Can an AI be your mentor? That’s what a startup called Practica believes. The corporate, which evolved out of a marketplace for one-on-one executive coaching, has now launched an AI system built on top of an existing knowledge base it developed over time spent with a big group of human coaches. The resulting AI chatbot experience functions as a personalised workplace mentor and coach that may aid professionals in bettering their skills across a dozen different topics, including management, strategy, sales, personal development, growth, customer success, marketing, data, design, finance and more.

Originally co-founded in January 2020 by Dave Whittemore, former Thinkful head of Product (which exited to Chegg), and former Dropbox engineering manager Andy Scheff, Practica initially tackled the issue around continuous upskilling throughout your profession with a standard executive coaching marketplace.

“We each became executive coaches,” explains Whittemore. “Andy and I each plunged ourselves into it…I coached product managers and Andy coached engineers,” he says.

Later that 12 months, the positioning grew by adding a marketplace for other executive coaches, and today it still offers 250 human coaches across domain-specific expertise. Indeed, 90% of that business is B2B — that’s, selling Practica’s services to employers. That business can be now profitable on an operating basis.

Nevertheless, the founders realized that pricing prevented people from having the ability to access its services.

“The common per-hour price was $200 an hour and the per-hour price varied based on the seniority level of the person being coached and the coach…In the event you got coached for the complete 12 months, the common one who does a full 12 months of coaching spends about $3,000 a 12 months,” Whittemore said. “That price is the barrier, and that’s what led us to AI coaching,” he adds.

The concept was to take what that they had learned through personal one-on-one coaching and mix that along with AI technology. Through the years, that they had learned what makes coaching relationships successful and that helped them understand what sort of constructs to construct around and on top of an LLM. Their knowledge base consists of numerous publicly available learning materials, starting from blog posts to conference talks to videos to podcasts to books and more, which have been hand-picked and curated into a whole lot of various skills across a wide range of topics.

Image Credits: Practica

In fact, many web sites today are actually blocking AI web crawlers, as they don’t need to be aggregated into AI chatbot experiences. So we asked if there was a priority that a few of these sites where the materials were found would do the identical. But unlike ChatGPT or another AI chatbots, Practica says it’s focused on pushing its users out to the sources where the content comes from, not only providing answers. This leads to increased traffic for the publisher or content provider it indexes and references.

That said, the corporate has not yet made any formal licensing arrangements with its educational source providers — a few of which might be so simple as a helpful blog post from an engineer, or someone writing about how they overcame challenges as a manager.

As well as, by way of the AI models under the hood, the goal is to be vendor-agnostic and only deal with the applying layer on top of that — which suggests Practica isn’t directly competing with firms like OpenAI or Google, but relatively able to working with them.

To teach its skilled users, the corporate uses a way called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to match the perfect learning resources for the situation a given learner is in, the team tells TechCrunch. The AI coach explains what’s within the sources it retrieved and why they’re helpful — just as a human coach would. It cites the sources and encourages the user to go and browse them as “homework.”

Practica’s use of third-party content, then, is more of a curated search engine, relatively than machine learning model training. However the AI is doing the coaching.

That a part of the AI’s methodology mixes together various coaching tools, including instruction, questioning for context, finding present challenges within the learner’s job to make use of as learning materials, mapping learning progress to the learner’s profession goals, and celebrating wins along the way in which. It finds the suitable material, organizes the insights from those materials into a listing that the user can interact with, and adds notes you’ll be able to reference later.

Plus, unlike today’s generalized AI chatbots, Practica’s AI remembers the learner’s history so it may well construct on their skills as they proceed to make use of the service.

“You possibly can have generalized system instructions, nevertheless it’s probably not memorizing what it must find out about you from one session to the following,” says Whittemore, comparing Practica to general-purpose AI chatbots. “We attempt to be very intentional about that…we remember the way you’ve been developing over time in order that we will proceed to educate very well — the identical way a human coach would.”

The system has been in private testing since July of this 12 months and is now opening as much as individual learners for between $10 to $20 per 30 days per user. (A “teams” version from employers can be in limited testing.)

At this price point, Practica hopes to make executive coaching more accessible.

“We’re optimistic that it’s actually going to expand executive coaching,” says Whittmore. “Our hope is that we get to get more people touching this on the AI coaching level, and learning about how effective executive coaching is and due to this fact upgrading to the premium product,” he says, referring to the corporate’s human coaching services.

Practica has raised $1.5 million in outside funding from across two rounds in 2021 and 2022, before it shifted into AI-based coaching. Each rounds were led by Script Capital and included over 40 individual angel investors, lots of whom were leaders within the domains where the corporate focuses its coaching.