Designing an AI companion that understands where you are, where you're going, and what might help you get there.

MyGooru already had years of intelligence around learners — their goals, beliefs, progress, competencies and personalized pathways.

But the way people interacted with AI was changing. ChatGPT and Claude had made conversation a familiar interface for intelligence. That opened a different question for us:

What if users didn't have to navigate the system to find what they needed? What if the system could understand their context and meet them there?

That became the Companion. But this couldn't just be another chatbot.

A learner asking “What should I learn next?” needs something fundamentally different from an instructor asking “Who in my class needs help?” The challenge became designing one Companion experience around different people, contexts and goals.

Learner — help me move forward. Start learning from almost anywhere. The Companion understands the learner through their context, beliefs, goals, progress and Portrait of a Graduate — connecting them to pathways, nudges and relevant next steps.

Instructor — help me understand my learners. See where learners are, identify who may need support, receive recommendations, assign activities and get suggestions for what could help them move forward.

Mentor — help me guide my mentees. Understand a mentee's progress, learning journey and pathways without having to reconstruct their context from scratch.

The Companion can be conversational, but conversation isn't the product. The intelligence behind it is.

As someone uses MyGooru, the system builds an evolving understanding of who they are, what they believe, where they are, where they're going and how they might get there.

Instead of every conversation beginning from zero, this context carries into what happens next.

The Companion doesn't simply generate the next piece of content from a prompt.

Behind the experience, EcPA rules help determine what content should come next based on the learner and their evolving context. That means a pathway isn't just a static sequence.

For the learner, the experience can feel simple. Underneath, the system is continuously deciding what is relevant next.

Because the Companion carries context, learning doesn't have to begin from a traditional course page.

A learner can enter from a question, an interest, a pathway, an activity or something happening in their current context. The Companion connects that moment back to the larger learning journey.

This was an important shift from designing navigation around where content lives to designing an experience around where the learner currently is.

Start anywhere

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Understand context

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Connect to pathway

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Continue learning

For a learner, the Companion looks inward: Where am I? What should I explore next?

For an instructor, it looks across learners: Where is everyone? Who needs my attention? What can I do?

For a mentor, it follows the individual over time: How is my mentee progressing? Where might I support them?

The underlying learning system remains connected. The perspective changes.

The work started with Learner, Instructor and Mentor, but the underlying idea wasn't inherently limited to education. It could apply to very different kinds of journeys.

That eventually became important as we began exploring the Companion across other domains.

But Learning was where we first had to make that intelligence feel understandable, contextual and useful to the person using it.

Working on the Companion changed how I think about AI products.

The interesting part wasn't designing a chat interface. It was designing how an intelligent system becomes understandable to the person using it — while much of the complexity, rules and reasoning continue underneath.

The interface became simpler. The system behind it became more contextual.