What if the most powerful use case for generative AI is not getting through to-do lists more quickly, but leveraging the technology as an emotional support tool?
Burnout rates are at record highs: 83% of global workers reported suffering from burnout in 2026 – as compared to the 82% from 2025. To navigate this, workers and companies alike are turning to AI tools.
However, most AI platforms were not designed for this job, especially as individuals are presented with unprecedented amounts of information on what they can do – prompting an information overload that prevents them from actually taking action. That action gap is widening, and will continue to do so without the right support tools in place.
That’s precisely what Vivian Lei, founder and CEO of PowerYou.AI, has set out to address in the form of an AI coach that helps build individuals’ mental fitness on a daily basis.
From reactive care to proactive strength building
Burnout is both insidious and rampant. As with physical ailments, treating it once it hits is far more difficult than managing its symptoms early on, and a reactive approach does not address vulnerabilities that could lead to a repeat occurrence.
In fact, research shows that insight alone does not produce lasting change. Many remain caught in episodic solutions, from sessions and books to seminars, while life remains, unfettered, in the space between them. And, conversely, current tools are either static content libraries or productivity-oriented AI models that lack the depth of an individual’s inner context.
Most mental health apps put users on dopamine treadmills but don’t actually trigger the neuroplasticity required for lasting habit change; the brain rewires itself through action, not merely through reflection.
PowerYou.AI bridges that gap by delivering real-time coaching experiences that translate knowledge into a fundamentally new way of being. Lei and the PowerYou team have developed an agentic coach engine, Kris, designed to be a daily companion rather than a sporadic – and often disorganized – effort.
Whereas traditional LLMs reset between sessions, the New York-based startup uses its proprietary personal memory graph to act as a witness to users’ growth, integrating evidence-based frameworks like Internal Family Systems (IFS), body-based Somatic work, and Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) directly into its core logic to move each user past rumination and into action.
The platform has also been designed to remove fears of judgment; instead of a cold, robotic and distant app, users feel engaged and supported 24/7, with PowerYou remembering individual progress and experiences.
Keeping pace with people’s needs and behaviors
Lei stresses that the most surprising shift she’s observed is seeing users treat PowerYou as a daily self-management partner; they leverage its integrated AI coach to “warm up” before difficult decisions, or simply to decompress following intense workdays.
This is a broader shift in the wellness and coaching ecosystem: the app is becoming a reliable virtual shoulder to lean on. Meanwhile, the growing market for consistent, context-aware partnerships – for both small and big moments – continues to shape the decisions and lifestyles individuals commit to.
Importantly, AI bypasses the Social Desirability Bias, our innate drive to present a perfect version of oneself to others. Lei and her team have thus seen a level of radical honesty that is rarely achieved in traditional settings – or via previous tools.
Users often reach a depth of closure with PowerYou.AI in minutes that would typically take weeks of rapport-building with a human coach and, by removing the fear of judgement, the platform collapses the time-to-truth, allowing users to drop the social mask and get straight to the action required for growth.
PowerYou.AI is fulfilling what other apps fail to do: existing in the gap between sessions, not just during them. With the app, users can take a proactive approach to building their mental strength, achieving the fortitude to move through each day and the various chapters of life with resilience.
The end goal is for the app to function as an invisible thread that makes mental fitness as frictionless as its physical counterpart, intervening in the moments that matter most before disaster strikes.
Featured image: Vivian Lei, courtesy of PowerYou.AI
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.
