Innovator of the Week: Jefferson Roc’s Company Uses AI to Provide Mental Health Support

This series is part of Avenue‘s innovation newsletter. Sign up to get more news about Calgary’s innovation scene delivered directly to your inbox.

Jefferson Roc’s life has shaped his current entrepreneurial journey. Like many people, Roc has experienced mental health struggles. He also immigrated to Canada from Haiti in 1989. Because of experiences like these, Roc believes that mental health support should be culturally inclusive and provided by professionals with similar lived experiences to their clients.

In 2024, he launched his startup PeerX.AI, an AI-enhanced mental health program that allows users to have one-on-one, confidential conversations with peer support specialists online. While the peer support specialists go through a hiring process conducted by humans, the AI operates in multiple ways once they’re ready to speak with clients: it evaluates the peer support specialists for their soft skills and monitors them to make sure they adhere to their training, it matches users with specialists who have similar cultural and social lived experiences, and it monitors the conversations between users and specialists and suggests resources or makes recommendations to the user based on their needs.

According to Roc, while there are no standardized guidelines for peer support specialists in Canada, specialists who work with PeerX.AI follow the startup’s mental health guidelines which are based on certifications from Peer Support Canada and the Canadian Mental Health Association. He hopes this software will help destigmatize conversations about mental health and create safer spaces for sensitive conversations.

“We want to eradicate mental health stigma, and we want to decrease death by suicide,” says Roc. “We believe both can be achieved if we can increase the number of safe conversations people are having.”

In 2024, the business-to-business software was selected as one of eight startups for the Canadian Technology Accelerator program for digital health to be exported for use in the U.S.

The post Innovator of the Week: Jefferson Roc’s Company Uses AI to Provide Mental Health Support appeared first on Avenue Calgary.