Rebekah Stevens: Turning Elder Care Into a Math Problem

Rebekah Stevens once spent months competing against an algorithm named Octopus, running weekly throwdowns to see who could staff a home care market better: her, with a spreadsheet and years of operating instinct, or a model built by her own data science team. She now leads Care Transformation at Honor, the senior home care platform, where that early contest became the blueprint for how the company decides what AI should touch, and what it shouldn't.

In this conversation, Noah and Rebekah get into how a business built entirely on trust and vulnerable moments decides where to let AI in. They cover why unstructured data doesn't automatically mean you need a language model, what it actually takes to turn a fuzzy client complaint into a precise, AI-ready metric, and why the hardest part of deploying AI is writing the goal correctly, not building the model.

You'll hear:

• How Honor defined the outcome before automating staffing decisions
• The real story behind Rebekah vs. Octopus, the human-versus-algorithm contest that built the system running Honor's staffing today
• How her team decided a language model was the wrong tool for a problem everyone assumed needed one
• Where Honor draws the line between AI working in the background and AI on the phone with a client

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction
(02:05) Inside Honor: senior care built like a tech platform
(10:06) Turning client churn into a math problem
(16:38) Rebekah vs. Octopus: human vs. algorithm
(23:53) Where large language models actually showed up in the product
(26:59) When not to use an LLM
(30:10) What's blowing her mind about agentic AI right now
(33:01) Directed Work: letting the system decide who does what
(45:01) How AI will reshape product teams next year

Resources:

Valet — Episode Sponsor

Valet is the founding sponsor of the Serious People Podcast.

AI is getting very good at making useful things: dashboards, analyses, internal websites, and small tools. Making those things available to the rest of a team is a separate problem.

Valet lets you publish AI-created artifacts to a stable URL. New sites are private by default, and members of your organization can access them after signing in.

Try Valet at https://valet.dev

Rebekah Stevens operator field guide: https://seriouspeople.valet.run/spp-rebekah-operator-field-guide/

Connect with Rebekah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-stevens-6751b41a/

Honor’s Website: https://www.honorcare.com/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/

Noah’s Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/

Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:05) - Inside Honor: senior care built like a tech platform
• (10:06) - Turning client churn into a math problem
• (16:38) - Rebekah vs. Octopus: human vs. algorithm
• (23:53) - Where large language models actually showed up in the product
• (26:59) - When not to use an LLM
• (30:10) - What's blowing her mind about agentic AI right now
• (33:01) - Directed Work: letting the system decide who does what
• (45:01) - How AI will reshape product teams next year