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The Frontline Dispatch

Ideas for the frontline-first workplace.

Field notes, playbooks, and hard-won lessons on mobile workforce management, AI at the frontline, and what we're learning from healthcare, hospitality, and industrial leaders.

Posts by Jonathan Erwin

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Why the ROI Conversation for Frontline AI Is Backwards

Here’s how the frontline AI ROI conversation usually goes: someone shows the model, capabilities, accuracy, benchmark results. Someone else asks how much it costs. Then someone asks if it’s worth it. ...

The Silver Tsunami Is Here, and Senior Living Is Running Out of Nurses

“Silver tsunami” has been in circulation long enough that it almost sounds like background noise in healthcare policy conversations. But the wave it describes isn’t background noise for the people ...

The Thing Your Desk Gave You That You Never Noticed

There’s something you got on your first day in an office that nobody handed you deliberately. It wasn’t in the onboarding packet. HR didn’t mention it. But the moment you walked in, you had it, and ...

The $60,000 Problem No One Talks About

There’s a number that floats around senior living operations circles quietly, because it’s uncomfortable to sit with: replacing a single frontline healthcare worker can cost $60,000 or more when you ...

What a Ramp Agent's Safety Question Reveals About Enterprise AI

Simple question: what’s the maximum wind speed to safely cater an aircraft?

Why Good Leaders Keep Deprioritizing the Frontline

This isn’t about bad leaders. It’s about good ones, thoughtful, well-intentioned people, who consistently underinvest in their frontline workers anyway. And the reason has nothing to do with values.

You're Underestimating Your Own ROI by 5x

We thought we had a solid ROI model. We’d done the math, built the framework, grounded everything in real usage data. The number was real and defensible.

You Can't Bolt AI onto Chaos

There’s a version of the frontline AI story that goes like this: buy the AI, train it on some documents, give workers access, and it starts answering questions. Simple, fast, transformative.

What We Learned Driving a Minivan to a Healthcare Conference

Most conference stories start in an airport. Ours started in a rented 2014 Toyota Sienna, packed floor to ceiling with a 65-inch TV, two TV stands, a table, a backdrop, and four people who were about ...

Proactive vs. Reactive: The Missed Opportunity in Senior Living Tech

Here’s what most senior living technology vendors are selling: a better way to fight a fire that’s already burning.

Why Night Shift Nurses Shouldn’t Wait 24 Hours for Answers

It’s 2 a.m. A nurse at a senior living facility has a question about a resident’s prescription. The answer exists somewhere in the organization’s documentation, the care plan, the medication ...

You Built the Intelligence. Here's the Last Mile.

You built the model. Maybe you fine-tuned it, built an agent layer on top, gave it tools and context. It answers well. The demos are solid. Your team should be proud.

Why Your Frontline App Keeps Failing (It's Not the App)

Every few years, a frontline employer launches a new app. There’s a rollout, maybe some training, maybe an incentive to download it. Adoption is okay at first. Then it drops off. The app sits on ...

We Ran a Report in 10 Minutes That Used to Take Weeks

At Argentum in Nashville, a rep from Synchrony Pharmacy stopped by our booth. We were running a live demo, Shelbe connected to a Trilogy senior living community’s real data, showing how the AI was ...

The Model Is the Cheap Part. The Rail Is the Moat.

The AI industry is converging on a truth that’s uncomfortable for a lot of vendors: the model is commoditizing.

The category we're building

RedeApp is the communication system of record — and the distribution platform for AI — in mobile work.

For frontline ecosystems in labor-forward industries, that record is the ground truth AI operations run on — the context AI reasons from, the channel it acts through, and the instrumentation it's measured against.