A new startup, Thrive AI Health, is being backed by lead investors OpenAI’s venture fund and Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, with the Alice L. Walton Foundation also announcing that it will be a strategic investor in the new startup. Thrive AI Health is on a mission to use AI to democratize access to expert-level health coaching that hopes to improve health outcomes through the development of an AI health coach that will promote healthier lifestyles.
Hoping to “address growing health inequities by bringing the power of behavior change to the urgent challenge of chronic diseases,” Thrive AI Health stated it has already established research partnerships with academic institutions and medical centers such as Stanford Medicine, the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University. These initial launch partners will help bring the AI Health Coach to their communities.
The CEO of the new venture is DeCarlos Love, who was most recently a product leader at Google. Love stated that “recent advancements in artificial intelligence present an unprecedented opportunity to make behavior change much more powerful and sustainable… AI has shown a remarkable ability to assimilate large datasets, extract actionable insights, recognize patterns, and deliver personalized recommendations. However, despite these technological advances, the current landscape of large language models (LLMs) still falls short of delivering a truly comprehensive and effective personalized behavior change and coaching experience.”
Enter Thrive AI Health with a solution to the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions. According to Love, the startup will provide personalized, proactive, and data-driven coaching across five daily behaviors by using generative AI to give users personalized advice on sleep, food, fitness, stress management, and “connection.”
The goal is for Thrive AI Health’s technology to be used as a tool for both the prevention and optimizing the treatment of disease through an AI personal context engine that will understand the user and generate personalized AI-driven insights. According to a press release from the company, users will receive “proactive, multimodal, expert-level coaching as well as nudges and recommendations unique to each user across the five behaviors.” The foundation for the company’s technology will be a unified data platform, and the Thrive AI health coach will be kept up-to-date on the latest peer-reviewed science, biometric, lab, and other medical data, as well as the user’s personal preferences and goals surrounding the five key daily behaviors.
Sam Altman, Open AI co-founder and Huffington founder of Thrive Global, wrote in an op-ed in Time that the AI health coach will be available as a mobile app for users, as well as within Thrive Global’s enterprise products. Altman and Huffington also wrote in the op-ed that AI-driven personalized behavior changes can finally help reverse the trends on chronic diseases—which account for around 90% of $4.1 trillion in healthcare spending when combined with mental health conditions.
“So much of the conversation around AI has been about how much time it will save us and how productive it will make us. But AI could go well beyond efficiency and optimization to something much more fundamental: improving both our health spans and our lifespans,” Altman and Huffington wrote. “AI will serve as part of the critical infrastructure of a much more effective health care system that supports everyday people’s health in an ongoing way. These are some of the ideas behind Thrive AI Health.”
