How a Lifesaving Chatbot Prompted AI Empathy Solutions for Marketing and Customer ServiceHow a Lifesaving Chatbot Prompted AI Empathy Solutions for Marketing and Customer Service
The Trevor Project’s AI innovation helped save lives by scaling counselor training. Now, two of its former execs have created ReflexAI, a tech tool designed to bring empathy to marketing and customer conversations.
June 26, 2025
In 2015, youth waited as long as 75 minutes on the hotline for The Trevor Project, the leading provider of suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth.
“That was really hard for young people who really needed care in that moment,” says John Callery-Coyne, who was senior vice president of technology for the organization.
The Trevor Project faced a scalability problem. Counselors needed about 40 hours of training before they could take a call, and getting sufficient one-on-one role play experiences was difficult.
Enter an early generative AI program created in partnership with Google — the Crisis Contact Simulator. It allowed The Trevor Project to go from training 40 counselors per quarter to 600 per month. TIME magazine named the revolutionary chatbot as one of the top 100 inventions of 2021.
A year later, John co-founded ReflexAI with his co-worker Sam Dorison at The Trevor Project. Now they help organizations and businesses use the power of AI and empathy to foster better conversations, from high-stakes topics to call center responses.
Learn more about what they’re doing and the role empathy plays in John's engaging presentation, How Generative AI is Helping Improve Empathy and Outcomes, at the Marketing & Analytics Data Science conference. Watch the video above.
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