Cera's AI Agents set to Transform Healthcare

One of the UK's largest home care providers is rolling out almost 1,000 AI agents across its workforce to automate administrative tasks, accelerate recruitment and enhance care quality as the sector grapples with severe staffing shortages.

Cera, a home healthcare innovator, is developing a suite of AI care agents designed to reshape how the industry operates. The agents are built to automate time-consuming tasks, make decisions based on gathered information and act autonomously using reasoning, planning and memory capabilities.

The deployment across Cera's 10,000-strong workforce could speed up the recruitment of carers, organise replacement cover and continuously review and improve patient care quality and compliance. With around 500,000 carer and nurse applications processed annually, the company is positioning AI as a critical tool to address workforce pressures whilst maintaining care standards.

"Our AI agents remove paperwork so carers can get back to caring," says Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, founder and CEO of Cera. "They also accelerate recruitment, ensuring more patients get better care, faster."

Automating healthcare administration

Cera's AI agents are designed to ensure more patients receive appropriate care faster, whilst freeing frontline staff from time-consuming calls and paperwork so they can focus on medical and quality needs. This efficiency could deliver significant time and cost savings at a point when the care sector is facing severe short and long-term workforce pressures.

Europe's largest healthtech company is now licensing several of these agents to other health and care organisations to help expand the talent pool and address widespread staffing shortages. The move could signal a broader shift towards AI-enabled operations across the healthcare sector.

"By automating repetitive tasks, we're enabling carers, nurses and coordinators to focus on what truly matters: care quality, health outcomes and human connection," Ben explains.

"The impact is profound – faster access to care, less pressure on frontline teams and a larger, more resilient workforce."

AI recruitment and workforce management

Earlier this year, Cera deployed its AI recruitment agent Ami to transform frontline hiring. Ami conducts initial candidate interviews, doubling recruitment volumes and accelerating hiring while reducing the burden on human recruiters.

Building on this success, Cera is licensing Ami externally and launching three additional agents across its workforce. These include an AI Care Coordinator Agent that halves the time spent organising last-minute cover and a Field Care Supervisor Agent that synchronises clinical data into actionable summaries, cutting care review time by 85% and supporting continuous quality assurance through supervisions, spot checks and reviews.

"We have now got time to ring clients, find out how care is going, fix issues and chase doctors and district nurses instead of spending hours of each day on admin tasks like organising cover," says Lucy Kruyer, Registered Manager at Cera Colchester in Essex. "Our AI care coordinator agent organises staff cover so we can focus on client medical and quality needs."

Lucy adds that the technology gives human coordinators hours, sometimes whole days, back: "We want to be able to say yes to every person that needs care. Our goal is to get people home from hospital and cared for where they want to be and the agent is helping us towards that aim."

Retention and predictive analytics

Cera has also developed an AI Retention Agent that identifies staff at risk of leaving and intervenes up to seven times faster than human teams, contributing to retention improvements of up to 22%. These agents sit alongside other AI tools such as carer chatbots, training avatars and predictive analytics that reduce falls by 20% and prevent more than half of avoidable hospitalisations.

"We have built these agents to transform productivity and care quality inside Cera and we're excited to make them available to the wider sector," Ben says. "With two million adults in England living with an unmet need for care, we must embrace technology to meet the growing needs of our rapidly-ageing population."

According to the company, 110,000 vacancies currently exist in adult care, with one million new care workers required over the next 14 years. Cera's integrated use of AI is helping to build what could be a more scalable and sustainable care model for an ageing population.

"At Cera we are building AI that protects the human touch, rather than replacing it," Ben adds. "It's about giving our staff the time, headspace and support they need to deliver exceptional care. This will transform lives."