Cera pioneers the next generation of care with suite of AI Agents

WEDNESDAY 7 JANUARY 2026, LONDON, UK: New AI care agents will transform workforce recruitment, care quality and productivity in the home care sector, leading to better health outcomes for patients. 

Home healthcare innovator Cera is developing a suite of AI care agents, designed to  automate time-consuming tasks, take decisions based on information they gather, and act on them – using reasoning, planning and memory. Cera will introduce agents across its 10,000-strong workforce, significantly speeding up recruitment of carers, organising replacement cover and continuously reviewing and improving patient care quality and compliance.

The agents will mean more patients get the right care faster, freeing staff up to focus on patient medical and quality needs rather than calls and paperwork. This will also save time and money whilst the sector faces major short and long-term workforce challenges.

Cera, Europe's largest HealthTech company, is also licensing some of its agents to other health and care organisations to grow the talent pool and tackle widespread staffing issues in the sector. 

Cera rolled out AI recruitment agent Ami earlier this year to transform recruitment across its own frontline workforce. The company receives high volumes of job applications, averaging around 500,000 carer and nurse applicants in a year. Cera is using Ami to conduct initial interviews with candidates, speeding up hiring times and doubling recruitment volumes. This is helping to grow the care talent pool, while saving time and money for human recruiters. 

Cera is now licensing Ami to other health and care organisations. Building on Ami's success, Cera has developed and is launching three further agents for almost 1,000 staff to tackle some of the other most pressing issues facing health and care. 

• Cera's AI Care Coordinator Agent brings a new level of resilience to the home care workforce. The agent intelligently automates the complex, hours-long process of organising last-minute cover, halving the time human staff must spend on calls and admin. This efficiency gain frees up coordinators to dedicate their time to improving patient outcomes.

  
  

• Its Field Care Supervisor Agent  is helping to ensure care quality is continuously reviewed, improved & personalised. The agent instantaneously synchronises complex, clinical data (visit logs, medication and care plan updates) into comprehensive summaries, helping spot issues and trends. By automating the process, the agent provides carers with the necessary intelligence to spot critical trends and review individual patient care, resulting in an 85% reduction in the time typically spent on these activities.

Cera's Field Care Supervisor Agent will also be used to carry out other care quality assurance tasks, helping with supervisions, carer spot checks and quality assurance reviews. 

• Cera has also developed an AI Retention Agent to help keep more talent in the care sector long-term. This agent uses an algorithm that is able to spot staff at risk of leaving, then calls and triages at-risk carers to assess whether they need to speak to a member of the Cera wellbeing team, would benefit from personal development plans or rostering tweaks, to help retain them. The agent contacts carers 7x faster than humans (in 2 days vs 2 weeks). Cera has already used AI to improve staff retention rates by up to 22% – an improvement its retention agent will build on.

Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder and CEO of Cera, said the suite of agents were developed to tackle some of the greatest workforce challenges in a generation for the health and care sector.

"Our AI Agents remove paperwork so carers can get back to caring. They also accelerate recruitment, ensuring more patients get better care, faster," said Dr Maruthappu.   

"By automating repetitive tasks, we've enabling carers, nurses and coordinators to focus on what truly matters: care quality, health outcomes and human connection. The impact is profound – faster access to care, less pressure on frontline teams, and a larger, more resilient workforce.

"We've built these agents to transform productivity and care quality inside Cera, and we're excited to make them available to the wider sector. With 2 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.

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

Successful pilots of the agents have taken place at various of Cera's 130+ sites across the UK.

Lucy Kruyer, Registered Manager at Cera Colchester, said: "We've 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."

"Our AI care coordinator agent organises staff cover so we can focus on client medical and quality needs. It 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."

Cera is known for developing its own AI tools to improve prevention and productivity – from a Falls Prevention AI which cuts falls by 20% to a Hospitalisation Predict-Prevent tool which prevents more than half of avoidable hospitalisations.

These agents are the latest in a suite of innovative AI products Cera has developed to solve challenges in care. These include an AI Carer Chatbot to answer care staff’s frequently asked questions from their mobiles, speeding up admin tasks, and AI Training Avatars which enable Cera to deliver high-quality training at scale, in multiple languages and locations – overcoming inequalities in outcomes both for those receiving care and for staff looking to progress in their careers.

There are currently 110,000 current vacancies in adult care, and 1 million new care workers are needed within the next 14 years. There are 2 million adults in England living with an unmet need for care, and immediate staffing gaps and factors like winter pressures exacerbate this. 

Cera is innovating to tackle the sector's most pressing challenges, introducing new technologies – from home care robots and AI agents to predictive analytics. This integrated approach is building a more scalable, sustainable model of care designed to meet the complex needs of an ageing population.