ITAC closed last Thursday with a panel called Aged Care 2076. Dr Louise Schaper opened by asking each of us to describe an ideal day in 2076.

As a nonagenarian, I'm in a place that smells like home, Chinese food cooking on the stove. The humans around me are the ones I actually want to see. Whatever care I need sits quietly in the background — the bathroom, shower and kitchen all smart, designed to help me stay independent. On a Tuesday morning, I head to jewellery making class, and afterwards I come home to play old-school videogames from the 50s. The 2050s, I mean.

In terms of a prediction, something I expect to see is that by 2076 we'll have two groups. Those who share their data, whose live model sits in the system and allows anticipatory, personalised care. And the privacy maximalists who will refuse, and who will get the reactive system we have today. So, I do see a health and care divide forming in the future.

And the one thing I'd mandate today to get 2076 right: design every aged care service in Australia from now on for the new mainstream — multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith, mixed ancestry — by default. The average Australian is theoretical. The new mainstream is real. Let’s stop building for one and patching for the other.

Shadow AI — staff using AI tools at work without IT approval — is happening in aged care now, the same way it's happening in every other knowledge-work sector. Every few weeks at a session I'm running, someone takes me aside to admit they're using ChatGPT or Claude on their personal phone for work tasks, knowing it's "not allowed."

A Wolters Kluwer survey of US healthcare professionals found 58% of frontline staff had used a generic AI tool for work in the previous month. A Microsoft survey of UK workers put unapproved tool use at 71%, half of them weekly. A Freshworks survey of IT leaders found 86% had seen at least one negative incident from unsanctioned AI use; nearly 80% of those same leaders thought the staff using unapproved tools were more productive than the staff who weren't!

Sensitive resident information pasted into a public tool sits on someone else's servers, and the average healthcare data breach in the US in 2025 cost $7.4 million. Most aged care providers don't have a formal AI policy in place, so the staff using AI well and the staff using it badly are invisible in equal measure.

The people in your organisation already using AI have already worked out where AI fits in their job — identified a real problem, tried a tool against it, found something useful enough to keep doing. That's the case study you'd commission if you were scoping a sector-wide AI strategy. It's already running, for free, inside your building.

Ask your team what tools they're using and what problems they're solving with them. Frame it as curiosity; staff who feel audited will tell you nothing useful. From there, the conversation about boundaries — what data shouldn't go near a public tool, what to do when output is wrong, what's approved — actually has somewhere to land.

The Guidelines for the Responsible Use of Generative AI in Aged Care, which we developed at the AI Adoption in Healthcare Work Group have been in use for 12 months and more than 100 organisations have adopted them. The refreshed version is out next month; I'm walking through it on 16 June (details in the event section further below).

Assist by i-P (part of the AgedCareAI suite) is the first web AI extension built for Aged Care and NDIS organisations. It's now on the Chrome Web Store.

Most aged care AI sits in a separate tab or tool, and only sees clinical data. Assist works differently. Install it once and it lives in the side panel of every web-based system your team already uses — clinical, rostering, finance, HR, nurse call, maintenance, complaints, risk, compliance, government data connections, and whatever else you run on.

It sees and understands the form or page in front of you, pre-fills it from your other systems, and answers questions in plain language using your own templates, policies and procedures.

Assist is trained on your organisation, for your organisation. It runs in a secure environment with no link to public AI tools. Your data is never shared, never used to train other models, and never leaves your control.

Tuesday 19 May | 10.30am AEST | Online | Free

A live Q&A with Elyssia Clark (Benetas), Justina Gardiner (LightSpeed Consulting), and Hanaa' Grave (culturalQ) on who's actually making aged care decisions in 2026, how cultural diversity shapes the consumer base, and where AI fits.

The aged care consumer in 2026 is more than one profile. Decisions move through families with different priorities and unequal dynamics. Cultural diversity is shifting too, and and consumers are arriving more informed — 66% of families say online reviews shape their decision. The combination is what's new, and the pace it's changing at.

Thursday 11 June | 9am–4pm AEST | Novotel Melbourne on Collins | Free for CHSP and Support at Home providers

A full-day forum for CHSP and Support at Home-funded allied health teams. I will be speaking about AI, and other sessions cover navigating change, improving referrals, dignity of risk, managing service agreements, interdisciplinary practice, and change fatigue. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing is hosting a dedicated Q&A responding to questions submitted in advance.

Tuesday 16 June | 9.30am–12pm AEST | Online | Free for CHSP and Support at Home providers

A hands-on workshop for desk-based aged care staff working with AI on routine tasks — drafting, summarising, problem-solving. Covers what current tools can and can't do, prompting fundamentals, privacy and accuracy considerations, and what data should never go into a public AI tool. Participants get a dedicated resource page with prompts and templates afterwards. No technical background needed.

Tuesday 16 June | 2–3.30pm AEST | Online | Free

I’m presenting a walk-through of the refreshed Guidelines for the Responsible Use of Generative AI in Aged Care. The original Guidelines have been in use for 12 months across more than 100 aged care organisations. The update reflects what providers have done with them and how the AI landscape has shifted. The session covers what's changed, why, and how to adopt or refresh the Guidelines in your own organisation, with Q&A at the end.

For providers across the sector — managers, governance and compliance staff.

Go Gentle Australia's new national report on voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in residential aged care surveyed 70 of Australia's largest providers. 73% either don't offer VAD access or their level of access is unclear or unpublished. 66% provide no public information about VAD at all, despite it being legal in every state and the ACT. Only 10% offer comprehensive information and full access.

The report names individual providers for the first time and rates them in a searchable online database, alongside an e-booklet to help families ask informed questions before they enter a home. Under the new Aged Care Act, supporting access to relevant end-of-life services is an obligation regardless of whether the provider itself participates in VAD.

An older (2020), quite interesting piece on why childhood and old age — biologically expensive, low-contribution periods — turn out to be central to human evolution rather than a cost we tolerate. The grandmother hypothesis is the headline argument: in forager cultures, post-menopausal grandmothers digging up roots provided more calories to grandchildren than the celebrated hunters did.

One cross-species detail: orcas are the only other mammals with post-menopausal grandmothers. The grandmothers lead the pods on the hunt, and food traditions pass from grandmother to grandchild.

I came across a McKinsey report on the small-business succession problem in the US. The report looks at the wave of US baby boomer business owners approaching retirement. McKinsey estimates 6 million small and medium businesses will face ownership transitions by 2035. I started looking up what the same picture looks like here in Australia.

The basic shape carries across. Around 22% of Australia's 2.6 million SMEs are owned by people aged 60 or over. MYOB's Business Monitor found 48% of boomer owners intend to exit within one to five years; only 24% have a succession plan, and Vistaprint's more recent survey puts the share with a documented plan at 16%. Fewer than 30% of family businesses successfully transition to the second generation. The numbers track the global picture.

However, one thing is meaningfully different here. Most Australian SME debt is secured against residential property, which means successors entering an inflated housing market with large mortgages have limited capacity to gear up to buy a business, and won't get the capital-gains tailwind their parents had. Australia's succession problem is tangled up with housing in a way it isn't in the US.

Tonight's 2026–27 federal budget is handed down at 7.30pm AEST, and the aged care portion is going to be substantial.

Here's an idea - Download tonight's Health portfolio budget statement from budget.gov.au and last year's from the archive. Upload both into ChatGPT or Claude. Ask the model to highlight what's changed for the parts of the sector you care about — residential, Support at Home, workforce, capital funding, dementia. Ask it to quote the specific sections it's drawing from.

Doing this side-by-side by hand takes hours; the model does it in minutes. Of course analysts and firms will give you the political and sector commentary over the next 48 hours, but you can have your own answer first, and one that's specific to your service.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis