Welcome to Global Good’s Impact Interview series. This series is designed to tell the stories of the people and companies working to drive impact in society.
In this edition, we speak with Alan Hayling, co-founder and CEO of YourAvatar.ai — about applying AI to one of the quieter crises of modern life, why ethical guardrails on personal data matter more than the technology itself, and how a system originally built to ease loneliness in care homes has found an unexpected second life in education.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I’m Alan Hayling, one of the co-founders of YourAvatar.ai, and its CEO. My background is in television — I was Head of Documentaries at the BBC and prior to that a documentary commissioning editor at Channel 4. But around twenty years ago I left the BBC to found a start-up TV company, Renegade Pictures, which grew very quickly and after five years was acquired for several million dollars by Warner Brothers. So YourAvatar is my second start-up.
I work closely with the two other co-founders: Ian O’Gara, who has a deep knowledge of AI and the technology behind it, and Alexis Price, our Director of New Business, who, like me, has a background as a senior executive in television. The three of us make decisions together — alongside one of our major angel investors, who represents them all on our board — and we collectively drive the company forward.
How did your company come about, and what was the motivation behind it?
The idea for the company came from personal experience. We were increasingly aware through friends and family that more and more elderly people were facing crises of isolation and loneliness, particularly those who had to be looked after in a care home. We thought it might help break the feeling of isolation if residents of care homes could have 24/7 access, via their laptops, tablets or mobile phones, to fully interactive lifelike digital twins of their loved ones — their partner, children, grandchildren or best friends. These AI-powered avatars would act as companions to the care home resident when a real human couldn’t be there.
My co-founder, Ian O’Gara, is an expert in the deployment of artificial intelligence in the public sector, primarily in policing and national security. Together, just over a year and a half ago, we formed the company and set about developing an avatar system that would be user-friendly and cost-effective for the elderly and their families.
We started by building a digital twin of Ian. It took around three weeks, worked only on a laptop, cost us around £10,000, and although it looked and sounded just like Ian, it took nearly a minute to answer any question. Despite these deficiencies, we trained “digital Ian” to talk about our business plan and to answer questions from potential investors about the company. They were astonished — and we were able to raise just over three hundred thousand pounds.
With those funds, we have transformed the system. It now takes just two minutes for anyone to build their own digital twin, the creation process costs nothing, it answers questions in less than a second, and it converses fluently and with emotional intelligence. It also now works on phones and tablets as well as laptops. We are currently turning the beta version of our system into an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which we will launch to care home groups and families in May 2026.
So to answer your question about motivation: we wanted to deploy AI — which is so controversial and which is raising many concerns — for an entirely positive social purpose, while also building a substantial and profitable commercial company.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
We are deeply aware that our system is dealing with some of people’s most precious data — not just by reproducing their face and voice, but by learning about their lifetime experience, their favourite music, shared experiences, and memories. And we know — as I mentioned above — that people are apprehensive about artificial intelligence and, in particular, large language models. So for us it is essential to have the highest possible ethical standards, particularly in relation to privacy and data security.
We have said that we will never sell or commercialise in any way our users’ data, which immediately marks us out from some of the leading AI companies. All data will remain in the ownership and control of our users, and they can decide to delete it from the system at any point they choose.
So building trust with users, and only using AI for social good, are the values at the heart of our company.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
As the population ages and longevity increases, increasing numbers of us are needing to be looked after in a care home. In the UK there are over 10,000 care homes, and over 1 million people living with dementia. That number is predicted to double by 2040. Right now, globally, it’s estimated that 34 million people have been diagnosed with dementia.
The consequence is the increasing crisis of isolation and loneliness I’ve already mentioned. That’s because it’s increasingly difficult for loved ones to make frequent and regular visits to their relative in a care home. In previous generations, they might have lived close by, but the modern world isn’t like that. People live much further away from their children and grandchildren — sometimes on a different continent. And with busy jobs and children of their own, adult children can’t visit their parent in a care home as often as they would like. The consequence is that the relative feels lonely, and the loved ones feel guilty.
And that’s where our digital twins can make a real difference.
But it has turned out that eldercare is not the only positive social use of our unique interactive, human-like avatar system. We have been approached by educationalists concerned that inequalities in academic achievement are being exacerbated by the access to homework and revision tutors enjoyed by the children of middle-class and wealthier parents — an advantage unaffordable by the less well-off. We were asked to develop an avatar-based homework tutor that would be more widely affordable. Our pilot studies with pupils and teachers in a state school and in a private school have been hugely successful.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
In relation to eldercare, a key part of the process of building our MVP is to carry out extensive testing with elderly users before its launch — both to ensure that the user interface is easy to use, and that the avatar works to ameliorate loneliness and isolation. We do recognise that independent assessment is vital, and consequently we are currently conducting a trial in a care home with a leading team of academics to gauge how much of a difference using an AI-powered avatar makes to feelings of loneliness among elderly residents.
However, we have already trialled the prototype on people with significant memory loss who, after using it, have used terms such as “life changing” and “the best idea I’ve ever come across for people in my situation.”
In assessing the homework tutor application, the schools themselves have been asked to measure the effect on homework tasks carried out by their pupils of using the avatar tutor, using a matrix designed by one of the educationalists involved in the project.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
That’s a difficult question to answer. Like many new technologies, AI can have profoundly positive — and also potentially very negative — consequences. It is already resulting in jobs disappearing, particularly for young people at the start of their careers. And with the ability of large language models to mimic creativity, it can have wider negative ramifications.
Equally, as in our application, it can enhance and enrich the human experience. Technology can dramatically improve medical care, diagnosis, and the development of new pharmaceutical treatments. And with the ability of humans throughout history to imagine completely new applications of technology — and therefore new industries and new jobs — there is real potential for positive social progress.
The key things will be regulation: to minimise the real harms that developing technologies could cause, and to encourage positive developments. At YourAvatar.ai, we are strongly in favour of the regulation of artificial intelligence.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use tech for good and positively impact the world?
My advice is to be persistent. Starting a company is hard — really hard. You’ll face obstacle after obstacle. But knowing that you are trying to deploy technology to do good in the world is a big help as you develop resilience to weather the knock-backs and disappointments. With ambition and persistence, you will succeed in both building a profitable company and creating that positive impact that got you started in the first place.
YourAvatar.ai is operating in one of the most ethically charged corners of consumer AI — the recreation of human likeness, voice, and memory. What makes the company’s approach interesting is not the sophistication of the technology itself, but the deliberate decisions about what not to do with it: never to sell user data, never to retain control of it, and never to deploy the system in contexts where the social value is not clearly defined.
That restraint is rare in a sector where the temptation to monetise personal data is enormous and where the line between augmentation and exploitation is often thin. By starting with a problem most of society has quietly accepted — the loneliness of older people in care, separated from family by geography and circumstance — and refusing to broaden the use case beyond what the ethics can support, Alan and his co-founders are demonstrating that the most consequential design choices in AI are not technical. They are moral.
Whether the avatars themselves change how families stay connected across distance remains to be seen. But the principle that user data should belong to the user, and that AI products should be assessed by what they enable people to feel — rather than what they enable companies to extract — is one the wider industry would do well to take seriously.
