ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 3:00 pm-3:40 pm | Career-Connected Learning & Pathways
Speakers
- Julia Dixon, ESAI
- Keely Cat-Wells, Making Space
- Nick Gross, Find Your Grind
- Sam Hyams, SpringPod
- Rowan Trollope, BrightBound
Key Takeaways
- A five-person panel moderated by Rowan Trollope (BrightBound) explored how AI-powered career navigation tools can reduce inequalities rather than reinforce them.
- Julia Dixon (ESAI) introduced "narrative intelligence," arguing that mass job applications via AI scale sameness rather than uniqueness, and that the real differentiator is helping students articulate their human story.
- Nick Gross (Find Your Grind) presented results from an ESSA Tier 2 study showing 20% increase in student engagement and 15% increase in career awareness, with the most underserved students benefiting most.
- Keely Cat-Wells (Making Space) brought a powerful disability lens, reporting that 40% of employed disabled people are underemployed and that after a single Making Space employer engagement, disability self-identification rates doubled.
- Sam Hyams (SpringPod) showed Airbus scaling from 100 in-person work experience students to 10,000 via virtual programs, with a third of Amazon program students ending up in tech-aligned roles tracked via LinkedIn.
- The panel surfaced a critical measurement gap: most career tools measure engagement, not whether students actually get better jobs.
Notable Quotes
"Bloomberg put out a piece that families are paying $50,000 to help their college students break into what is potentially the most competitive entry-level job market in a generation. We're seeing the same inequalities emerge that have existed in higher ed."
— Julia Dixon (ESAI)
"We will all become disabled at some point in our lives, whether temporarily or permanently. It's not a threat. It is just reality. Helping investors understand their fate and their future is essential."
— Keely Cat-Wells (Making Space)
"The kids who actually benefited the most from Find Your Grind actually needed it the most."
— Nick Gross (Find Your Grind)
"Measurement is the bit that's always been missing from the career navigation world. We have to start measuring whether destinations are actually being impacted by the tools we're all building."
— Sam Hyams (SpringPod)
"If you slop, you flop. It's this Gen Z, Gen Alpha pushback against overuse of AI. As a company, we can't be producing slop. We can't be scaling sameness."
— Julia Dixon (ESAI)
Full Transcript
Well, welcome everybody. We have an exciting panel here for you today. There's not a day that goes by that everyone doesn't talk about AI and the effect that it's having either in your work or the way you study, the way you learn. At BrightBound, I'm running a $150 million initiative where we're constantly investing in new funds and directly into companies focused on career-focused education, workforce development, and intentional post-secondary pathways.
There's not a day that goes by where I'm not constantly being pitched about AI and the effect that it's changing the way people learn and work. Today we have an exciting panel where each of my panelists have either built or launched a product for students and workers. So I'm super excited for this panel, and I'm going to let each of them introduce themselves. Julia.
Okay. I'm Julia Dixon. I'm the founder of SAI, and SAI helps students figure out who they are, where they're going, and how to build the skills that help them communicate that story over time, first in the college admission space and now increasingly for college to career. Nick?
But that's what I do. Oh, great. Are we competitors? No.
Hi, everyone. I'm Nick Gross. I'm the founder of Find Your Grind. We are a solution that is in K-12.
We provide curriculum solutions for middle school and high school kids. We have micro-credentialing, industry-backed micro-credentials for our high school students, and then we also have professional development in combination with a new wellness check-in tool that layers in on top of everything. So Find Your Grind is all about future readiness for kids, right? We really believe in the idea of it's not what you want to be.
It's who you want to be. So we're really flipping that narrative for kids to really think about themselves in a different context of it's not just about the one career and the one job they're going to have the rest of their life. It's much more about this non-linear trajectory and non-linear path that a lot of us are on currently, but especially for the next generation of kids that I think we need to just approach them with different relevant frameworks for these things and meet them culturally where they're at. So we try and do that with Find Your Grind.
Keely? Hi. I'm Keely Catwells. I'm the CEO and founder of Making Space.
Brief bit of background. I acquired a disability when I was 17 and lost a job because of it, and when I started sharing my story, I heard the same story echoed back time and time again. So founded Making Space to close the disability employment gap and change the stat that disabled people are twice more likely to be unemployed despite making up more than 1 billion people globally, and Making Space is a talent and learning platform connecting disabled professionals with accessible employment and education and helping companies create more accessible workspaces that, to be honest, just work better for everyone, and we support a community of more than 50,000 disabled people and help companies including Salesforce, Microsoft, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, the small ones. And that's us.
Sam? Thanks, Rowan. Hi, everyone. I'm Sam Himes, the CEO at SpringPod.
So we're a virtual career-connected learning platform, and we exist to level the playing field for young people. So we enable middle school, high school, and college students to gain employer experience with some of the largest employers in the world, say Amazon Airbus, some more logos like that. We have about a million students on the platform, and we're operating in the U.K., U.S., and a few new countries as well. Great.
Thank you all. Today, many digital tools increase inequalities, but also increase access. How do each of you make sure the tools you're building reduce barriers and reduce inequalities? Julia?
Yeah, I can kick it off. So my background is as a college admissions advisor, and as most in this room probably know, a lot of the college admissions world has been dominated by elite advisors who families of means pay sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to to get individualized support for their students to get into college. And just today, Bloomberg put out a piece that the exact same thing is now happening in the early career space. There are families paying $50,000 to help their college students break into what is potentially the most competitive entry-level job market in a generation.
So we're seeing the same inequalities emerge that have existed in higher ed for a long time now in the college and career space. So our goal is to scale that individualized support and that access to figuring out who you are and not just getting that next job that's right in front of you or increasing volume of applications, which, you know, sometimes can just scale sameness instead of your unique story. Instead, give that same individualized support that is a luxury historically for wealthy families to students of all kinds. So we really want to not only scale that individualized support, but also help each student find that uniqueness so that that scaling of access doesn't become scaling of the exact same story and generic responses for multiple students.
That's so great. Nick? Yeah, I think for us, it was really important to not only kind of talk about breaking down inequities and barriers, but also, of course, making what we do as accessible and as relatable as possible to the entire population of every single student in the country. So for us, it was really great to go out and finally get an ESSA Tier 2 study done where we actually did a full research-backed situation with 500 students, 25 teachers that really showed for us we can finally talk about how we're actually making a direct impact on the outcome for students and how we're helping open up barriers and help all kids have access to the amount of careers, the amount of learning, all in that same kind of way, regardless if you're rural or urban or whatever district you come from.
And so for us, the ESSA Tier 2 study was great that showed 20 percent increase in student engagement and student confidence, a 15 percent increase in general career awareness for kids, but then also what was most important for me was the kids that needed Find Your Grind the most benefited the most. So that was a big one for me of just saying like, okay, the kids who actually benefited the most from Find Your Grind actually needed it the most, which was really great. And so second to that, a lot of our careers on our platform that we show kids, we want to make sure that we are showing them the gamut of what's out there. So we have literally probably over 1,200 different kinds of careers on Find Your Grind that talk about, you know, a lot of these mentors that we have that frame the careers up that talk about the first 10 percent of their journey and how they've got started.
I think that was a big one for us, not to just show kids careers, but to show like actual people living in those careers and talking about what the first 10 percent of that journey looked like for them in terms of like how the hell did they get started? Like for a middle school kid, even to a high school kid, it's very kind of unattainable, especially in a rural side of a district to be like, okay, great, I'm limited to what my thinking is of what's possible here. How do these people actually get started in what they do? And so for us, that was a big, I think, change in framework and a lens of how to approach this space of like getting real stories from real humans, sharing real experiences, and not just talking about the amount of money that a career can make you.
And so for us, it was important to have diversity across all of our people that talk about what they do in their careers from gender to, you know, to their races, to whatever it is, to make it a show so they can see themselves in that career was an important piece for us and making sure we have not just a couple things, but we have all kinds of different opportunities for kids to explore, to change that limited thinking that a lot of young people might have around what's possible for them. That's great. Thank you, Nick. Keely?
There's a saying within the disabled community that is nothing about us without us. And we ensure that whatever we build is always built with the community. Everyone on the Making Space team has some form of lived experience of disability. So that's really important for our product and for everything that we do.
And the other element for us of making sure that we're not reinforcing inequalities is building with the social model in mind. So historically, disability has been usually seen through one of three lenses, which is the charity model, the medical model, and the social model. Initially, the charity model essentially says if we just give disabled people charity and money and pity them and feel bad for them, then that's how disabled people can survive. And it's the wrong lens to look through.
The next is the medical model, which essentially says if we find cures for disabled people and try and find solutions and fix them and fix the body, then that's how disabled people can do well in life. And then the social model came along and said that none of that is correct. Let's fix the inaccessible society that we live in. So I'm not disabled by my body.
I'm disabled by the inaccessible world that we live in. And that is really the focus that we have at Making Space. So that also means not just educating and upskilling the disabled community. That also means educating and upskilling the employers and making sure that their workspaces are actually built in a way that can support disabled people and unlock their innovation and creativity.
gets missed when we talk about disability, especially as the future of work becomes less predictable and career paths no longer look linear, then we're gonna need more creative and innovative people and disabled people are some of the most creative, adaptable, flexible people you will ever find because we've had to navigate such inaccessible spaces for so long.
So yeah, that's I think a few of the ways. Great. Sam? I think from our perspective for access we always start with supply and demand.
So for the UK market where we started, two in three young people leave the school system with zero work experience. That is a structural problem and I know it's very similar this side of the pond as well. So we start with that, is in this day and age why shouldn't every single young person have the same ability to gain experience with the best employers in the world? So if we take some of our partners, if you look at Airbus, so they used to have about a hundred students in person on work experience and that was their sort of cap that they could deliver.
We now help 10,000 students a year gain an Airbus experience and through virtuals which can act as that top of funnel to widen access. So that's really where we come at it from is widen the top of the funnel for young people so that you can inspire them to think about that is actually possible for me. Great. At BrightBound, you know when we talk about career readiness, we believe it's more than just job matching, right?
It's about helping young people find their true passions and to tell their story and to find the best pathway that is aligned with their goals and and needs. We've done a lot of work in this area and we're actively funding this area. When we rebranded from ASA to BrightBound, our new tagline is find your why, find your way. So with that, Julia, could you talk a little bit about how you look at this in terms of career readiness?
Yeah, so some of the AI job application platforms that I get ads for on my Instagram all the time really emphasize volume and really quantity of job applications and internship opportunities that they can match students to, but it's missing the primary differentiator of what it's going to take for students to stand out in the job market right now, which is understanding yourself and building the skills to storytell, not just for the next interview you have, that next job you want, but for life. We think that college and career prep should be more coupled together. It should be about building the foundations, the skills to figure out who you are. We call it narrative intelligence.
How do you find the language to express your values, your motivations, your interests, and connect the dots to what you're doing next, and learning how to translate that, how to articulate your story is a skill that is lifelong, and the job you're applying for will change, the industries will change, the job market is shifting, but having that skill to be able to translate who you are in context is what we call identity intelligence, and it's all about being able to apply your story to whatever comes next. So our belief is, you know, volume's great, getting access to more opportunities, our voice agent will source them in your sleep, is what we always say, but volume is not everything. Understanding who you are and what story you're bringing to each of those different contexts, that's the real superpower, that's the foundational skill that's going to help you not become dependent on technology like this, but learn to operate outside it and learn about the human qualities you have as you're using it. So who you are and telling that story is our North Star, always.
Great. How about you, Nick? I think probably that is the fundamental question of, like, why we're all here and what is fundamentally changing around, like, AI-powered career navigation, is like, how do we flip this conversation from a kid who takes a career assessment and then gets two or three careers spit out to them, and then it's like, good luck, hope you like it, hope you enjoy your life. And so for us, we think that that's a pretty backdated model where we need to start the conversation with, it's not what you want to be, it's who you want to be.
So going back to your point around self-awareness and having this deeper sense of who you are, what interests you, what skill sets you might have, and having more of an open mindset to what's possible for you, I think is, and ultimately the type of life that you want to live, right? Like, if you're spending so much time in a specific career that you're trying to go on and you hate your life, like, what's the point, right? We want to create, like, fulfilled, meaningful people at the same time, and sometimes that's hard to do with young people, right? It's like, we shouldn't always expect them to have this exact lane that they're gonna go down, and so for us, it was important to kind of coin what we call a lifestyle assessment.
So we started every kid off with this idea of, you know, what are your interests, what are your skill sets, what excites you, what gives you energy, what type of environments do you imagine yourself living in, and so for me, I'm an entertainer, I'm a connector, and I'm a creator, and now I get to look at hundreds of careers that fall underneath those three lifestyle buckets for me. So now I've alleviated that pressure for a kid who's in seventh grade or eighth grade to have to pick a direction or pick a thing, pick a job for the rest of their life, because school told them to, to now this version of yourself where you say, wow, like look at how many endless opportunities I have within these lifestyle categories based on who I am as a person and what interests me in terms of my life. So that was a good framework to kind of ease the tension of this like crazy career conversation we're having for young people that I think's worked really well for us. Secondly, we really looked at like, okay, how do you help a kid with who they want to be?
I think learning design was a huge piece of that, like how do we keep them engaged in their learning, and so for us we really built out a lot of learning design within our templates, within our curriculum, within our activities that we've built that that meet them where they're at naturally in terms of the content that they interact with, and so think of like a text message style flow where we're asking them a question, and then they can choose their own answer, right? We ask them another question, they choose their own answer, and the more information that we pull from the student in that process, the better we're able to personalize their experience around careers that might be suitable to them, next activities to explore within our curriculum to create this kind of mini Netflix meets Spotify personalized experience around self-discovery and career readiness and 21st century skills. So that's what we're trying to do there, and then the third piece for us, I would say just trying to tie things back to AI because that's what we're up here trying to talk about. What we think that's been really helpful to help a kid figure out who they want to be is give them a portfolio, give them a digital portfolio of everything that they're doing and spending time on in Find Your Grind.
Let's use an AI version to create an AI About Me section to where everything that a kid does that's spending time in Find Your Grind is getting pulled into an About Me section that talks about who they are, like what are their skills, what are their interests, what are their lifestyles, what directions do they want to pursue, and so for us that was a big one to create that kind of aha moment for kids at the end of this thing or even throughout the process of them using our product to create that digital version of like paragraphs that explain, hey, this is who I am and what I'm interested in at this moment in time. So that AI About Me piece was a big feature for us. I hate talking about product features because there's thousands of them, but in context of this, that was really helpful to help a kid take something at the end of the day and have it be useful for their life. Thank you, Nick.
At BrightBond, we are active impact investors, so we invest in products and services where impact is an intrinsic part of that product or service, which means that as revenue rises, impact is also rising in a linear way. In each investment we make, we systematically measure the impact for both workforce, career-focused education, new pathways, and so forth, but we measure beyond just reach. We also measure depth and duration and the theory of change. So if we invested in a workforce company, we don't just measure wage growth.
We also like to measure intangible outcomes like confidence gained and the ability to tell your story, right? And so we like to look at outcomes that are long-lasting as opposed to short-term outcomes. I'd love to hear, Keely, how you guys think about that at Making Space. Yeah, it's so important.
Unfortunately, disabled people are still so underestimated, and the expectations for disabled people, especially young disabled people, is so, so small. People do not realize the capabilities that disabled people have, even the most highly qualified disabled people who have advanced degrees. Unfortunately, disability is still coded as fragility oftentimes, so a measure of confidence for us is incredibly important. Also, 40% of disabled people, 4-0, of disabled people who are employed are underemployed.
It's a huge, huge gap, and so what we do is also a lot of self-advocacy support and training to help disabled people be able to advocate for themselves and understand what they're able to ask for in workspaces. We often also help them reframe things like accommodations to access requirements. It has a certain, a different type of weight to it that can help them realize that what they're asking for is not burdensome on the company, it is an actual access requirement that helps them do the necessary work. We also have a pretty cool tool on the platform that helps disabled people turn their lived experience of disability
into transferable skills.
So, for example, as someone with a chronic illness, I manage complex medical supplies, I manage a complex medical team, and because of that, I probably have so many other transferable skills from that, like operations coordination, project management, team management, all of these things that if I just positioned them slightly differently when I was going into different work opportunities, I could maybe even have a completely different career trajectory. So, that's really important to us, so measuring confidence is absolutely key. The other element to this is also the confidence of existing disabled people in the workplace who are already employed who may not even know that they are disabled or may not be confident enough to identify as disabled. So, we measured with our employers the amount of people who were self-identifying as disabled, and then after just one engagement with Making Space, on average, the number doubled, which is huge, it's wild.
And that, to us, signals confidence that they're then also gonna get the right access requirements to be able to do their best work, so better career trajectories. Thank you, Keely. Sam? Yeah, I think, from my perspective, measurement is the bit that's always been missing from the career navigation world.
So, if you think about all the tools that you might use in K-12, college, whatever space you're in, how do you know if they're actually working at the moment, apart from maybe some student feedback? There's no repercussions on whether that actually supported that young person to get into a job that is right for them, a career that's fulfilling. And it's so difficult, right, because you've got years of lag before you actually reach that point, so it's very difficult to measure. So, I think, for us, we try and take a staggered approach to measurement.
So, we have about half a million enrollments per year in our experiences, and we start from student feedback. So, ratings on the programs, time spent, completion rates, all of that standard sort of stuff, but we want to move all the way through to destinations. We have to start measuring whether destinations are actually being impacted by the tools that we're all building, especially as AI will make it feel better and it will feel like magic, but actually, is it impacting that destination? So, that's the way that we look at and measure ourselves on our programs is use the destination data for where the students actually ended up.
So, for 30,000 students going through the Amazon program with us, a third end up in tech-aligned roles, and we can track that through LinkedIn. So, we use hard data on the destination side to actually tell ourselves, are we making an impact for the young people? So, I think that's the biggest sort of request from the sector for me is actually looking at the end result for students, not just the initial student feedback ratings. Great, thanks, Sam.
As investors, we're constantly being pitched at, and we're always looking for new innovative ways to assess these new products and services. Nick, if you could share a little bit about your experience as an investor and what you look for when you're assessing companies. Well, all right, what do I look for when I'm assessing companies? Well, Gross Labs is my family office and family enterprise where we've made a grip of investments across sports, media, entertainment, do a lot in real estate, hospitality.
Education is one vertical we've never invested in outside of our own direct operating company where we have full majority control. Yeah, we have not made another investment into another ed tech company, but that is to say, and as a general framework, I think for me, we would look to invest into an idea or a product or a solution, we should say, that has a direct impact on changing human outcomes and creating human value alongside digital engagement, I think is important, but I also think it's more important to look at the durable human value creation that products are creating. And so for me, I think it's really important, and I learned this with my own company, with Find Your Grind, is that the outcome side of things is really important, like what are the outcomes that we're driving to? And let's be really, really clear on that.
So I think for me, I would look to a company to define that. And if they haven't defined that yet, there better be a plan in place as to how they're gonna go figure out what those outcomes are that they're driving to and have a plan for that. Third is probably like founders, right? Do these founders have an idea and a direction and a way to scale a product in ed tech?
It's very hard, right? Like it's very hard to be in education and like have a startup. I was just like hanging with some dude outside who has his own thing. He started in July, 2025, and I'm just looking at him.
I'm like, shoot, okay, like you just started this thing. He's a young guy. I look back to myself eight years ago when I was starting Find Your Grind, and he just had the same energy and like enthusiasm, but I'm like in my head going, man, like do you understand how long sales cycles are? Like do you understand how hard it is to actually create real, like solve real problems with the right products and with the right features?
And like there's so many things that like building a team and like being a solid leader and knowing how to switch directions and pivot things when things aren't working and like market feedback from the space. Like that's a huge one for us I would look forward to is like how do you know you're solving the right problem? You know, like are you creating something because you think that you're solving the right problem or have you actually gone out and really tested that to make sure that the features you're releasing and the value you're trying to create is solving an actual real problem? And for us, it's been really helpful to go out and get that market research with actual teachers and with actual users and non-users of our product to make sure that we're doing full discovery, full market validation before we choose to invest a dollar with our engineering team or our tech team or any of that to build something that creates zero value at the end of the day.
So that's a big one for me too. And I don't know, I could go on and on forever but I think that's probably the four things I would think about looking for if I'm gonna invest in another ed tech company. But I wanna invest in mine because I like mine the most. Thank you, Nick.
You know, so many companies here at this conference are trying to raise capital, right? And we're fortunate that three of these panelists have been successful in raising capital. So I'd love to hear from Julia, Keeley and Sam, how were you able to successfully communicate your value proposition to investors? What are they looking for?
And what are some tips for our audience that you would share with them? Julia? Sure, so over the last two years, we've raised two rounds of capital from impact funds and AI funds and some angel investors. And I don't know if anyone in this room is as addicted to TikTok as I am, but if you are, you might've seen the phrase, if you slop, you flop.
And it's this sort of Gen Z, Gen Alpha pushback against overuse of AI, feeling wildly impersonal, manufactured, unsure what's real and what's not. And while that phrase is relatively new circulating around social media, I think it gets at something we've been thinking about since our inception, which is just as the new differentiator for applicants is leaning into your humanity and actually telling your human story, what makes you unique from all of these other people who are now using AI platforms to apply a massive volume, which just makes it even harder to differentiate. As a company, we can't be producing slop. We can't be scaling sameness.
We have to help every person lean into what is that story that only you could tell? How do we put that story in the context of this unique opportunity, this hiring manager, this company, their values? So going really deep into that human side, I think has never been so important as our users are pushing back against this technology. VC firms are figuring out what makes this different than an LLM wrapper or any other spray and pray job application system.
So that's kind of always our North Star is how are we helping every person pull out their uniqueness and make sure that every single user has a wildly different experience. And I think just as that's a differentiator for students right now, it's the differentiator for products too. Great. Keeley?
I would say, I think I used to lead with the business case in disability specifically for us. I think being very, very impact driven and disability being 0.01% of all funding goes towards disability. It's wild. And the majority of those solutions that are funded are medical driven.
So they're driven around solutions to fix people, body conditions. So for us, it's a very new space for a lot of investors. So there's a lot of education that comes along with that. So we usually talk about the business case, which if you don't know, companies that do intentionally invest and engage in disabled people, they achieve 28% high revenue, double the net income and 30% higher profit margins.
The business case is truly undeniable. But what I've also really loved leaning into, especially recently is helping investors understand that this is an experience that they themselves will encounter one day. We will all become disabled at some point in our lives, whether that be temporarily or permanently. And it's not a threat.
It is just.
just reality, we will all be disabled. Gold. Gold. So helping them understand their fate and their future is essential.
And it helps them recognize that this is not a niche issue. This is an everyone issue. And that definitely helps move things. And then I think storytelling is really important.
As a founder who has lived experience of disability, helping them understand that this is a problem I have lived every single part of this issue, from benefits navigation to having to drop out of college because of my health, having to try to enter a workforce that was just not ready, that's also very, very helpful. Great. Sam? Yeah, I've got two investors in the room.
So you can definitely keep me honest on whether this is actually true at all. But so I think for the space we're in, education, it's so easy to focus on the mission. Like all of us went into education. The money is obviously part of it, the commercial aspect.
But it's not the easiest sector to make money in. So you go into it because you care about the issue. You care about supporting students. And I think if there are any early stage founders, the advice from me would be don't only focus on that.
So don't only lead with the impact statement. It's obviously absolutely central. But you've got to nail the ICP, the buyer that you're actually going to be selling to. For us, we're fortunate that it's the employers.
So there's quite a clear use case. And I think the other thing, especially now with AI, which I know is meant to be the focus of this. So if you're a founder, there's absolutely no excuse to not have a working prototype and a working MVP now. With Vibe Coding, you should be able to spin that up pretty quickly.
And I'd advocate for also go straight to the user. So even if your buyer might be the school district, it might be the corporate, go to the student and just get in front of them first. Get the impact stats back. And that will take you half the way there at least.
Thank you. We've talked a lot about technologies. And these technologies helping young people with career-focused education and planning and so forth. But for each of you, what other human supports do you feel need to exist to supplement technology to properly ensure young people with their pathways and career exploration?
Julia. So I've gotten pushback before that I think is very fair around we talked about some of these elite college advisors, career advisors, families pay tens of thousands of dollars for. Some worry that that will continue to be the case, human-to-human support for those who can afford it. And other students will be pushed towards bots, pushed toward AI agents.
And how do we make sure that that's not the sort of secondary option that's less ideal than working directly with a human? And I have a few thoughts there. I think there's no question that human support should always be part of the equation. Our primary partners are career service centers at universities.
And we were talking to a school last week who actually had a great ratio of career counselors to students compared to most universities. And they really pride themselves in their relationships with students. Their percentage of students who actually utilize their career center was much higher than average. But at the same time, when we showed them a demo of our product and how after three times talking to our voice agent how many data points it knew about this person's life, the career counselor we were talking to said, well, I couldn't possibly know what sport everyone played in high school.
I don't have a map of everything they've ever done. So the goal would be to scale that individualized support that they're already giving with even more context, 24-7 availability that these agents allow for, and ultimately pushing them back into more human interactions. So if we have the context of your career center has a health care career fair on Tuesday, you should go to that. You should connect with this alumni.
You should meet with your counselor to talk about this further. We want to use our AI agent to connect them back to human people and potentially give them an even better experience than what they could get from a human advisor alone. So valid question for sure, something we're always thinking about. But trying to push people in ways that they can work with a human in more intentional ways with the support of AI.
Great. Nick? Yeah, I think for us, we didn't understand the importance and the value of professional development alongside of what we do to make sure that it's not just students who are engaging with what we're doing, but also teachers and educators. Party fell, sorry.
Teachers and educators that are also informed on how to speak the language of future readiness. A lot of teachers kind of come in. It's funny, when we first built this thing, we had this idea in our head of what we thought how the perfect classroom was going to go when someone was going to use Find Your Grind of like, great, we built it for the perfect teacher who is at the front of the classroom teaching the perfect experience for kids. And all the kids are on their computers and doing exactly what they're told to do.
Like 90%, so I had half my team, we have a 30-person team. I had 15 people go for two weeks and explore all the schools that are using Find Your Grind and go into the classroom and watch what kids and teachers actually do. The amount of teachers who are in the back of the room and for better or for worse, there's some advisory periods, just different settings of things. The amount of kids that were just, you know, 90% of these classrooms that were on different kinds of technologies and corners of the room.
Some people are over there on their phones not even knowing if they're doing stuff. The teachers in the back eating lunch. And then you have some teachers who are amazing in some of the classrooms that are going perfectly. So I think for us, it was important to develop a hybrid experience for us where it wasn't just based in digital technology and kids that were on computers all day long.
So now half of our experience is really about empowering the teacher and empowering the human-to-human relationship with kids. Project-based learning, more things that are more involved from a human-to-human connection. Because when we saw the amount of kids that were on technology that were really probably half of them not even doing what they were supposed to do because 90% of the teachers are very passive in a lot of environments. There are great teachers that implemented find-your-grind really well.
It was just an interesting approach to make sure that we had this hybrid experience built into it, which we focused a lot on over the last two years. That's great. Thanks, Nick. Ellie?
I always go back to community. Community is so important. We host a lot of in-person events and we bring our employers with our community together. And it's incredible to see the mindset shifts that just happen in that room from the recruiters and the hiring managers and the CHROs when they meet with disabled candidates in person.
And they actually have those important one-on-one connections and conversations. We really see empathy or we see sympathy turn to empathy. And they get a completely different perspective and understanding of what this person is capable of. And it reframes all of the stereotypes and the stigma that they've had in their head previously.
So I think community is incredibly important. We've also seen employers change their technology and their systems because of those gatherings. It's really scary that still today, 97% of the web is still inaccessible to those who use assistive technology. That is wild to think.
But also, if we look at how AI is being inputted into hiring process, we also see virtual interviewers, where they're not meeting people anymore. They're meeting virtual AI people, bots, robots. And for people who are deaf, for people who have voice differences, for people who just communicate differently, for people who are blind, that is incredibly difficult. They're never going to get through the front door.
So having employers understand that those are not going to work for some of their possibly best candidates is really important. So I think community, I always come back to that. Thank you, Keeley. Sam?
Yeah, I think for the human engagement, it's a little bit of a cold way of looking at it. But I think it's all about the value exchange. So if you're an employer and we're saying there's two and three young people leaving the school system with no work experience at all, why is that? Why are employers not desperate to get in front of a young person and support them with their future?
It's obviously about scalability and what they're going to get back as value from that. At the moment, historically, it's been quite difficult to evidence what that value exchange is going to be for the employer, apart from a long-term talent ambition. So I think with AI, we've actually got a real positive. To glass our full view of this, at least in my head, is there's all these negative headlines on it's killing early careers.
There's 32% fewer opportunities for young people already. But actually, if you look at it the other way around and go, well, young people are the most AI native, obviously, and have the potential to be the most impactful in the workforce, what are they missing? They're missing context on business processes, is our opinion. So they might know AI, but they don't know how they apply that to a CRM, or to a B2B website, or to actually have impact on the business.
So what we're trying to do is bring the two together. So we've worked with the likes of Accenture to train almost the consulting skills. So when you go into a business, how do you understand a problem, just for any problem? How do you understand that?
What's best practice for developing solutions? And then how do you use AI to improve those solutions? So if you could enable an 18-year-old to go into an SME, who's probably going to be five years behind the curve on AI adoption, and you can enable them to show them a prototype of, we've reviewed your B2B website, we've rebuilt it using vibe coding, we've done deep research, we've found you a load of new prospects that you didn't think about. We've rebuilt these processes.
That is how, in my opinion, you make young people more employable, and actually you flip it where. AI enables them to join the workforce and make a bigger impact from day one. Thank you Sam. Thank you to all of our panelists and I encourage everyone to visit the BrightBound booth in the exhibit hall and pick up your free pair of sunglasses.
We have four different kinds so go there. They're a vibe, you got to put them on so people see what these things are actually like, right? Let's see. This is one of them.
That's a vibe. I love that. So this pair is like the Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man sunglass look but anyway there's four different kinds.
Please go there. You'll learn all about all the different products and services at BrightBound and please stay engaged with us. We're actively investing, giving grants, we've developed our own products for career focused education and career exploration that we've rolled out. We have many lines of businesses so come on down.
Thanks Roland.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.