For the last two years, much of the conversation about AI within our profession has been about us.
Whether it belongs in practice. Whether it will take work away. Whether something built from algorithms has any place in a profession founded on human relationship. These are reasonable questions, and it’s understandable why they came first. They are also questions about therapists, asked largely by therapists.
Meanwhile, the people we were discussing went ahead without us.
They are already using AI, in very large numbers, often at two in the morning on the free tool already sitting on their phone. Nobody recommended it. No professional body approved it. They simply found something that would respond, and having something respond at that hour turns out to matter.
So I don’t think the question is whether people should be doing this.
They already are.
The question now is what those conversations look like, and whether people with decades of experience supporting others have any involvement in shaping what they become.
The part that should concern us
I want to be specific about the risk, because saying “AI might give bad advice” is too vague to be useful and, for me, it isn’t the greatest concern.
What concerns me is agreement.
Generic AI systems have a tendency to move towards the position taken by the person using them. Tell one something bleak about yourself and it may soften, apologise and rebuild its next response around what you have just said. In many situations that is of little consequence. In conversations about emotional wellbeing, relationships or somebody’s view of themselves, it can become something entirely different.
We spend years learning not to do that. We learn when to stay with something, when to question it, when to gently challenge it, and when not to accept a person’s first explanation simply because they believe it.
The opposite problem exists too. Say something serious and many systems will quickly produce a helpline number before effectively ending the conversation. That isn’t a criticism of the technology. It is what happens when tools built for one purpose become widely used for another.
If people are already turning to AI for support, dismissing the whole area doesn’t stop it happening. It simply means the people designing these conversations continue without the benefit of professional experience.
Who this is actually about
This article isn’t really about our clients.
It’s about the people who were never likely to become our clients.
Some cannot afford private therapy. Some do not want to become vulnerable in front of another person. Some don’t know where to begin. Some don’t want to arrange their lives around weekly appointments. Some simply want support in a different form.
Those people have always existed.
Most of us know that because we’ve heard their reasons over the years. Sometimes from people who nearly contacted us. Sometimes from friends, colleagues or family members. Sometimes simply because someone discovered what we do for a living and explained why they would never have picked up the phone.
After 26 years working with people, I have become less interested in persuading someone they should choose therapy and more interested in understanding why they don’t.
Many of those reasons are neither irrational nor temporary.
They are genuine preferences, practical barriers or carefully considered decisions.
Whether we agree with them or not doesn’t alter the fact that they exist.
What we built
At MindMotive AI, we build Digital Partners.
We use that term because that’s exactly what we set out to create: Digital Partners, each designed for a specific purpose. Otto is one of them.
I can only describe ours because I have no idea how anybody else develops theirs.
Our Digital Partners are conversational AI built around a clearly defined purpose. Every aspect of how they behave is deliberate. What they hold onto, what they question, how they respond when conversations become difficult, where their boundaries sit, and what happens when those boundaries are reached are all conscious design decisions rather than accidental outcomes.
Those decisions have been informed by 26 years working with people and nearly 20 years training therapists.
Some of our Digital Partners are designed for specific areas such as relationships, confidence and resilience. Otto is broader because the people he was built for rarely arrive with one clearly defined issue. Life is usually more complicated than that.
Otto is designed with clear boundaries and is not a crisis service.
What this means
For me, this isn’t really an AI conversation.
It’s a conversation about people.
If millions of people are already using AI to make sense of their lives, I think they deserve something better than whatever generic AI happens to give them.
That is why we chose to build something ourselves.
We wanted the thinking behind it to come from decades of working with people, not simply from whatever the underlying technology happened to do by default.
Not everyone will agree with that approach.
That’s perfectly reasonable.
What matters to us is that people have more choice than they did before.
Working with professionals
We’re interested in working with counsellors, therapists, coaches and complementary therapists who recognise that support doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.
If you can see the value in helping people who may never access the services you provide, we’d be interested in talking to you.
We offer a professional referral programme and are developing training around our own Digital Partners to help professionals understand how they work, how they have been designed, where they may be appropriate, and where they are not.
Find out more
If you’d like to learn more about Otto, how he works and whether he’s the right choice for you, visit the Otto page.
Find out more about Otto
About the Author
Karen Ferguson is the founder of MindMotive AI, where she develops Digital Partners designed for specific purposes. Otto, built to help people make sense of situations, relationships and decisions at the point they need to, is one of them.
She has worked as a therapist for 26 years, as a hypnotherapist since 2000 and later as a counsellor, and for nearly 20 of those years as a trainer and supervisor. She has trained more than 1,000 therapists.
MindMotive AI was created in response to a simple question: what happens to the people who never access traditional forms of support? Karen’s work combines decades of professional experience with the deliberate development of Digital Partners designed to give people another way of accessing support when and how they choose.
Karen is a Fellow of the ACCPH (Accredited Counsellors, Coaches, Psychotherapists and Hypnotherapists).