The founders have spent a lot of time in recent years trying to create practical consumer use cases for AI and machine learning. AI startup Advocate believes the technology could help people apply for benefits from the federal government more easily.
The New York-based startup was founded by Emilie Poteat, who got the idea after watching her stepfather struggle to get Social Security benefits. Despite being eligible, it was a complicated process for him to apply and even when he did, he spent months waiting to hear back. Years later, Poteat realized that artificial intelligence might be able to improve this process.
Poteat came on the TechCrunch Found podcast this week to discuss why automating the application process using artificial intelligence could help many people get easier access to government benefits. He also talked about why government benefits is the perfect place to build an AI model because of the wealth of documentation, policies and data that a closed-loop system could learn from.
He shared what it was like talking to the government about creating an additional third party to their existing infrastructure and why the government seems open to working with an outside organization rather than developing the technology themselves.
This episode also deals with the company formation process for Poteat and Advocate, as the startup is not yet fully launched. Poteat also talked about raising funds for the startup and how she’s had better luck with companies that want to back moonshots than companies that focus on women and LGBTQ+ founders like herself.
Poteat hopes that eventually the company will be able to help anyone who qualifies for any government benefit have an easier time applying, and plans to begin expanding into more government benefit industries shortly after launch.
“It wasn’t that the government wanted to take people, it was that a piece of infrastructure was missing, like a bridge or a road, but technological infrastructure that would stand between the American public and their federal government,” Poteat said. “So we started building it.”
