Evals-Driven Development for a Mental Health AI Coach — Akele Reed & Dave Revere, SonderMind
SonderMind built a clinically grounded AI mental health coach using evals-driven development for safety.
“General purpose LLMs however are not built for mental health care which has resulted in some very tragic events.”
SonderMind, a mental health company serving over a million people, has built 'Sonder,' a purpose-built AI coach designed to fill the gap between general-purpose LLMs and clinically safe mental health support. The talk covers their evals-driven engineering approach to ensure safety in high-stakes domains, driven by the finding that 77% of psychologists report patients already using AI for mental health. This is a notable case study in responsible AI deployment for sensitive use cases, with real architectural and evaluation lessons for teams building AI in regulated or safety-critical domains.