Beenova AI

At Beenova AI (part of Meet Anna, LLC) we build personalized AI mentors to teach and measure 21st century skills in local languages. Girls and women across Africa lack access to training for these skills.

In Phase Two of our rollout, we will include Gender-Based Training directed at Boys and Men.

STEP 1: The first "touchpoint" - where a learner meets her AI mentor, Ira - is through joint deployment with strategic program partners (corporations, job centers, higher education institutes). Ira stays with the learner throughout her journey.

STEP 2: Each learner embarks on a personalized learning journey that meets her needs specifically. The AI Mentor Ira understands skills gaps and serves relevant learning content to immediately close gaps. Learning is tracked against essential skills that allow users to build billable skills.

STEP 3: Women and girls multiply these skills amongst their teams and communities.

Africa: Across Africa, girls are systematically excluded from quality education. From not being able to go to school as a result of unsafe environments at school (rape, harassment, unsanitary toilets), to not having access to menstrual pads, in addition to facing harmful cultural barriers, girls are excluded from access to quality education. 

Women are overworked, underpaid and wear an enormous amount of ‘hats’ - undue burdens of elderly care, child care, and domestic work in addition to driving incomes, mean women are unable to progress against Future Skill demands. This is further exacerbated by unsafe relationships with unsupportive partners.

Women and girls have always faced employment inequality - from lack of access to quality education, to an unbalanced burden from unequal societal expectations, to reduced opportunities for equitable work opportunities, to bias in hiring and salary increases. 

Covid-19 has made this situation dramatically worse. 

Women are over represented in essential services, make up two thirds of healthcare workforce globally and serve as 90% of long-term care workers. 

Women are more likely to work in sectors that have been shut down, more often have zero-hour contracts or work part-time and are more likely to have low-paid jobs.

What is it? Beenova AI uses personalized AI Mentors to teach and measure Future Skills and Entrepreneurship across the African continent. Ira speaks over 100 languages, works on every popular platform (Microsoft Teams, G-Suite, WhatsApp, Slack), and supports job seekers and skills development from start to finish. Our unique combination of both practical teaching (billable skills) in addition to mindset management, equips each woman and girl with access to her financial freedom and an empowered life.

What does it do? Beenova AI's mentor, Ira, follows three simple steps:

Step 1: Ira builds a personality profile of each user, tracking skill gaps and a talent profile

Step 2: Ira does a daily mindset check-in 

Step 3: Ira serves personalized learning content directly related to the learners needs

Processes and Technology: Beenova AI uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to build effective and open-ended discourse with the user. 

Expectations: We expect our groundbreaking technology, built with accessibility, scalability and sustainability in mind, can change the Future of Work in Africa.

Target population: Our target audience is women and girls across the African continent, starting in Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Kenya and Mauritius.

Needs: The majority of female workers across the continent operate in retail, hospitality and domestic work. We aim to provide women and girls with skills beyond these roles, in order to increase their potential and reach across the continent. Girls do not have access to quality education, our low-cost, sustainable and scalable solutions solves this problem.

Engagement: Global experience, particularly over 15 years in Africa in various capacities (United Nations, technology, education and entrepreneurship) means we have prioritized engagement with local communities. We have successfully launched mGirls, which gathered feedback from over 65,000 girls in the first month alone, gathering feedback on experiences. We successfully launched Girls & Football, which taught girls life skills for better economic prosperity. 

Solution addresses needs: Our solution immediately addresses the needs women and girls have by:

1) Addressing skill gaps

2) Building relevant skills in real-time;

3) Providing immediate, micro learning in an entrepreneur's native language  makes high quality engagements with the AI Mentor effective and exponential. 

African Economic Outlook, 2017

Beenova AI:

1) Enables Women and Girls to have access to personalized learning journeys in their native language;

2) Can be deployed across any platform, removing the barrier of accessibility (our WhatsApp solution requires zero additional data purchases);

3) According to our research based on Forrester's TEI™ Methodology, personalized learning and 21st century skills are the single most important factors in Future of Work learning. We make both factors accessible.

 4) Includes an audience of Men and Boys in Phase Two rollout. We have interviewed near 800 boys for best-selling book “Tackled!” and know this is a two-way conversation.

Our competition comes in many forms, around the areas of learning, assessment and performance improvement. Companies in this space include LMS, Assessment, Micro-learning and LXP, as it can been seen in the picture below (© Josh Bersin Academy).

1. Uses the latest AI (Deep Learning) to create a human-based interaction with the technology of our AI mentors;
2. Can be deployed in any communication or collaboration platform with an API, rather than creating its own platform and therefore can be used by everyone without new software installation and at no cost;
3. Is made to understand one's level vs. 21st century skills that equip the learners for the future of work; and
4. Takes advantage of any learning content in the public domain from sources ranging from MIT TR and HBR to Singularity University and Inc.com, lowering costs for content development and/or licensing

The core technology that powers our solution is Deep Learning. We train the latest Deep Learning algorithms on datasets designed and compiled by us in order to create an AI mentor that can interact with learners much like a human mentor would. The AI mentor understands the skills one is lacking and finds content that this individual would like to interact with. 

The whole experience is open-ended (not like a chatbot, but like a conversation with a human) and most learners mention that they feel they have a personal connection with the AI mentor. There have been many cases where it is hard to understand that an AI and not a human is communicating with you (which effectively means that our system passes the Turing Test in these cases).

Moreover, advances in Deep Learning in the last 2 years have improved our solution dramatically, and we expect that this field will continue to grow and allow us to improve our solution, aiming at a more human-like connection and experience.

Last but not least, we have built our AI mentor as a brain that can communicate with users on different platforms. Therefore, a core technology that is powering this is the growth of the communication and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slackand WhatsApp, where users can have a live discussion with our AI mentor, as they would with a human.

Advances in Deep Learning have made it more mainstream in the last 2 years. Some examples of other applications of the technology we use are:

• AI beating humans in reading comprehension (Stanford Question Answering Dataset-SQuAD challenge) with various algorithms involved (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and many Universities etc)
• AI from Facebook that can blend personality, empathy and knowledge in a conversational way
• AI being able to generate original works of art sold at Christie's

Therefore, the important piece in the puzzle is not if the technology works - not only it does, but it becomes better and more commoditized every week! The important piece is how we can design systems to use these algorithms in a safe, inclusive, ethical and human-based way. It is our view that the data structures and data collected during this design is what would be key in delivering value to humans. 

The long-term outcome of this solution is an increased number of girls and women with access to viable and rewarding livelihood options. 

To achieve that goal, we identified two preconditions: women and girls need to have relevant skills (1) and good jobs or know-how on creating other forms of income need to be available (2). 

To gain relevant skills, women and girls need to have access to quality education and training (3) as well as the opportunity of practical on the job learning (4). 

In Africa, 90% of the firms are one-person ventures and women in Africa are twice as likely to start a business as women elsewhere in the world. As long as those businesses are unable to grow, and women still experience gender bias in formal education and employment, women will continue to start businesses for survival and lack of formal employment opportunities rather than as a conscious career path. To have bigger and more successful businesses that will hire and develop other women (5), we need more skilled and successful female entrepreneurs to build those businesses as well as less biased hiring procedures globally (6). 

In our solution, women sign up for a Beenova Mentor to learn 21st century skills to gain employment or start and build a successful business (7). 

The organisations we partner up with have worked directly with women in communities across Africa. They will hold community events to address the opportunity to develop skills through the Beenova Mentorship programme to help them build the skills and confidence at their own time and pace, around their other responsibilities (8).

Beenova AI - scalable, sustainable AI and EI mentors will be accessible on their own devices on easy-to-access platforms and will teach them Future of Work and entrepreneurial skills. Through a personalized learning journey the AI Mentor understands skills gaps and serves relevant learning content to immediately and effectively close gaps. Focusing on good leadership, these females will employ and hire other women and multiply these skills amongst them (9).

Our solution is extremely scalable, because it is based on widely used communication platforms and personalized, automated AI mentors. Where direct interest exists amongst corporations, higher education institutions and governments, we can easily scale to 10s of millions of people.

Currently serving: 3000 and growing fast

Serving in one year: 100K+

Serving in five years: 10s of millions, depending on interest from organizations and governments (beyond our B2B scope)

What are your goals within the next year and within the next five years?

ONE YEAR:

• Deploy Beenova AI across priority countries in Africa reaching 20 - 30% of Girls and Women

• Help governments, companies and learning organizations provide quality education and prepare their female workforce for the Future of Work

• Provide immediate relief for the global unemployment crisis

• Create unique data sets regarding mental health, emotional awareness and learning preferences

FIVE YEARS:

• Our long-term goals are to change the world, by developing human capital to the fullest degree and ensuring Women and Girls have increased access to quality education and support

• To upskill entrepreneurs and help them support their employees and their employees' families and communities

• To include Men and Boys in this work (Phase Two)

Financial

• We have experience with NPO and for-profit models

• We understand a for-profit model with investment through MIT Solve from partners aligned with our mission will help us exponentially accelerate our growth

Technical

• We have fully developed the technology - ready to go!

• We have a plan for product improvement, in addition to a team of demo testers that provide constant feedback

• As we are a year old start-up, we turn solutions around quickly and efficiently

• Internet connectivity creates challenges for platform interactions

• Device inequality might make the platform harder to use on certain devices

Cultural 

• We understand cultural barriers are deeply engrained in traditional systems and may withhold the level of conversation we need around skills development and innovation market business

• Through years of work on the African continent, we have a strong network of relevant partners - from NGOs, to corporates, to universities, to thought-leaders/role models - that we can leverage

Market barriers: 

• Right now, we work with the most innovative, human-based application of AI technology right now - in the past year, we have noticed that the understanding of AI and AI application is very limited 

• We see this as a challenge as the unknown may cause apprehension in user adoption

• However, we have researched the priorities of organizations participating in this challenge, and we are confident we can deploy strategically throughout the right partner networks and engagements

Financial

• Work with strategic partners and use the MIT Solve prize to accelerate our growth

Technical

• Continue to work on our technology and improve our algorithms

• Further develop Beenova's AI capacity

Cultural 

• Continue growing our multi-cultural team

• Request input from a variety of stakeholders

• Work with a wide range of product testers

Market barriers: 

• Conduct research to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate market changes where / if possible

• Use global dissonance as an opportunity for innovation 

Beenova AI is part of Meet Anna LLC. At Meet Anna LLC the team has worked on numerous globally recognized, award-winning initiatives with at the heart of what we do the intersection of education, technology and diversity and inclusion.

Full time: 2

Part time: 4

Contractors: 2

We have an all-female development team. 

Jos is CEO and co-founder of Beenova AI, founder award-winning NGO Girls & Football, two-time author, Faculty of Exponential Education at SingularityU. She grew up in 12 countries, four in Africa. Jos was selected as a 50 Global Heroes Ending Violence Against Children (alongside others like Hilary Clinton and Maria Eitel), a 2019 Woman To Watch, a Women Deliver Young Leader, a Nike Girl Effect Challenge winner, a Microsoft YouthSpark winner, an Ashoka Changemaker, and has spoken at global events: TEDx, to Glowork, to WEF: Women in Leadership.

In 2009, Antonios Kondis founded Icarus Sports, which now has more than 50 employees and hundreds of clients reaching more than 170 countries. Antonios' second company, a HFT AI system for predictions markets, is currently trading $40m+/year with his own funds and growing (~5x in 2018 vs. 2017). Using AI, he managed to simulate the work of a team of more than 1000 sports prediction experts, using the latest Supervised Machine Learning (SML) algorithms. The system captures billions of data points to make sub-millisecond predictions and handles 100s of thousands of orders per day.

Dewi has been involved with research around entrepreneurship, job creation and gender in Africa for over a decade. From understanding obstacles in education for girls to the role of cities in job creation, Dewi has developed a unique understanding of the obstacles, players and mechanisms impacting job creation and entrepreneurship in Africa. She has worked with award-winning NGOs, the World Bank and the University of Oxford.  

• MIT EF Greece: We were a finalist in MIT EF Challenge for startups
• Microsoft: We are certified Microsoft Partners
• Google: We are Google Certified Educators (Level 2)
• SingularityU: We are part of the Future of Exponential Education team at SingularityU
• Abundance360: We partnered with Peter Diamandis, Abundance360, on a session re the Future of Education 
• xEdu: We partook in a program called xEdu, based in Helsinki, Finland

Previous partners for Meet Anna based projects and others include:

• Nike Girl Effect Challenge
• Women Deliver
• Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Ashoka
• Sprinklr
• Miro Forestry
• FIFA
• South African Institute for Entrepreneurship
• Pick 'n Pay
• Socionext

We consist of both for-profit and not-for-profit models and products.

Henceforth, we are prioritizing our focus on for-profit ventures in order to decrease our leverage of outside grants and funding.

Our core product, Beenova AI, is sold under a recurring fee-for-service model. It costs less than a mobile phone plan and is affordable for individuals, schools, nurseries and governments in most countries in the world. For example, Europe spends ~4.7% of GDP (2017) on Education to deliver a largely outdated curricula that does not prepare children for the future. What Beenova AI asks is a few €/$ per learner per month to build a personalized learning, emotional and personality profile and direct the right content/activity to the right person at the right time. We offer packages to learning institutions (nurseries, schools etc) and caretakers with higher price points, which offer deeper, customized and more personalized insights on the learners.

We are also able to leverage an income from institutions to whom our data on financial inclusion and data never before gathered is highly beneficial.

We understand that we will work with relevant partners to devise models that allow for additional funding opportunities for Beenova AI expansion across Africa. 

Our path to financial sustainability and growth is through our B2B model which allows us to sell our product and drive revenue. We have been able to keep our expenses low as a result of working efficiently and strategically and as a result, we believe we will cover our expenses by the revenue we are already generating.

We're applying to MIT Solve because our ground-breaking technology can change the lives of millions of Women and Girls across the African continent, and will help redesign the Future of Work, change communities, countries and the world-at-large. We have a track record of experience in entrepreneurship, the Future of Work, across the African continent, and in AI. Winning MIT Solve would help us to bring our world-changing technology to a global scene faster.

The world can’t wait. We want to tackle education challenges across Africa first, because these challenges are pressing and have a direct impact on the quality of life of not only the learner, but also of those in their immediate network. 

Then, we aim to focus on upskilling unemployed people across the US.

We believe MIT Solve can help propel our solution through its network to individuals that share the vision and desire to prioritize scalability and sustainability in entrepreneurship.

Antonios, one of our co-founders is an MIT alum - we know and trust this global network for its diversity, passion and cohesion. The other co-founder, Jos Dirkx, has been a Women Deliver Young Leader (2013) - https://womendeliver.org/class... - and knows the power of such a network in making change on a global level. We would be thrilled to work with this incredible network of passionate world-changers and would make every moment count!

Finally, we have launched innovative mobile health technology across Africa before through mGirls - reaching over 60,000 girls in our first month alone.

Product/service distribution: We've built our technology in 10 months. We've worked with beta testers worldwide and we're ready to scale. We'd like to form strategic partnerships that allow us to further deliver AI to truly change the future of learning. 

Board members or advisors: The current global pandemic has made it difficult for us to leverage networking opportunities. A strategic board advisors would help forge new connections.

Legal or regulatory matters: Legal is one of the biggest expensive for an any starting company. We would like to work with strategic legal partners that can help guide us on important IP matters moving forward and that have an interested in the emerging field of AI. 

Marketing: As a startup, it's hard to justify any spend on marketing, media or exposure. We know the work we're doing is important - we'd like to share it with the world!

• Microsoft: We'd like to form a strategic partnership with Microsoft through it's Teams engagement for learning for NGO partners via Nethope and Microsoft Community Training. 
• UN Women: We've reached out to UN Women prior to applying to this MIT Solve Challenge. We would like to work with UN Women through a content partnership that allows us to leverage relevant training materials if/where required for our target audience. 
• Obama Foundation Alliance for Girls: Via previous initiatives, we signed up about two years ago for the Alliance for Girls via the website. In this case, we would like to deepen our relationship with the Foundation, as we see much potential for Beenova AI across various regions in the US, as well.
• General Motors: We understand GM has various initiatives that tie directly into our work at Beenova AI. We understand GM focuses on AI for Future Skills Learning and is exploring the space of mentors. We can help scale both these objectives, fast. 
• Vodafone: We've read about Vodafone Foundation's strategic efforts towards technology for social impact. We deliver the perfect solution against these two objectives. We are equally mindful Vodafone has an interest in entrepreneurship and education, two initiatives we can support with. 
• Cicero Impact Capital: We've worked across NGOs and for profits and we believe there are great opportunities to build IP and great tech products while also applying this technology to social good. We would be interested in working with Cicero Impact Capital to further develop these models. 

Our solution contributes to improving the lives of women and girls in several ways:

1) As we use both Artificial and Emotional intelligence, we support not only skills development, but also help women thrive with confidence and build on their human dignity. 

2) Our solution is personalised and can be used on existing platforms, and is therefor specifically suited in addressing issues women face in access to education. This includes bias, unsafe environments and unpaid care responsibilities. By using Beenova mentors, women can access educational resources at any time from their own homes and build their educational experiences around any other responsibilities they may have. This allows women to learn and grow in order to fulfil their potential.

3) Our training materials are personalised and adapt to the interests and needs of the individual. Women and girls can engage with material made by and tailored for women and their specific interests rather than a one size fits all educational experience and provide women with critical information for their safety and well-being. Additionally, beyond just a focus on skills development, we equalize the AI playing field by ensuring more diversity in development of AI. 

4) With women reaching their full economic potential and vitality, this will also impact the communities they live in, therefor improving communities to thrive beyond the individual beneficiaries.

Like GM, we are dedicated to support marginalised groups to have access to relevant skills, including those in STEM topics, and gain access to quality employment. Like GM, we believe in the power of AI for teaching and personalised mentors for all.

A women and girls, especially in Africa, still have less access to quality education, are still more often working in lower paid jobs and often unable to progress against future skill demands, we focus on women and girls in Africa. If women have better jobs, this has a positive impact not only on them, but on their families and communities. To support women to choose non-traditional and better paying career paths, including those in STEM related topics, at their pace and timeline, we provide personalized AI mentors who teach 21st century skills through easy-to-access platforms. In addition, beyond just a focusing on skills development, education and delivery of quality learning through AI mentors, we also equalize the AI playing field by ensuring more diversity in development of AI. 

The prize and relationship with GM will allow us to 1) work with them on selecting the best content, 2) learn from and partner up with their extensive network of partners, such as Ashoka, Khan Academy and Mind Research Institute, 3) visit their head quarters to discuss scalability with their engineers and 4) work with them on providing AI mentors to their education and employability programs.

Qualification

Beenova AI is dedicated to human-based tech design of AI. We are based on the most advanced AI research in the field of Deep Learning. In order for us to be able to create AI mentors that understand and help humans develop their skills and create a better future for themselves and humanity, we have spent considerable resources into designing, testing and implementing data structures and algorithms to deliver a valuable experience for humans.

An important thing to remember when talking about Deep Learning is that the field will certainly grow in the next years. The algorithms that were cutting edge two years ago are deprecated today. However, this does not mean that AI will solve our problems automatically. Algorithms need data that are (among other things) 

• well structured to solve an important problem; 
• unbiased to limit racial, gender, age or any other bias in the available datasets and 
• collected with inclusive and diverse participation in technology in mind

Therefore, the design of AI will not only need coding expertise, but mostly human-based tech design expertise.

Use of prize money

We will be using the prize money to expand our human-based tech design team with a combination of human-centered designers, AI content writers and AI software developers, who will:

1. keep up with recent developments in Deep Learning algorithms (new ones come out almost every month!) in order to create prototypes and understand how/if the new algorithms can deliver more value to humans
2. test and productize the prototypes to deliver this value to our audience