Selected
StepForward: Essential Innovation Challenge

NClude

Team Leader
NClude Team
An inclusive AI platform enabling youth with disabilities to navigate AI-driven systems, build future-ready skills, and access careers independently.
What is the name of your organization?
Nclude Inc
What is the name of your solution?
NClude
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
An inclusive AI platform enabling youth with disabilities to navigate AI-driven systems, build future-ready skills, and access careers independently.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Bellevue, WA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how young people access education, employment, and public services. For many, this creates new opportunities. For youth with disabilities, AI is often intensifying exclusion. As AI-driven hiring portals, automated assessments, learning platforms, and chatbots replace human pathways, inaccessible design and biased models increasingly determine who can participate. Over 96% of websites and digital systems remain inaccessible to assistive technologies, and AI systems are typically trained on data that excludes disabled users. This embeds ableist assumptions about communication, productivity, and interaction into automated decision-making. As a result, youth with disabilities are disproportionately filtered out by automated hiring tools, struggle to use AI-powered learning platforms, and are unable to complete basic digital tasks independently. Globally, more than 200 million youth with disabilities lack equitable access to career training or guidance; in India alone, over 20 million working-age people with disabilities are unemployed due to systemic digital and AI-driven barriers. Most AI literacy and workforce initiatives assume accessible interfaces and normative interaction. They focus on content delivery or coding skills rather than the real challenge young people face today: navigating inaccessible, AI-mediated systems. NClude addresses this gap by equipping youth with disabilities to participate meaningfully in an AI-shaped economy.
What is your solution?
NClude is an AI-powered, multimodal platform that helps youth with disabilities build practical AI literacy, develop employability skills, and independently access career opportunities. Available via web, WhatsApp, and IVR, NClude works in low-connectivity environments and does not assume visual access, high literacy, or advanced devices. The platform integrates three interconnected components: 1. Career Discovery Coach: A conversational AI coach grounded in the lived experiences of professionals with disabilities helps youth explore realistic career pathways, including AI- and technology-adjacent roles. It aligns interests, accessibility needs, and skill requirements using job taxonomies and labor market data. 2. ITutor Adaptive Learning: An AI-powered learning companion that delivers employability, digital literacy, and foundational technical skills using inclusive pedagogy. Content adapts in modality (audio, plain text), language complexity, and pacing based on learner needs, with reflective prompts that explain what the AI is doing and where it may fail. 3. AI Task Completion Agent: A voice- and text-based agent that enables users to complete real digital tasks such as job applications, training registrations, or government forms, even on inaccessible or AI-driven websites. Users are guided to connect AI actions to their own goals, building understanding of AI behavior and limitations.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
NClude serves youth and young adults with disabilities including blind, low-vision, mobility-impaired, and neurodiverse individuals with a primary focus on underserved communities in India and the United States. We prioritize young people who face limited access to inclusive education, assistive technology, and AI skilling programs. These youth are often excluded not because they lack talent, but because AI-mediated systems assume normative interaction and inaccessible design. Many rely on caregivers or intermediaries to complete tasks such as job applications, limiting independence, confidence, and privacy. NClude enables youth to engage directly with AI-driven systems. Through career discovery, they identify pathways aligned with their strengths, accessibility needs, and local labor market demand. Through ITutor, they build digital, communication, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning skills through contextual, AI-enabled exercises and guided reflection. Through AI-powered task automation, they independently complete actions that unlock education and employment. In existing deployments, young people have identified new career interests, built resumes, and submitted job applications independently for the first time. Users have submitted over 10,000 job applications and secured approximately 600 jobs, realizing over $150k in collective earnings. The result is increased self-efficacy, digital autonomy, and real participation in the AI-shaped workforce, including pathways into accessibility, technology, and responsible AI roles.
Solution Team:
NClude Team
NClude Team