Sapia.ai has today announced the launch of Phai, an AI-powered career coach underpinned by new research into how people experience career uncertainty and mobility in a changing world of work.
The launch is accompanied by analysis of more than 1,000 real conversations with Phai during its trial phase, offering rare insight into people’s willingness to use AI for career guidance, and what they’re seeking to gain.
Across the conversations analysed, almost two-thirds (63%) of users sought help changing career direction. Notably, 43% were mid- to late-career professionals, highlighting that career uncertainty isn’t just limited to those early in their working lives.
Rather than asking which roles they were qualified for, many users were focused on more fundamental questions: how to articulate their experience, where their strengths really lie and what realistic options might be available to them in a changing workplace.
Confidence gaps, lack of clarity, and uncertainty about direction emerged as the most common themes.
“These conversations show that career mobility isn’t just about matching CVs to job descriptions,” said Barb Hyman, CEO and co-founder of Sapia.ai “People aren’t stuck because opportunities don’t exist. They’re stuck because they can’t see a path forward. That becomes a problem for employability — which is a huge concern for Government.”
The findings challenge traditional approaches to talent intelligence, internal mobility, and workforce planning. Despite significant investment in internal job boards and talent marketplaces, many employees struggle to engage with systems that assume confidence, clarity, and the ability to actually find the roles they’re suited to.
Phai was designed to explore how conversational, reflective AI could help bridge this gap by starting with the individual rather than the role. Through structured dialogue, Phai helps people articulate experience, reflect on strengths, and connect insights to real opportunities, including live roles within the organisation.
Built on human-centred experience at scale
Phai builds on Sapia.ai’s experience delivering more than eight million chat interviews globally, using conversational AI to humanise hiring at scale.
Through these chat-based interviews, Sapia.ai has designed experiences that invite candidates to reflect, open up, and be themselves. Organisations including Qantas, BT Group, Costa Coffee, and Holland & Barrett use this approach to assess people fairly while creating experiences candidates consistently describe as respectful and human.
“We care deeply about two things when it comes to hiring. Firstly, diversity and inclusivity, and secondly the experience of everyone who comes into contact with the Qantas brand. Our goal is to treat every candidate like we would a customer,” said Michael Eizenberg, Head of Talent Acquisition and Benefits at Qantas.
With Phai, Sapia.ai is extending this same human-first, conversational capability into career mobility, bringing clarity and dignity to how people explore what comes next.
Designed for ethical, responsible AI
Phai is built on the ethical AI principles that have guided Sapia.aisince its founding, with fairness, transparency, and human agency embedded by design.
Phai runs on Anthropic’s Claude, selected for its safety-first architecture and strength in reflective dialogue. Conversations are anonymous by design, no personal identifiers are collected, and no data is reused to train underlying models.
Sapia.ai’s approach is formalised through its FAIR™ framework, which embeds fairness, accountability, inclusivity, and explainability into every model and workflow, ensuring AI supports people rather than replacing human judgement.
Sapia.ai is now extending Phai from a public learning experiment into an enterprise-ready capability, helping organisations strengthen employer brand, improve alignment before application, and enable internal mobility at scale.
To read the full research report, Inside 1,000+ AI Career Coach Conversations,
