What is the name of your organization?
Edifii
What is the name of your solution?
Digital mentor with Edifii
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
AI and Neuroscience-based guidance chatbot for high school students, counselors, and parents
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Cambridge, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Over 20 million parents of high schoolers in the US are dissatisfied with their child’s preparation for college or the workforce. They list lack of guidance as a key barrier (NPU, 2024). Each counselor faces impossible caseloads of almost 400 students, leaving little time to meet every student, let alone provide them customized guidance (ASCA, 2024). As a result, over 75% of students feel unprepared for college/career decisions (Jaschik, 2022). Federal budget cuts in the education space will worsen the situation in the coming years. This is a disaster in the making, given how critical guidance will be for teens to be able to prepare for the dramatically changing work landscape (World Bank, 2019; UNDP, 2021; Jacoby, 2022). Out of desperation, many parents spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month cobbling together tutoring and guidance services for their teens to compensate for deficiencies in school counseling. This is a missed opportunity, given the compelling evidence that when counselors do spend time building relationships with students, their impact can be powerful (Chetty et al., 2014; Deslonde et al., 2018; Sackett et al., 2018; Paolini, 2019). Bottom line: Students need better guidance.
What is your solution?
Edifii is a personalized counseling assistance tool, delivered as a mobile/web app, that addresses this problem through a powerful combination of AI and neuroscience. We have a two-step approach: First, a proprietary engaging ‘Discovery’ process uses specially created questions to help students discover their interests and goals. And, second, ‘Path Charting’ – formulation of granular action plans to get to those goals. This is based on the use of large language models on specially curated counseling resources. The resulting generative AI chatbot offers crisp action items instead of vague suggestions like “do well in your classes.” In essence, we propose a system that every parent wants their child to have, one that is customized to the child’s needs, provides globally optimized step-by-step guidance, is dynamically reconfigurable, and is expansive in its knowledge of relevant resources. An apt metaphor for Edifii is as a student’s always available GPS, providing turn-by-turn guidance for success in high school and beyond. We envision Edifii’s solution focusing on career guidance, while the existing human counseling infrastructure caters more to students’ social and emotional needs, and crisis management (Van Velsor, 2009; Young et al., 2011; Even and Quast, 2017).
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Edifii is a public benefit corporation with a mission to provide a path to success for all learners. The ACLU estimates that 21% of US schools do not have counselors. We see Edifii as shoring up an increasingly inadequate counseling infrastructure for ~20M high school students in the US. This population of students is not well-served by current technology solutions (for example, Naviance), leading to massive downturns in engagement. Edifii invites students to take a series of Discovery quizzes. The results, displayed on a counselor dashboard and supported by pro-active notifications around topics like mental wellness, provide an aggregate view of students’ profiles across the grade, as well as individual synopses. Over time, engaging students with their interests, setting goals, and empowering them through Path Charting’s chatbot with local opportunities and action plans can improve outcomes like attendance and GPAs, all reinforced by relationships with well-informed counselors using our dashboard. This same dashboard can be adapted for a parental view, which would highlight insights into their teen’s interests and opportunities for them to cultivate those interests both in and outside of school.
