6 Tools, 3 Workflows, and 1 Formula to Scale Up with AI in Home Care (Matt Ericksen)

AI is transforming how home care agencies operate. Matt Ericksen, VP of Sales and Operations at Griswold, breaks down the exact AI tools, workflows, and formulas he’s using to reclaim hours, improve recruiting, and scale franchise operations. You’ll hear how he built a job ad grader that boosts hiring results, layered Microsoft Copilot across internal systems to save 17 hours a week, and created a compliance companion tool in under 30 minutes. Matt also shares the “Overall Productivity Index” formula for calculating AI ROI and the six-step anatomy of a winning prompt. If you’ve been tinkering with AI but aren’t sure how to make it stick, this episode is your blueprint for adoption and measurable results in home care.

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min

Sep 9, 2025

6 Tools, 3 Workflows, and 1 Formula to Scale Up with AI in Home Care (Matt Ericksen)

Miriam Allred (00:00)
Welcome to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. Today in the lab, I'm joined by Matt Erickson, the VP of Sales and Operations at Griswold Corporate. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Ericksen (00:12)
Hey Miriam, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Miriam Allred (00:15)
I have been looking forward to this for a while. You and I have been friends for a long time. You and I have been in home care for a long time and I've interviewed you several times and it's time to have you back in the lab on the new show to dive into AI. I am just so impressed with your passion and excitement for home care, but also your passion and fire and what sound like sleepless nights thinking about AI and its implications and its use cases in home care. And so I...

want this to be pretty like casual, conversational. I want to pick your brain on what you're doing, what you're thinking about, what are you implementing with your franchisees? I want to just kind of take you in a few different directions and think through and talk about this in a more just casual conversational way. So before we get into it, ⁓ for those that don't know you, why don't you share a little bit about your background in home care and then bring us up to speed on your current role and responsibilities at Griswold.

Matt Ericksen (01:14)
Sure. I've been in home care and home health care now for coming on 13 years and I've held every role from scheduling coordinator, recruiter, outside sales to location director, everything but clinical pretty much. And so it's been an amazing journey that allowed me to see all the different aspects of the business and what goes into those roles and to be successful and a lot of potholes along the way too.

But that's led to the wonderful place that I'm at right now with Griswold Corporate, the franchiser based here in Bluebell. I've been here coming up on five years now. ⁓ in my role, taking all the life experiences I've had on the operator side, working on the franchisees and their corporate structures, pediatric home health, adult geriatrics, behavioral health.

⁓ is bundling all those together to best serve our franchise owners, their teams across the country, and most importantly, their caregivers and the clients that they serve in their communities.

Miriam Allred (02:18)
I love it. And I might cite this at the start and several times in the conversation. You got a degree in history. And I just think it's funny and interesting how we all came to home care. But history degree turned home care, turned VP, turned we're going to talk about it. And you're going to show some of your AI tools. now you're coding AI like the rest of the world. But it's just amazing how we all evolve and where we land and what we're capable of now in this modern AI world.

Matt Ericksen (02:45)
It's absolutely it's like I couldn't write a crazier script and what they kind of like where my life's gone with with with this I have an amazing amount of random facts in the Civil War if everybody ever wants to know those that's that's the specialty of my degree but ⁓ ironically what I found in my as I got immersed into generative AI and LLMs is it's not the typical IT

specialties that these companies are hiring for. They're actually hiring individuals with degrees in English, history, political science, ⁓ more of that aspect for the ability to spot trends and analyze and prompt engineer. And I thought that was just kind of cool. was like, who knew that a history degree could actually be useful in the skills that are now applicable to the world that we live in.

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Miriam Allred (03:34)
Yes, and before this conversation, I think you were listening to a podcast this morning talking about like scaling up like in our career in our life. It's all about like scaling up. But with AI, it's totally like rewriting that script on how we think about like accelerating our career. Share a little bit more about like your thoughts on what you heard.

Matt Ericksen (03:53)
Oh, it was, it was one of those light bulb moments that you have that you wish you're always chasing you when you have one. just like, Oh, that's so profound. And I was just, I was listening to a, there's a practical AI podcast and name escapes me of the exact title of it, but they were, they were emphasizing that

you know, historically we've in the workspace and workforce development, we've always upskilled in vertical channels, you know, taking a coordinator to maybe being a senior coordinator or director of an office, right? You know, and just up and just kind of keep it on a specific track. Well, you know, it's not about upskilling anymore. You don't have to make a better say coder or you have to make a better ⁓ scheduler in a way as much as you have to help them access and learn how to just take advantage of the tools,

take advantage of prompt engineering. There's a big difference between just searching Google and structuring the correct prompt and teaching somebody how to do that. You can create quite the multiple on their skill set very, very quickly. And I think just as a material shift from just historically taking years to learn a trade, that's not the case anymore.

Miriam Allred (05:01)
It's so interesting the multiply. I completely agree. It's how do we take a role or a function and multiply it with AI? I think that's the realization that a lot of people, companies are having is how do we, how do we like double down and multiply with AI? And that's where things get really interesting. And that'll be a tone through the conversation today. I want to take you back, I don't know, a couple of years, like you've been tinkering with AI for years now. I want to hear your first aha moment.

that you were tinkering, you built something or did something or thought something and it like unlocked this like this passion or this fire in you of like, wow, this is really gonna like change the game for home care. What was that moment for you a couple of years ago?

Matt Ericksen (05:47)
Yeah, it was somewhere and it's all blurry now because days just fly by. But it was somewhere between like, I would say mid to late summer of 2022 and, your GPT is coming out and we're all using kind of like as a glorified Google search or again, at that point it was a lot of, can you help me write an email? Right. And

That was about kind of where everybody's kind of public use, general knowledge base was, and certainly, it helped me there a lot. I struggle with putting eloquent emails together at times, so that it certainly brought value, and that kind of, I'm like, okay, it can do this for me, what else can it do? ⁓ I've been heavily involved with the caregiver and staff recruitment retention strategies here during my tenure, and you know.

Going back to our indeed page, know, every everybody's got a company page. Everybody's got reviews. I'm like, well, what can I do with that? That's a giant data set that I know I can upload this file to GPT. What can we do here? And that's a Part of the fun of it is just kind of like innocent exploration, you know I don't have any intention of kind of figuring things out. Hey, what does this button do quite literally and I downloaded all of our ⁓ all of our caregiver reviews I

upload the file to chat GPT had, you know, at that point it had the innovation to do analytical capabilities, right? And it could look at numbers and analyze them and quantify stuff. And it was able to work. I was able to prompt it to not knowing what I was doing. I have no clue what I was doing. So I'm not going to act like I was just by accident, right? But that was the aha moment was I figured out like, oh my God, I can organize by region, by state, by location.

sentiment analysis, a behavioral analysis, a strength and weakness analysis of our franchise network and I can take this information that I created in 15 minutes and now I can go and equip our owners with insights that would have taken days to historically put together in a manual process. Even if it was done in Excel, it would still have taken so long. ⁓ that was the aha. like the the the aha was not so much that this is cool that I can just go and do this like

quick analysis, it's the thing that had me sit back in my seat was I just did in three days, what did it take three days? I just did it in 15 minutes. What else can I do in that compression time? And then that from there, that's where my wife would come downstairs at 2 a.m. in the morning, why are you still up? I'm like, because I'm fiddling and I'm tinkering and I'm like, but that was what set off what I do now.

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