Our posts last week set the stage: Caregivers are struggling, care recipients are suffering, and today’s self-service, host-controlled web offers them next to nothing. We introduced two revolutionary innovations—Proactive Voice-AI Agents (PVAIs) and User-Controlled Services (UCS)—that can and will change all that.
In this post and those to come, we’ll explore why these innovations will have a profound, positive impact on the nascent market for e-care—benefiting hundreds of millions worldwide and finally enabling all of us to use AI + the internet for the greatest good.
Most readers will agree that caring for those who can’t care for themselves is an essential part of being human. At the same time, caring for someone else is often a difficult and thankless task.
Billions around the world have worked tirelessly to care for a stranger, loved one, or friend while those they’re helping have nonetheless suffered from loneliness, social isolation, and multiple chronic or acute conditions.
As we’ve suggested in earlier posts, today’s reactive, self-service apps can’t bridge this gap because they require the care recipient to initiate every interaction—an impossible barrier for many who need help most. Though the latest AI is capable of completing myriad tasks, it simply can’t help us care for someone else, yet.
The first virtual “good”, therefore, that our enhanced web model will achieve is to connect these two populations—caregivers and care recipients—via a proactive, voice-AI agent (PVAI). As important, these PVAIs can be personalized by one or more users (UCS) to proactively monitor and care for other users.
When PVAIs are given the agency of a caregiver—serving simultaneously as their proxy and as the automated yet amiable companion of their care recipient—they will benefit both in unprecedented ways.
The graphic below shows how the future PVAI + UCS web model differs from the legacy consumer model—by simultaneously connecting, serving and giving control to both caregivers and care recipients.
Innovations for the good of caregiving … that scale
The graphic above illustrates why enabling a caregiver to configure a PVAI to serve their needs and someone else’s constitutes a great good—the numbers.
Whereas today’s self-service model consists of one user interacting with one host-controlled app, every interaction between a care recipient and a PVAI serves at least two users at a time.
As adoption grows and trust builds, user-controlled services (UCS) will naturally evolve and expand. They’ll scale from a 1-to-1 caregiver-to-care recipient model to a many-to-1 model (e.g., several siblings supporting one parent), to a 1-to-many model (e.g., one adult child or paid caregiver supporting multiple aging relatives or clients), and soon to a many-to-many model (e.g., an in-home care organization with thousands of caregivers using PVAIs to monitor and support thousands of care recipients).
Tech-savvy readers will recognize how “network effects” will drive scaling … and scaling is needed. A recent AARP report states that 59 million Americans annually monitor and care for relatives aged 18 and over, most of whom are over 50. The same report finds that 24% of these caregivers care for more than one person, meaning the number of care recipients potentially benefiting from PVAIs could reach ~73 million.
Together, these numbers suggest that PVAIs could benefit 132 million personal caregivers and the loved ones for whom they care!1
To this, we should add professional caregivers employed by organizations like Home Instead, a provider of ADL (activities of daily living) support sans medical care, and BrightStar, a provider of ADL support and medical care. Claude.AI estimates that approximately 2.3 million professionals currently provide in-home care to roughly 4.5 million Americans each year.2
Add these professionals and their clients to the total above, and the potential number of Americans who could benefit from PVAIs with humans-at-the-helm grows to over 139 million—more than 50% of the U.S. population aged 18 and older!
And that’s only in the United States. Claude.AI estimates that 2.4 billion people outside the U.S. have “meaningful internet access in developed economic conditions”3 which—using ratios comparable to those in the U.S.—would represent another 953 million potential beneficiaries of this virtual architecture for e-care!
Finally, we should expect the PVAI + UCS platform to evolve to benefit other users (e.g., younger care recipients) and support other apps (e.g., voice-first control of a user’s online experience) just as the internet grew, soon after its launch, from online publishing and e-commerce to support countless other apps and users.
The Mission Multiplier effect
Numbers alone, of course, aren’t the whole story. At a time when many believe social media and other mobile apps are doing more harm than good, it’s critical to call out the exemplary mission of caregiving.
A caregiver’s core mission is to help others. With PVAIs + UCS, caregivers can finally leverage the power of AI + the internet to help others as well as themselves.
Ask yourself: Have I ever used a mobile app that serves me and someone else—someone in need of help—24x7 for weeks, months, or years at a time? The answer is “no,” because it has never been possible for one user to configure the self-service, host-controlled web to help another user … until now.
In our view, new “apps for good”—caregiving—will multiply the beneficial impact of scaling. Just as few imagined the vast mix of apps the web would support, an enhanced web supporting both caregiver and care recipient users will inevitably lead to an explosion of e-care apps benefiting millions of new users.
We predict, for example, that configurable PVAIs will help family and professional caregivers support older adults and others in their struggles with:
Scheduling and remembering daily tasks, meds, and appointments,
The risks and impacts of social isolation and loneliness,
Preventing, detecting, and responding to life-threatening falls,
Monitoring and managing myriad chronic conditions and diseases, and
Collecting actionable data to improve the timeliness and efficacy of care.
This list of potential benefits is obviously high-level and must be supported by data. That said, the same critique could have been made—and was—when experts first predicted the web would benefit billions by creating a global “e-commerce” market 30+ years ago… which clearly happened.
Future posts will describe why we are so confident that this new e-care market will soon scale in similar fashion!
Caregiving in the U.S., AARP Research Report, July 2025
“How many people in the U.S. are cared for, part-time or full-time, by professional caregivers in their homes on an annual basis; and how many professional caregivers provide that care?”, Claude.AI, Anthropic, 15 May, 2025
“What’s a reasonable estimate for the number of people worldwide living in economically developed nations who have access to the internet?” and follow-on prompts, Claude.AI, Anthropic, 15 May, 2025