There's demand for trusted verified handling of regular financial life interactions, bill paying, hiccups from cards being changed and regular direct debits needing resetting, etc.
Much like, Chubb (for example) remote monitor home security with liability should one of their employees start feeding "they're not home and they have valuables" infomation to thieves.
My own father was born in 1935 and he's still pretty sharp, handles his accounts etc but he still worries (quite rightly) about social engineering and scammers .. the very "ease" of something doesn't reassure, it's the fact that interactions have been double checked by a trusted party (me, I guess) that does the trick.
It's also an area that demands reputation, liability, and transparent auditing - conservatorships for the elderly, as for Britney Spears, are ripe with opportunities for graft and abuse.
Found them here long ago (YC S13), used them with an alcoholic parent I was acting in a guardian capacity for.
I'm not sure what countries that spans (I'm in Australia) so there's perhaps scope for others to expand across other geographic locations.
There's also the "don't babysit me" aspect, a good number of elders are often slowly diminishing in capability and have no desire to be immediately shifted to a full guardianship when what they want is incrementally increasing trusted oversight that they are in control of.
I’m currently tracking with spreadsheets, which is less than ideal.
When I googled "social work case management CRM" a ton of stuff came up.
I just spent an hour yesterday untangling my in-laws shared, paid, Spotify account.
What had transpired is that they needed to confirm FILs physical address. So they sent him a link to an old email address, but no notification in app. He, reasonably didn’t see it within the 1 week deadline. So they removed him from his own shared account. Once he was removed there was no way to confirm his address and self service to get himself back into his own paid service.
To get back on the account I had to find the very hidden “contact a real person” link buried very deep in useless help articles, and gated behind a bot that didn’t even get close to understanding the issue. Then, to verify identity he had us login via the app, not the website, create a playlist, make it private using a secondary menu and message him the name. Only then was he able to be added back onto the shared account. The shared account that he was paying for, mind you.
I have no idea how anyone who hasn’t seen the inside of a tech company is supposed to navigate these systems.
Yes, there are probably a whole bunch of paid services which simply can't function if they have to actually provide useful, easy-to-access support to their paying customers. However, I'm not sure it's a net benefit to let them exist.
Somewhere in the years since we decided basic utility were unsightly.
I taught a basic after school coding class, and the first thing I had to teach was the concept of a file, a folder, saving and loading.
These are things that everyone I went to school with understood in primary school.
Apps have abstracted it all away, and now kids just go for the search bar.
I think its more about, stuff iterates today to your much more experienced and maybe open to adapting to new iterations faster. Or like my grandfather, he work with lots of new tech continuously over his 30-40 year career. So adapting to new tech is just second nature.
I'm a professor in AI, I still wasted two days of my life disentangling a mess caused by a family member ending up with two amazon accounts attached to the same e-mail address.
Tech literacy is a moving target.
These kids grew up on the iphone or gsuite. They have little concept of a filesystem much less how the OS works. Its a black box. Teaching command line or writing scripts takes a lot of effort just to break out from their own wrong internal worldview of how a computer works. It’s kind of disappointing seeing what tech companies have done to dumbify this generation in terms of tech literacy.
[1] https://www.ordissimo.com/en/why-ordissimo
[3] https://www.endlessos.org/
[4] https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
Ex got passwords altered. My credit union got ransomwared. For mysterious reasons the "bank by touchtone" worked so I could pay my credit card, but I can't get balances and access via web or app. The point being that problems are wildly varied and changing, let alone basic stuff that Apple and others change every so often. I know how to get answers by web search, but it's tricky, and impossible for others. Worse, fraudulent sites get top SEO rank, pose as authorized support and get you to drop RAC apps on your device. First question she had was "What is this remote app?" Like, delete immediately and restart the phone. Apple does not ask you to do that.
So, I think that personal attention is often needed. To the extent that AI can replace some of the tedious lookup, fine.
Another thing I have noted over time is that in helping people, I often run through lots of menu items and settings that people are unaware of (and sometimes I am not aware of) and the same function doable in two different places.
Of course, they want me to explain what I did, but since a lot was just looking for trouble and finding settings, it's 10x faster just to do it than explain it, especially since the solution is likely one-shot or useful once every 3 years. And then everything changes.
Well, I'll stop here for now. I love that this matter is getting a thread here.
This is a person who spent half of his life driving trucks...after he retired he took a class called "overcoming computer phobia" which began quite literally with "this is the power button, this is the mouse". He refuses to get GPS in the car and does not use the internet at all. No email, no social media.
These people are out there and as they age they only get more confused by things that they do not understand. Customer service is getting more and more difficult to get in touch with a real person (even more rare for the agent to be fluent and coherent in the necessary language, it is frustrating to not understand the topic and not able to comprehend spoken instructions at the same time). Not totally sure what the fix here is since automated systems and outsourcing service seem to be where everything is headed. In the case described above my father drove to the local office and was told he needed to call the number. The person in the office claimed they could do nothing...
My county is over 35% retired people. Cost of living is way above what caregivers can afford (just in the last 5 years or so). Most businesses have "now hiring" signs. I am not sure who is going to be taking care of these people since it seems to be a growing population...and those who would be able to take care of them are leaving the area.
So yeah...I agree with the OP. This field is going to grow in the next few years...but as others have said it may drop off a bit after the boomers.