too. So when we’re looking at how do we manage the use and implementation of this, we really want to look at the governance and the guardrails we can put up either technologically, policy-wise or education and administratively to say, hey,This is how you can use AI. We don’t want you to not use it, but we want you to be very mindful when you use it. And I think the biggest aspect of that is education. You gotta keep open communications with the frontline who are like asking questions. Can I do this? Can I do that? And I think a large part of that is we want to get to, yes, you can, but let’s take these precautions so we’re not regretting that decision later.

Jerry Vinci (11:39.662)

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Vinci (12:00.128)

One of the big misconceptions I think for a lot of people that aren’t necessarily tech savvy is I think they’re confusing automation with AI and I don’t think they really recognize what the difference is. How would you define the difference between automation and AI?

Benjamin Exstrom (12:17.559)

Well, automation is a form of AI. AI is a big umbrella these days, right? It starts out at the basic task automation chatbots are considered AI and they’re just a literal script that is being followed by the computer. No thought, no generation there at all. So automation does fall into the umbrella, but it is not a thinking system, right? So when we think generative AI, we want to assign that.it can make a decision based off of input it’s been given. And the decision might change, depending on how you present that input. But automation is going to do task A, B, and C, and then it’s going to go back and do task A, B, and C. It’s not going to change or deviate from what it was originally designed to do. And that’s the challenge with these AIs, is when you get to that generative arena, something may, comma, maybe in the wrong spot, you’ll get acompletely different response from a prompt yesterday or an update happened on the background, then that prompt means something very different because the AI learned and was trained a little bit more. it’s a very automation is awesome. We use it as much as possible. It makes the boring stuff a lot easier to tolerate when you’re having to deal with it. But at the same time, it’s not going to make that choice of do I want chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream today?

Jerry Vinci (13:16.621)

Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (13:42.813)

It’s going to do whatever you told it.

Jerry Vinci (13:46.126)

And in a healthcare setting like ours, what are the dangers of unrestricted access to generative AI tools?

Benjamin Exstrom (13:53.991)

I would think data leakage, know, privacy and security of patient data is always top of mind when we’re dealing with vulnerable populations who we’re serving. We really want to make sure that anytime we want to do analytics on data and use a, whether it’s machine learning, know, Watson was doing that 10 years ago when it would take medical records and give you a working care plan.Whether we’re doing that or if we’re using ChatGPT to write our care notes for us, we want to make sure we’re careful about what we feed it, right? I’ve used ChatGPT to update a resume. And I bet if you go in there and said, hey, tell me a story about an IT director at Sirius Senior Living, you’d get a lot of the information off my resume because it’s not secret, right? We don’t want to put your social security number in ChatGPT. That’s not a way we use it.Any software logically, right? We definitely want to make sure we’re thinking about what information am I giving it? Is this private? Is this classified? Is this trade secrets? At my level, is this an SEC violation, right? What does that look like? And just make sure we’re understanding that the data is everywhere and we don’t want to add to the chaos and leak our personal information if we don’t have to.

Jerry Vinci (15:18.062)

And with such a large workforce, with Sincere, I how do you educate while balancing innovation with compliance?

Benjamin Exstrom (15:25.525)

I would say that’s probably the hardest challenge. Cause we’re seeing frontline workers who don’t know how use Microsoft Teams. And they’re asking us, teach me how to use Teams. And as an IT guy, it’s like, well, just open it up and start using it. When you can’t do that with a generative AI, right? You’ve got to have, well, this is how you prompt it. This is how you do a good prompt. This is how you do a bad prompt. So we’ve really been leaning into a lot of the training that these AI providers are giving us on prompt.development and prompt engineering and asking the tough questions is like, is this going to fall in line with our HIPAA compliance? Is this going to be part of our financial compliance? How do we ensure that this chat bot or this chat generation is not going to compromise us in some way that we don’t want to be? And then opening that door slow to the generative model. I think we started with three versions of Co-Pilot before we started rolling it out.So we could say, is this going to be used and is it beneficial, first of all, and is it, you know, one of the challenges to securing it, making sure that we are still a compliant organization when it comes to HIPAA and PHI.

Jerry Vinci (16:40.686)

I know too the industry is definitely seeing a little bit of a tech infrastructure bottleneck, you know, because of COVID. Now being post-COVID, there’s still a lot of systems that are outdated. mean, copper lines, 1990s tech in some of these facilities. mean, how, what are you seeing in terms of that? we overcoming that bottleneck? Are we still in the middle of it?

Benjamin Exstrom (17:03.313)

I think progress is slow and that you hear in the tech arena, like, everyone in South Korea has fiber to their house. Well, South Korea is a lot smaller than the U S and our elbow room makes it difficult to get that high speed stuff going. And then we have questions of who’s going to control it who’s going to update it. And same with a building, right? Do you really want to invest in this building or are going tobuild a new building someplace. So there is a lot of data infrastructure out there. Buildings that are 30 years old and were state of the art in the nineties, you know, are dated now and we can’t update them anymore because they just didn’t have the base fundamentals to add wifi access points every 200 feet or, you know, run fiber optic from floor one to floor two. Those take very specialized skills and very specialized knowledge.Even those are getting harder to find. If you got a guy who can run fiber, you’re doing good, right? And I think we’re improving, but at the same time, there’s just so much to do that it’s going to be a slow roll.

Jerry Vinci (18:13.804)

tech isn’t really a nice to have anymore now. It’s a capital investment that people have to make to stay competitive. mean, aside from just the competition factor that the guy down the street has it, so we need it. I mean, what are the other advantages or reasons why that it’s no longer just a nice to have?

Benjamin Exstrom (18:31.509)

Well, I think it’s a force multiplier. see this going on in a lot of the more developed countries that they’re having population declines. And workforce is not necessarily sitting in a chair for 30 years trying to do the same job or the gold watch and then retire. People are moving from job to job. So being able to capture that and replicate that and not lose your institutional knowledge when your frontline workers leave ispretty important and you know, in the old days, he’s he’s pen and paper and you’d have to read through all these file cabinets worth of notes. If you ever wanted to learn what the last guy did, now you can put that in copilot and say, Hey, summarize this, give me the 10 most important things I need to know today. And so I think that transfer and improvement of knowledge sharing is just crucial to operating these days and data. man, the size of data is just impossibly complicated to try and keep your head around or that.some sort of technological tool to help you. And I think we’ll see that continue to grow. The size of our data pool that we’re using, we’re using an analytic tool called Domo for analytics that we’re trying to roll out now. And just getting that in is quite the effort. And then we think, okay, do we want a year’s worth of data or do we want the last 30 years worth of data that we’ve been operating? And where do we draw that line if this is useful and this is not useful?And the technology can handle that, right? We could look at our analytics over the last 30 years. I don’t know how useful the results would be though. And I’ll rely on the analytic guys to tell us that. But yeah, technology is everywhere. You know, we carry more technology in our pocket than we used to get to the moon is the famous quote going around. Yeah, and it’s getting smaller and lighter and faster.

Jerry Vinci (20:20.686)

That’s crazy, yeah.

Jerry Vinci (20:27.918)

I think it’s interesting to what you’re saying about the workforce too, because it’s like we either, you know, we have to do more with less or we have to maintain what we have, you know, with less if maintaining is, is the way to go. You know, I don’t know if we necessarily need to do more than we’re doing, but it’s.I, the population, I mean, we’re in an upside down funnel, you know, so we’re going to continue to see generation after generation, less and less people in the workforce and, more and more older adults coming into this space. I’m really curious how we’re going to manage that, especially with, you know, some of the tech infrastructure we have. then even, even if we improve that, you know, tech isn’t the only solution. We still have to have humans manning the ship. So yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (21:10.295)

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, if you look at the statistics, my parents’ generation are the largest consumers of technology right now. I’m in the Gen X range, but we have less technology than the people who are going into our senior living communities right now and want less technology than the people who are there. The connectivity and the information at your fingertips is just vitally important to us at this point.

Jerry Vinci (21:40.002)

I know IT too, I mean you guys serve everyone, staff, residents, the systems in the community, I it’s like the invisible labor of tech support, right? I mean how do you manage that from like the staff devices to Roombas to smart TVs? I I can’t even wrap my head around it.

Benjamin Exstrom (21:57.611)

Well, it goes back to the automation and the more we can automate and AI is playing a big role in that, right? So if I can handle, you know, password resets and new user requests and new room requests with an AI bot that doesn’t need me to sit at a keyboard and type the same information twice, the better and then connecting the system. So if you’re already putting your information into our customer relationship management tool,We already have that captured. Why would I ask you to fill out three more forms to ask you for your name, date of birth and social security number six more times? Let’s connect those tools on the backend, automate that, remove the cumbersome work so that when you’re talking to the resident intake manager, you know that they have your information, they know who you are and they get to connect with you rather than have you sit there and fill out a stack of forms again. So I think it’s…Vital that people stay involved with people, but we also need to catch the data on the back end, right? And make sure that we have those tools aligned with everything else so that we’re able to serve as best as we can without having to say, hold on a sec, let me go look that up.Right.

Jerry Vinci (23:19.01)

With Tech2, mean, you’ve got the operational side of tech and then you’ve got the resident-facing support side of tech. I how does an organization like yours kind of weigh and navigate that challenge of, are we going to do something that’s benefited the staff who supports the residents or the residents themselves?

Benjamin Exstrom (23:39.031)

Yes. I mean, everything we do to benefit the workforce will hopefully add value to the residents as well, right? That’s the approach. And vice versa. You know, rather than having to go down to the concierge desk and have them find something for you on a map and arrange a ride for you, can we just have an app on your television that lets you do that? Say, hey, I want to go to the doctor’s office today. I need a ride at 10 a.m. That’s pretty simple technology that we could implement in the…in a senior care facility. And we rely a lot on our vendors for that support. I manage six people in my entire organization handling 80 communities. It’s always based on how can the vendors support us in this effort. And we rely on them pretty heavily for that.It’s a good combination of technology integration between this is for the resident, this is for the staff. It’s more like this is for the operations overall and hopefully everyone’s a little happier at the end of the day.

Jerry Vinci (24:31.598)

about… I’ll go ahead.

Jerry Vinci (24:47.502)

I’ve heard a lot of conversations too around robots and there’s questioning, are these really useful? Are they not useful? What is your position on them? I know a lot of communities are using them to kind of fill the FTE gaps, but I know obviously they still require human guidance.

Benjamin Exstrom (25:00.651)

Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (25:04.375)

I’m looking forward to buying my Optimus 3 when it comes out from Tesla later this year, right? We’ll see how that turns out. Yeah, from vacuuming a floor, right? We could pay one FTE to vacuum our floors once a day, or we can pay the equivalent to have a robot vacuuming all the floors in every level all day long, continuously.

Jerry Vinci (25:08.182)

Yeah.Right.

Benjamin Exstrom (25:32.631)

for the same money or less. And then having that person, you know, we can’t take the person out as we just talked about, we’ll have to then maintain the robots, right? You have to empty the bags, clean the brushes. I’ve got a little robot here in my house that, yeah, I used to spend three hours a day cleaning floors. Now I spend an hour a week fixing the robot to make sure it keeps working, right? And there is that human technology interaction that must happen in order to maintain what’s there.And just making sure, you know, a robot gets stuck every once in while. Those server robots, they do a wonderful job, but they sometimes find an obstacle. They can’t figure out how to get around and if someone’s not there to direct them, they’re just going to sit there and wait. So, and your food’s getting cold.

Jerry Vinci (26:11.502)

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Vinci (26:22.638)

As an IT leader too, what do you think we can do to fill generational talent gaps and kind of upskill? I feel like there’s a big gap.

Benjamin Exstrom (26:33.303)

there is a big gap and we see this a lot. My team, like I said, I’ve got six guys, six or seven guys, they start at two to three years experience and then there’s this giant gap to those of us who have been around for 30 years. So I’ve got three of the team that have been here for 30 years and the rest of them have been here for less than five. And that’s their entire IT experience. So that five to 30 years is a big part of the…Where are those people and can we get one of them? And it’s pretty competitive for that level of skill and talent out there. So we’ve approached it by having those guys like myself and my engineers that have been here doing this for so long, mentoring one-on-one with the teams that are just coming up through the ranks and getting them to think, okay, that’s how you fix a printer, but how do you think about the entire printing system as a whole? And how would you design this and how would you.improve this and trying to get them out of that. I’m just resetting passwords today and helping users log in to, how would I design this to be better? How do I think about the system as a whole? And that is a journey. Certainly not going to happen overnight. And we realize that. But hopefully by the time, you know, we’re ready to hang up our hats and move into my residence, one of my communities that I have a staff that’s educated and knowledgeable enough.to take over for me. And I think that’s where a lot of the technologies and leadership is in the technology arena is educating the younger generations and not age wise, you know, I don’t care about the age, but the skill gap is built, right?

Jerry Vinci (28:15.672)

Mm-hmm.

Jerry Vinci (28:19.254)

Is the systems thinking something that you feel like is just not happening now with the younger entry level team members and you’re just kind of having to educate them or does that just come with age and experience?

Benjamin Exstrom (28:33.361)

It’s kind of an epiphany you have after about 10 years of IT is like, hey, this is the same problem I’m having over and over again. Maybe it’s not this is the problem. Maybe something bigger outside of that. And, and I think when, when we try and educate people about, think about the system, not the, not the, the issue. we’re trying to, accelerate that knowledge. You know, it took me 10 years of banging my head against the wall and fixing computers to learn.hey, this is a system, not just a printer. If I can get my staff to do that in six years, that’s a big step ahead for them in their career and their abilities. So that’s what we’re trying to do. I’ll let you know in 10 years how that works out for me.

Jerry Vinci (29:20.12)

What do you think is the issue? Why is there such a gap in the middle, the mid employment market? mean, for IT specifically, I where are all these people working right now that there’s such a gap?

Benjamin Exstrom (29:31.595)

Well, I think there’s a huge demand for it. And we’ve seen a little bit of pressure relief when like Facebook and Apple and Google start right sizing. When they start letting go their technical staff, those become available in the market. But most of the guys who have that level of experience get a really good paycheck and a really good job at these really big tech companies. And there’s always another big tech.tech companies starting up someplace, right? So I think it’s just really competitive for that skillset and that education level and experience level there. So I don’t think there’s a lack of people. think it’s just, there’s a bountiful, plenty of technology jobs out there that just need that education and experience. And if you can’t pay the six figure salary for a guy who’s been doing this for eight years, you’re probably not gonna get that guy.

Jerry Vinci (30:28.856)

Yeah, yeah, there’s plenty of job opportunities right now for sure in tech. Talking about cybersecurity too, we’re cybersecurity in a quantum age now. Can you educate our audience about what quantum computing is and how that’s gonna impact the future of encryption?

Benjamin Exstrom (30:48.183)

I can a little bit. So I’m not the expert, but I do read a lot. So right now we’re a one and zero kind of computing mentality, right? It’s either yes or no. And so that’s the binary system that we’ve built up for the last 70, 80 years, right? And quantum computing is more of a state. So you’re either almost positive or almost negative.So you can be in multiple states at once. It adds a really interesting dimension to the way we compute. Microsoft and Google have both released a chip this year that can do stateful computing like quantum, as close to quantum as I’ve seen from outside the big IBM quantum computers out there. And as they get smaller in technology and we add generative AI to that,it’s gonna be pretty fast and pretty furious how fast that generative AI can learn and adapt. And it’s exciting, but it’s also like, oh, what does this mean for security? Right? Because in the past, you used to have to worry about the Nigerian prince wanting to send you a million dollars. Next week, you’re gonna get a phone call from your mother saying, hey, I need 20 bucks so I can get home. And can I just get that out of your Apple Pay? Right?And it’s going to sound like your mom and she’s going to know a lot about you because AI just discovered everything there was in less than two minutes based on the internet. And it’s going to be really hard to detect. You see that right now that even in encryption, the speed at which quantum can break a 256 AES encryption is really fast. We have to rethink how encryption is working to secure our data in transit. And there are now quantum resistant encryption.that are being developed and worked on so that we can combat that next level of computer crime going on there. And the computer crime is not going to stop, right? It’s a $3 billion a year industry. If there’s money there, people are going to flock to it.

Jerry Vinci (32:56.866)

I mean, at this point in time, who has access to quantum computing? I should we be worried about our standard security protocols right now, or is this like a future concern that we’re

Benjamin Exstrom (33:05.915)

would say probably going to start being a future concern in the next five years. You know, that’s how fast tech moves, right? five years ago we didn’t have AI and now it’s everywhere. So when quantum actually gets to the market and people learn how to use it, you know, there’s still that learning gap between, you know, I not a program in Python and C sharp and whatnot. How do you program a quantum, right? What does that look like? So there, there is that, that learning gap that I think will.give us a little bit of relief before that’s figured out. But we have AI now to help us with our coding. So that’s going to go even faster now too. So I think we’ve got for maybe five years, we’ll see how that turns out though.

Jerry Vinci (33:53.792)

Last time we talked to you, you were talking about going back to the days of the mafia. Why? Like some sensitive data might be going back to the paper and pen. Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (33:58.868)

yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (34:03.145)

Right? Yeah. you can, if your only concern is physical security, that takes a lot of the burden off from that, from that digital, right? And the old tech was away, right? I’d rather someone put a post another with their password underneath their desk than use a Microsoft Word document. That was, that’s one of my, my fear stories of the past is I had a user that kept all his banking data and all his passwords on a Word document and it’s

Jerry Vinci (34:06.818)

Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (34:32.907)

someone access his computer and download all his files. And I was like, if only you just use the Post-it note. So that was where I learned that part.

Jerry Vinci (34:46.67)

I do think it’s interesting though, because I feel like there’s a lot of areas where we’re going to value those analog approaches to things, know, things that are handwritten and human made are going to hold more value than something that’s generated, you know, through AI or digitally, just pretty interesting.

Benjamin Exstrom (35:06.143)

Yeah, there’s a big, the non-fungible tokens, the art that they use on those is generating some interesting like financial revenue for people. I’m like, you’re really paying for ones and zeros here. I mean, it’s pretty, but is it worth that much money as opposed to like going and getting a Picasso or a Monet or one of the old artists that put brush to canvas, right?something you can see and smell and experience.

Jerry Vinci (35:39.278)

Yeah, just because it’s one of a kind and it can be traced back to the original source creator. yeah, I can’t wrap my head around that. That’s my Gen X brain. mean, know, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they’re all about it. I just can’t, I can’t figure that out.

Benjamin Exstrom (35:57.035)

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me, but to each his own, guess.

Jerry Vinci (35:59.988)

youYeah, yeah. How do you see yourself in terms of tech adoption in terms of the curve? Where do you see yourself and you know why? mean, I think like waiting a little bit isn’t always losing. You’re not always behind. I think it’s probably smart, especially given the role you play to be a little bit behind the curve.

Benjamin Exstrom (36:23.019)

Yeah, there’s, marketing, actually cut the curve of adoption up and there’s early adopters, late adopters, and all those guys in the middle. I definitely don’t aspire to be an early adopter. I don’t wanna be first to market on adopting tech. Sometimes it happens because there’s just, this is what I wanna use, right? So we…Mostly based tech utilization from our user base. They say, hey, I need a tool to help me do X. And we say, well, okay, let’s go look at it see what tools there are. It’s like, well, if we want to future-proof this a little bit, we could be an early adopter on this new technology. You know, we’ll consider it and we’ll definitely look at it see if that’s worth doing. But most of the time being into that mid to late stage adoption gives you the ability to look back and say, hey, what happened over there when they tried this, right?So you get to see how it’s working in the market before you try and throw it on your people. You learn a lot of lessons that way. But again, to your point, we lose a little bit of that strategic advantage and that initiative of being first to market on something. And if that’s a concern, maybe early adoption is the motto, And I’m not opposed to early adopters. I just don’t want to be one of them.

Jerry Vinci (37:18.862)

Yeah. Right.

Jerry Vinci (37:46.41)

I I agreed 100,000%. I can’t, I won’t be first in line. I might be fifth in line, but I want to see how the first four go first before I dive in. Another phrase I was curious about too is when it comes to tech implementation was a people first mentality when it comes to like robotics and automation and AI. What does that mean and how is that utilized?

Benjamin Exstrom (37:52.929)

Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (38:12.093)

there’s a, there’s a phrase out there and I use this in the talk at the senior living executive conference. presentation is called human in the loop. And a part of that is designing your process, even if it’s an AI process around the people who are using it and experiencing it and not removing the person, but giving them leverage, right? So they can do their job better or faster or more of it. It’s often the case.and, but not, not thinking that, this has to be completely automated. This has to be completely robotic. don’t need people in this. Well, we’ve known that robots require people. know that AI requires someone to sit to verify. you hallucinating now, or is that really something you can, you can publish? so the, the person in the loop, the human in the loop is always going to be essential whenever we’re relying on technology, whetherIt’s just quality assurance and quality checking to say, is what you’re putting out what we actually want to be saying. And then we got to remember that if everyone is using AI tools, it’s going to filter down to like the two or three top runners. And so you’re going to be putting out the same product that I’m putting out that someone else is putting out. And then there’s really no competitive advantage in there because you’ve lost that human touch and that personal.connection that you could otherwise get keeping the people and augmenting them with the tech.I think it’s pretty important to make sure you’re thinking about the person before you think about the

Jerry Vinci (39:53.57)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely at the end of the day for sure. Especially in this industry. Is there anything that you’re doing proactively to plan for future moves in terms of tech and IT?

Benjamin Exstrom (40:07.095)

Lots of reading, keeping up on industry as much as possible and seeing what other people are doing, right? So we were talking about supporting residents before. They don’t call my help desk, but at larger communities, know, 800 plus, which are probably three or four times larger than most of our communities, they’re providing an onsite like a free gig service.

Jerry Vinci (40:08.588)

Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (40:35.031)

where they’ll show up one day a month and anyone can come and ask them tech questions and get help with their technology. That’s a great service that involves a technician, technology and resident education where you can bring up stuff like, hey, there’s this new social engineering out there where your grandson might call you saying he’s in jail and he needs bail money. Being able to educate your residents is awesome. So those are kind of what we’re looking at and what we’re moving towards.I’m also really interested in smart technology, creating that smart department of the future. I think that’s got a lot of potential for the senior living environment. And I really want to keep my eyes and my ears open for any of that new and interesting capabilities out there. Like I said, office robot, be in the corner right here next to me typing away.

Jerry Vinci (41:30.382)

Do you see this smart apartment kind of enhancing resident engagement too, or do you think that’s a totally separate item?

Benjamin Exstrom (41:31.425)

We’ll see what happens.

Benjamin Exstrom (41:40.257)

There’s an interesting work on that where, and it goes back to our AI conversation. We’re getting residents engaged with AI chatbots and it’s improving their quality of life because they have someone to talk to. But what it’s doing is it’s removing that engagement with their neighbors. So I see smart departments as helpful.You know, if the lights come on and when you get up in the middle of night to go use the restroom, that can help you prevent a fall, right? If you’re monitoring temperature and adjusting it automatically rather than going and changing the thermostat, that improves comfort. So we definitely look at those things. We’re looking at wearables all the time. You know, would a smartwatch give us better data information for your care planning and other technologies like that that are just.you know, beneficial for anyone who wants to use it. So we definitely keep an eye on those. And I think smart departments would be great, but we always have to think about what’s the infrastructure look like? it support that? And that’s always the first challenge is examining the infrastructure and thinking how would we apply smart locks and smart cameras and all of the other stuff.

Jerry Vinci (43:01.422)

My last question for you too, I think there’s a lot of people who assume or are fearful that innovation just means that job security is at risk, less people needed, right? Because technology is taking care of more of the heavy lifting for them. I I think there’s probably a way that innovation and employee retention can coexist, especially in the healthcare space. mean, what are your thoughts on that? there a way that…technology and innovation can actually improve employee retention.

Benjamin Exstrom (43:33.879)

I think so. You know, I think that jobs will change, right? We don’t have people driving nails with hammers anymore. There’s just no point to that. But we still need people that can design a structure and understand how it all fits together and making sure that everything flows the way it needs to so that we have good productivity at the end of the day. And no matter which technology you add or which job you’reyou’re working with, they’ll be using technology to improve that. The analogy I really like is, you know, think about in the early eighties before pneumatic cameras were there, how many people were sitting there framing and how many framers do we have out there today? Those pneumatic guns gave a thousand to one work effort. So those jobs, yes, they went away from the technology arena or from the construction arena, butOther jobs open up in the technology arena, right? We now need people who can assemble pneumatic guns, who can repair pneumatic guns, who can fix compressors, who can do all these other jobs that are needed for that new industry. And I think technology is the same way. And it’s, there is a barrier to entry. You know, I think that is our biggest challenge is that if you don’t understand tech and you don’t interested in understanding tech, you’re going to have a much harder time in the future. I think everyone’s going to be.at the point where they need to understand at least the most basic tech information in order to operate in any job that they’re doing. And we see that McDonald’s has robotic French fry cooks now, right? Do you know how to operate the robotic French fry cook?

Jerry Vinci (45:18.796)

Yeah, I’ve seen a few that they don’t even have registers anymore. They just have the kiosks, know, so, yep, it’s kind of crazy. Well, thank you, Benjamin. Thank you so much for such a great conversation. Where can our audience go to learn more about Sincere Senior Living or Connect with You?

Benjamin Exstrom (45:23.947)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Exstrom (45:37.377)

Yeah, I always go to our webpage, Sincere Senior Living dot com. That has all the resident information on there and a little bit more about the leadership team and the Sincere corporate environment. And we always like to say, you know, Sincere means like family. So that’s that’s kind of our approach, even in tech. You know, if I’m helping you reset your password, I’m hoping like you’re my dad or my my brother, not not some stranger out there. So that’s that’s place to find it. You can find me on LinkedIn.Not a big talker, but I usually respond.

Jerry Vinci (46:09.742)

Yeah, awesome. All right. Well, as we wrap up today’s episode, I want to extend a huge thank you to you, Benjamin Ekstrom, for joining us and offering a clear-eyed strategic view of technology’s role in senior living, from managing AI governance and cybersecurity threats to leading digital transformation across dozens of communities. Benjamin’s work shows us that true innovation requires intention, not just excitement.So if you want to connect with Benjamin or learn more about his work at Sincere Senior Living, we’ve included his LinkedIn profile as well as the website link in the show notes. As always, we hope you found this episode insightful and inspiring. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on.your favorite platform and stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore the evolving world of senior care covering everything from innovative care models and leadership strategies to family support technology and the future of aging. And remember that From Leads to Leases isn’t just an audio experience, we’re also a video podcast. So if you want to see the video versions of our episodes, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube or Spotify channels. I’m Jerry Vinci, CEO of CCR Growth. Thank you for joining us on From Leads to Leases and please like, subscribe.and share this episode with anyone who might find it useful. I’m truly grateful for your time and attention. And until next time, leave with strategy and with heart. Chat with you again soon. Thanks, Benjamin.

Benjamin Exstrom (47:31.031)

Thank you.

Jerry Vinci (47:34.208)

Awesome. Great job.