The Palo Alto-based edtech nonprofit CareerVillage has for years helped provide career guidance to students and people early in their careers.

Now, the organization is experimenting with harnessing generative AI to offer interactive career coaching to an even broader audience. CareerVillage worked with a coalition of nonprofits to develop its AI career coach (dubbed, simply enough, “Coach”), which provides users with help drafting résumés and cover letters, interpreting job descriptions, exploring different careers, and staging mock job interviews.

“When we saw the latest developments in large language models, we knew that there was huge potential to take a lot of the career coaching that we’ve overseen and bring that into an even more personalized format and something that’s really scalable,” says Jared Chung, CareerVillage’s founder and executive director.

Coach is slated for closed beta testing this summer, with CareerVillage and its partner nonprofits planning to review feedback from users, educators, parents, and others and begin work on a public version of the AI bot this fall.

Together with CareerVillage, the coalition behind Coach—a group that includes Year Up, known for its job training program, AVID, Mentor California, and the San Francisco Unified School District—is working to make sure the AI bot has been fed a steady diet of high-quality career information via member groups’ existing documents and datasets. That strong source material should mean Coach is less likely to hallucinate faulty advice, and ensure that it can provide links to relevant resources as users interact with it.

CareerVillage, which emphasizes providing services to underrepresented groups, intends to provide Coach’s services for free to students, though school districts and other agencies that use the program may pay a fee. Chung emphasizes the tool isn’t meant to replace existing career courses and coaches, but to democratize access to resources that it can provide. He anticipates Coach can also be used in conjunction with existing courses, with teachers assigning coursework that involves working with Coach.

The organizations behind Coach are also taking steps to ensure the coaching system is compatible with multiple AI providers and models, with models and prompts chosen or crafted for each activity. “There’s an interesting and complex prompt structure that you have to put together for this kind of system to work,” Chung says.

Over time, CareerVillage hopes to expand the menu of activities that Coach can provide, as well as potentially adding additional nonprofits to the coalition. If additional nonprofits join the coalition, their resources can also be added to the system, as can whatever AI models prove best for any future tasks, Chung says.

“We’ve made a lot of products over the years at Career Village,” he says. “To our great surprise, building an AI career coach is one of the builds that has gone the smoothest.”