Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving into areas of life once dominated by other people, from workplace advice to emotional support.
Hy, which describes itself as a new venture ecosystem, is betting that this could make face-to-face human connection more valuable.
The company says it is testing AI to document and analyze face-to-face conversations.
In its “forest walk” experiments, people walk with a human listener while AI records and summarizes the conversation.
“A system might document a conversation, preserve decisions, or help map collective knowledge while people remain responsible for the meaning and direction of the work,” said Weston Mossman, Hy’s product and experience lead and acting chief product officer.
Hy says it has conducted 21 experiments so far, with participants retaining ownership of their transcripts.
Afterward, the AI can be asked to look at the conversation from different perspectives. People then decide what those observations mean and whether they should affect the next conversation or decision.
Hy also puts its conversations into a shared body of notes, which Mossman says AI can examine for recurring or conflicting patterns, helping the team decide what needs further attention.
The company says it launched in San Francisco’s Bay Area on September 19 and is already working with more than 100 communities and organizations, including tech companies, financial institutions, startup ecosystems and communities of practice.
A second launch is planned for the greater Lisbon, Portugal, area in November.
“Growth, in our view, can travel through local communities and diverse contexts, allowing ideas to adapt to the people and environments receiving them,” Hy founder and CEO Ariana Bahrami told Newsweek.
The Connection Gap
Hy calls itself “an incubator for the life-centric economy.” Rather than developing its own AI model, it experiments with existing models and how they can be used in service of what it calls “love, life and joy.”
The timing is notable.
The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Stress in America survey found that 54 percent of U.S. adults had felt isolated often or some of the time.
Half said they lacked companionship, while 69 percent said they had needed more emotional support in the previous year than they received.
At the same time, 92 percent said relationships were a source of meaning.
Some people are turning to AI for emotional support. A November 2025 NAMI/Ipsos poll found that 12 percent of U.S. adults said they were likely to use AI chatbots for mental-health treatment or therapy within six months. One percent said they already did.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Torous told a congressional hearing in November 2025 that millions of Americans were using AI tools not designed for mental-health support each week. He also said many found some support from them.
At the same time, people are finding new reasons to get together offline.
Strava’s 2025 Year in Sport report found that new club creation nearly quadrupled in 2025, bringing the platform’s total to one million clubs. Running clubs grew 3.5 times year over year, while club-organized events increased 1.5 times.
While the figures come from Strava’s global platform rather than the U.S. population as a whole, they suggest growing interest in organized communities and activities.
Hy wants to explore what happens when AI is used to support those kinds of human interactions, rather than replace them.
Division of Labor
The company uses a framework associated with researcher Dave Snowden to describe the division of labor. AI handles “salience”—surfacing and organizing information—while humans retain “sapience,” making sense of it, and “sentience,” the emotional experience that informs decisions.
Mossman says the approach has changed Hy’s own working practices. A 90-minute conversation that once took hours to document can now be processed much faster, leaving more time for discussion and relationships.
Hy says it is still developing measures to assess the impact of its approach.
Loneliness predates generative AI, and the figures cited here do not establish whether AI is worsening it.
But Hy’s bet is that, as AI takes on more of the work around us, there could be a growing market for something it says technology cannot provide: human connection.