Generations Today

Aging services has spent years treating age as a liability. Now that assumption risks being embedded in the artificial intelligence systems entering healthcare, long-term care, and disability services. The familiar story is that intelligence peaks early and then steadily declines: speed matters, technology belongs to the young, and older professionals are useful mainly as institutional memory. There is a sliver of truth underneath the stereotype. Processing speed can slow with age.

The operation had gone well. The discharge recommendations were clinically sound: six medications, daily wound care, a walking schedule, dietary changes, and a clinic visit in ten days. Then the patient’s daughter opened a small notebook. She lived nearly two hours away. His wife had severe arthritis and could not safely help him out of a chair. Neither of them drove.

Aging-services professionals increasingly use artificial intelligence to draft case notes, summarize intake calls, schedule visits, prepare outreach, and organize benefits information. These tools can reduce administrative burden. They can also turn a weak assumption about an older adult into a polished recommendation that travels through an organization without enough human review.

Every conference begins with an invitation. An invitation not simply to attend, but to imagine, question, connect, and help shape what comes next. That is the invitation of On Aging 2027. Each year, the conference theme reflects where the aging field finds itself at a particular moment—and where we believe we must go together. Last year, The Power of Belonging challenged us to ask a simple but profound question: Who gets to age with dignity, purpose, and opportunity?

A hotel can reach full occupancy because more guests have arrived—or because half its rooms have closed. The same arithmetic applies to skilled nursing facilities, but the consequences are far more serious. New data from the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care show that occupancy in freestanding nursing care communities reached 86.7% in the first quarter of 2026, the highest level since 2016. Occupancy has now improved for 20 consecutive quarters from its pandemic low.

I once cared for a client in his home who seemingly had a complete plan of care: medications, meals, housekeeping, safety checks. Every visit was documented. Every task was finished. He was also one of the loneliest people I have ever known, but nothing in his chart would have shown that. Loneliness in home care is usually treated as a clinical problem or a social one, but it is also a design problem. Nobody in this field set out to build a service that delivers everything except company.

Every morning, I put on a piece of music and draw what I hear. Not a picture of the music—a saxophone, a guitar—but a response to it: The line follows the rhythm, the pressure follows the dynamics. For six minutes, while the song plays, my hand is led by something other than the tremor. I call this practice music-response drawing, and I’ve come to believe it has something to offer the aging services field as a low-cost, accessible tool for people living with Parkinson’s disease (PD) like me.

Addressing the complex challenges facing older adults, as well as people with disabilities and their caregivers requires cross-sector collaboration, with community voices driving change at the local and state levels. Since its launch in 2021, California’s Master Plan for Aging (MPA) has relied on stakeholder voices to inform the plan’s development and implementation.

We talk about the care system for older Americans as a continuum. Home care at one end, nursing home at the other, assisted living somewhere in the middle. The image is of a smooth gradient, as your needs intensify, you move along the line toward more support, more supervision, more care. It is a tidy picture. It is also wrong. The continuum of care is not a continuum of care intensity.

Only 10% of people ages 62 to 70 are financially able to retire and do, according to Teresa Ghilarducci’s sobering new book, “Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy.” Half of the rest are retired but have seen their living standards fall. Twenty-eight percent must keep working until they drop—or are dropped out. If later-life poverty comes as a surprise, it’s because US billionaires skew published data about old wealth, falsely suggesting it is spread equally.