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Thursday, 9 April 2026 |
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Everyone has a mental health chatbot. Now what? |
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| AI chatbots are no longer enough to stand out in mental health. |
| Plenty of companies have been building them for therapy, adding them as part of the virtual services they offer. It's not that they aren't working. It's that they may risk working a bit too well,
Jo Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of mental health chatbot startup Wysa, told me. |
| That can make users grow dependent so that AI might end up driving more mental health issues in the future, she said. It’s the reason she’s moving her company away from being just a chatbot for users to share their feelings with. Instead, Wysa, which last raised a $20 million Series B in 2022, is looking at broader ways of expanding mental health support to stay competitive. |
| Wysa is working on using AI to train non-clinicians to act like social workers and support frontline workers in underserved areas, funded by local governments and grants in places like rural India. Rather than immediately sending people to an overloaded crisis hotline after detecting a crisis, the goal is to instead teach users coping skills to stabilize them. |
| Wysa also wants to sell to employers, but not as a traditional health tech tool. It plans to use AI to anonymously gauge overall employee mental health after employees chat with it, citing research that has shown people tend to feel more comfortable sharing with AI. The idea is to provide employers with a candid look into morale, flagging trends — such as employees feeling bogged down by too many meetings — for the company to act on. |
| AI for administrative tasks has already faded into the background as the default. And now, as chatbots become table stakes, we’ll be watching to see what other ways companies will explore to stay competitive. |
| - Ngai |
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Where data are flowing |
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This chart from Rock Health caught our eye this week for mapping out all the connection points between health data from sources like wearables, medical records and labs to consumer AI tools. It’s interesting to see the different data sources laid out in one place. I wonder how different this might look a year (even a few months) from now. |
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This week in health Тech |
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Telehealth providers including Ro, GoodRx and WeightWatchers are launching Eli Lilly’s weight loss pill Foundayo. The companies previously were part of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill launch in January. Amazon Pharmacy said Thursday that it’s planning to include Lilly’s pill in its in-office pharmacy kiosks, too. |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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