Published on
4 min read
NextLadder Ventures, in partnership with The Bike Shop @ MIT and Anthropic, today announced the launch of a 10-week summer fellowship to build AI tools for economic mobility.
Eight graduate students from MIT and Harvard will work with four social impact organizations to build tools that learn from how each organization's most experienced advisors work, so more families get that quality of help. The fellowship recently kicked off and will run through August 19 in San Francisco and end with a Demo Day at Anthropic's San Francisco office where fellows will present the tools they built.
The program is intended to help jumpstart the development of Navigation Technology: an emerging category of people-centered, AI-powered tools that help working families overcome barriers to economic mobility and reclaim their path to prosperity. As an increasing proportion of Americans across income levels find themselves overextended and overwhelmed, Navigation Technology tools are designed to help individuals and families understand their options, connect to information and resources, and take action to recover from a setback or take advantage of an opportunity to reclaim their economic futures.
Navigation Technology is only as good as the expertise inside it, and frontline expertise is the hardest kind to capture. Building a tool that captures it and actually moves behavior takes a rare combination of technical talent and behavioral science training. The fellowship brings top talent who have both to social impact problems.
During the fellowship the graduate students will focus on four projects:
- Money Management International, one of the largest nonprofit credit counseling organizations in the country, serves over 250,000 individuals and families each year through financial counseling and debt repayment programs. Fellows are analyzing counseling conversations to find what drives clients to follow through on a debt repayment solution, then building tools that help counselors reinforce those moments.
- Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), the largest reentry employment provider in the country, serves people returning from incarceration across more than 30 cities. Fellows are building an applied AI evaluation system for CEO's AI voice agent that helps people practice for job interviews, measuring and improving the tool.
- Climb Together helps students and jobseekers from lower-income backgrounds build social capital. Fellows are building a tool that analyzes recordings of real "coffee chats" — informal conversations between jobseekers and working professionals — and gives participants targeted feedback to strengthen those connections and ultimately secure jobs.
- Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners provides one-on-one financial coaching to low-wage workers across the country. Fellows are building an AI tool that helps coaches gather better information, run stronger sessions, and guide their clients toward the right financial products.
Fellows receive technical support from Anthropic's applied AI team and product guidance from The Bike Shop. Each organization finishes with a working prototype, early user feedback, and the evidence to decide whether the approach is worth further investment.
Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures, shared, “Our goal is to catalyze a robust market for personalized tools that put families in control of their own economic progress, and equip community-essential workers who guide them through life's hardest moments with new capabilities and support. These organizations have spent decades learning what actually moves people toward greater economic mobility. The launch of this fellowship is an important milestone to test how AI-enabled Navigation Technology solutions can carry that knowledge to many more people in need, and provide more real-world evidence to guide future investments."
“At The Bike Shop, we’re focused on cultivating new AI solutions that enhance human capacity, not replace it,” said Professor Sendhil Mullainathan, who leads The Bike Shop @ MIT. “This fellowship can be a model for how we channel the rapid advances of AI toward giving more people the tools and support they need to thrive. We’re proud to support the talented, mission-driven fellows participating in this program, and we couldn’t be more excited to see what they build.”
“Core to our mission is making sure AI's benefits reach the people who need them most,” said Elizabeth Kelly, Head of Beneficial Deployments at Anthropic. “With The Bike Shop and NextLadder Ventures, we're putting Claude in the hands of eight graduate students building for credit counselors, financial coaches, and caseworkers supporting people coming home from incarceration. By Demo Day, each partner organization will have a working prototype shaped by its own frontline staff.”