When Should We Use AI?

It's impossible to do anything these days without coming across AI.

Something I've been debating a lot over recent months whilst building Naked is whether to, and where to, use AI (for now we’re largely talking about the generative type - not agentic).

Mental Health is an interesting field when it comes to AI, there are lots of risks and dangers, but equally the global mental health crisis is so far reaching that it arguably can't be solved with people alone - technology solutions have an ability to reach scale and cross global borders in a way that people alone can’t.

That being said, we should still be very careful when introducing AI functionality, and it's important to ensure that users understand where it is being used and for what purpose. At first I thought this might not matter so long as we were giving users what they want, but the more I read and hear about security breaches and privacy concerns surrounding AI, the more I think people do want to know this (especially with personal or health related information). And I want Naked to live the core principles behind the name - being raw, open and honest in everything we do. If we think people won’t like it, we probably shouldn’t be doing it.

At this stage in the Naked journey, and I think for some time - open chatbot based anxiety, stress and panic support is not the direction I want to go in. What I do think, and where I've landed on is a halfway house - using AI in a controlled and fixed response pattern to help a user get to the content they need as quickly as possible.

AI can do a great job at taking information from different sources and applying a level of logic to that which can be very useful in our use case. For example, if we know what a users name is, how anxiety shows up for them (their symptoms) and what usually causes anxiety (their triggers) - we can draw insight that can be used to present the most relevant content from our database in an accessible and personalised way.

I think one of the most important objectives of an app like Naked is to get someone to something that will help them as quickly as possible, so anything that helps us do that is valuable.

People are becoming more aware of the downsides of AI and using it in your product isn't necessarily going to be seen as a good thing by default.

The key message here is making sure that we're using technology where it delivers an outcome our user wants, not just using technology for the sake of it or so we can stick an "AI" label on our product.