Can an AI Chatbot Connect Student Survivors of Sexual Violence to Resources? — Ep 12

Isabella Kulstad: The best way to think about it is we’re kind of like a big squid where we have this knowledge body of federal regulations and emotionally intelligent trauma-informed support and just general survivor knowledge. And then for each specific campus we work with, we have a different version of the model, and that allows us to really work as a vector database more than any just large AI platform. It allows us to prevent hallucinations, it allows us to be more private, and it allows us to be really energy efficient.

Stephanie Hepburn: This is Crisis Talk. I’m your host, Stephanie Hepburn. Today, Isabella Kulstad and Dana Foss join me. While a student at Tulane University, Isabella founded Cloud IX, an AI platform designed to support students who’ve experienced sexual violence on campus. Dana is the company’s chief technology officer helping build the platform’s architecture. Today’s episode will be in two parts. The first is with Isabella on why she founded and developed Cloud IX, and the second is with Dana on how she’s helping Isabella’s vision come to fruition. Before we begin, a quick warning. This episode includes references to sexual violence, sexual assault, and rape. Let’s jump in.

Isabella Kulstad: I just graduated from Tulane about a year ago. I studied neuroscience and mathematics with a minor in philosophy. And most importantly, I’m the founder of Cloud IX, the first and most intelligent sexual violence response platform.

Stephanie Hepburn: Isabella, can you tell me about Cloud IX and the impetus of why you started it?

Isabella Kulstad: Yeah, so I had my own experience with the subject matter on January 17, 2023, when I was sexually assaulted in my college dorm room. Now, something that you’ll get throughout the rest of this interview is that I’m really bubbly, really motivated, really passionate, but I kind of lost all of that. My I didn’t want to go to my classes. I was really a shell of myself for a whole semester and kind of continuing. But as I healed, the more I talked about this with my friends, the more I realized how common this was. And national numbers reflect this. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reports that one in four college students experience sexual violence. One in three survivors drop out, and 95% of instances go unreported.

Stephanie Hepburn: When you decided to integrate AI, was it in part because of the anonymity that it provides?

Isabella Kulstad: As a survivor myself, I know how scary it is to tell someone about this experience. I know personally the um the guy who assaulted me was a member of my friend group. And I was actually assaulted the same night I broke up with my first college boyfriend. And it was really scary to talk to people because everybody I knew knew this guy, and everybody I knew had their own thoughts and feelings and opinions, and I didn’t know if they’d take my side, I didn’t know if they would believe me. And that tends to kind of be reflected. Usually, a lot of people just don’t know that they’ve been assaulted because sexual violence encompasses anything from harassment to digital or verbal abuse all the way to penetrative rape. So oftentimes people experience this, and because they’re in very various different scenarios, they tend to not know that this is something that happened to them, but still feel impacted. So anonymity is a really big benefit of using technology. I like to use the term tech-enabled triage.

Stephanie Hepburn: What makes it different than let’s say somebody going to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini?

Isabella Kulstad: I’m not an expert on the privacy backgrounds and all of the ins and outs of some of those larger models. I know that from the beginning, Cloud IX has been built to be confidential and end-to-end encrypted. So what you are saying is not going to be taken out of context, it’s not going to report for you. And there’s a lot of privacy and autonomy that therefore comes with the platform. At the same time, the focus and really the benefit of Cloud IX is that we’re able to be really campus and community specific, that because we work so intensely with the university, we know their support resources, we know what exists around the community, and we know the ins and outs of those resources. We know what this specific confidential resource provides, we know what that one provides. And though maybe those resources are brought up in a larger language model like OpenAI and ChatGPT, they’re gonna lack that kind of specificity and that emotionally intelligent trauma-informed care that Cloud IX provides.

Stephanie Hepburn: It’s more tailored to the individual or more tailored to the local community.

Isabella Kulstad: 100%. The best way to think about it is we’re kind of like a big squid where we have this knowledge body of federal regulations and emotionally intelligent trauma-informed support and just general survivor knowledge. And then for each specific campus we work with, we have a different version of the model, and that allows us to really work as a vector database more than any just large AI platform. It allows us to prevent hallucinations, it allows us to be more private, and it allows us to be really energy efficient. Our model uses 10 times less energy than a single Google search for all the back and forth that students experience and go through when talking to it.

Stephanie Hepburn: So, Isabella, how do people know about it or learn about it?

Isabella Kulstad: In order to make sure that Cloud IX is being utilized, we want to be almost everywhere. So residence halls, on bulletin boards, in syllabi, on the back of bathroom stalls. And we are actually starting to work with panhellenic organizations, and we want to work with fraternities and sororities and bars and clubs to get Cloud IX where people are already gathering.

Stephanie Hepburn: RAs, they’re mandatory reporters. How do you balance that push and pull between privacy and care?

Isabella Kulstad: I was an RA for three years at Wall Residence Hall in Tulane University. And there’s a really interesting dichotomy there because as a student, we feel a lot of the student needs and we’re really accessible for students, but we are mandatory reporters. So everything that someone tells us, if it breaks the code of conduct, we have to report. So if someone comes to me and they say, I think I’ve been assaulted, I have to say, I’m so sorry that happened. I’m going to report this for you. And that can be really scary if you don’t even know what this is yet, if you don’t want to go through the investigation. And that’s actually why a lot of students have stopped sharing this in person and have turned to AI, is because they want the power to make that decision. They want to know the next steps before they actually continue on with it. So RAs are really helpful because they get the student experience and they should be able to answer questions about student-facing software like Cloud IX.

Stephanie Hepburn: If somebody finds out about Cloud IX, what does that interaction look like? Let’s say they enter in a prompt and they say, Hey, I had this experience. I don’t know what this is, but I know I’m feeling terrible. What happens next?

Isabella Kulstad: So every single conversation is going to look different. But what remains the same is the care and compassion for the individual that is deciding to reach out and talk to Cloud IX. And Sky is the name of our model. So when a student decides to do this, we want to immediately ensure that they’re all right. And then on their terms, answer questions, make sure they’re feeling okay. And then when the time is right and when they feel it’s right, we can discuss how we can help them report, how to best write that report, what the different reporting avenues are.

Stephanie Hepburn: So Sky operates on a referral model, if I’m understanding correctly. And that means pointing people to sources tailored to their community. But does it do any interventions like cognitive behavioral interventions in the meantime? What else does it provide?

Isabella Kulstad: Our focus is on response and eventually referral, but on education as well. So we’re able to walk through different breathing exercises, different wellness and mindfulness exercises. The whole thing is trauma-informed. If someone’s saying, like, I know that I probably shouldn’t feel guilty, but I still feel this, like, what do I do? Whatever the student decides that they need is what we provide. We’re not going to force anything on them. We’re going to suggest, but the autonomy remains with the student.

Stephanie Hepburn: Where exactly is the pilot for Cloud IX? Has it been implemented? And if not, when will it be?

Isabella Kulstad: We are launching with universities in August. We’re still finalizing which ones those will be, but we’re looking for representation from universities all across the country, from the City University of New York, the California State University system, members of the SEC, the Big Ten, some community colleges, some state colleges. We’re getting a really wide sampling of universities to work with us for this pilot. We’ve recently had a very successful Kickstarter with people signed up to actually test Cloud IX and give it some feedback. And we’ve had some testing be done by Title IX coordinators and advisors within the space.

Stephanie Hepburn: It’s interesting because right now in the world of AI, speed is of the essence. It seems like it is put products out and then worry about potential consequences and pull back, for example, the sycophancy that’s happening in the general broad use, AI chatbots. It sounds like you all are doing this quite differently. Not only is the infrastructure, the core of it, your own, having open AI fill in particular gaps, but also what you all are doing is quite different in terms of the pace. And it seems incredibly thoughtful and deliberate. Can you talk about that?

Isabella Kulstad: A lot of the focus right now for AI technology is in speed and deploying as soon as possible and getting this out and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Like it’s really, really, really fast-paced. But at Cloud IX, we’re dealing with measures, and this is going to sound dramatic, but between life and death. And we’re dealing with students who may have this experience and then may consider suicide afterwards and may consider harming themselves or harming someone else. And sexual violence changes someone’s life. I mean, I know it changed mine. It causes people to leave universities, to transfer, to drop out entirely. We are dealing with something so intentional and so articulate that if we don’t apply that same approach, then we’re going to do way more harm than good. My focus has never been on making millions and millions and millions of dollars. I’ve always wanted it to be a movement and to really impact the people that it serves. So it does make us slower. It does take a little bit more time. But that like deliberate focus has really differentiated us.

Stephanie Hepburn: This could potentially shift the dialogue about sexual assault on campuses, help to eliminate or work against the barriers that exist in academic communities. What questions are you trying to answer? What areas of support are you trying to address?

Isabella Kulstad: Our big focus is increasing the connection on the campus. And mainly that comes through increasing the utilization of human resources on campus. There’s a disjunction between the university and the student, between the institution and the individual. And there has been for a while. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. I mean, particularly recently, the Department of Education is gradually shutting down. And as a result, Title IX coordinators are experiencing unprecedented levels of brain drain. And so many positions are unfulfilled. Roughly 69% of Title IX coordinators are not full-time. And of those, two and three have been in their positions for less than two years. So Title IX coordinators who are overworked, they’re underpaid. They work for the university and work on compliance first. And this is oftentimes, especially in smaller colleges, one person who’s overseeing so many different departments. They’re overseeing so much that a lot of this slip through the cracks. Some of our students that we’ve worked with at the Cal State system have noted that it takes over nine months to receive an initial consult from a Title IX coordinator because the backlog is that strong. And from the students, at that point, they’ve left the institution, they’ve graduated, they’ve transferred, they’ve dropped out, they’ve gone on summer vacation, they’ve maybe even gotten back together with the person that they write the report about. So our focus has been increasing connection and reducing the burden on these frontline workers who are being blamed for a lot of university faults by students. And at the same time, giving students voices when universities may not have the bandwidth to resort to reply to that situation.

Stephanie Hepburn: What are the common themes that you’re hearing from people who have navigated the system as it exists now on campus?

Isabella Kulstad: A lot of people just don’t feel comfortable continuing their report to a whole like a adjudication process and going through that investigation. It’s really tough and it involves months upon months of going back through your text messages and seeing the person who’s taken advantage of you over and over again. So there’s a lot of things out there that really concern themselves with that process. There’s a lot of Title IX coordinators, there’s a lot of investigative groups that focus on this. But what seemed unanimous is that after these experiences would happen, I mean, LSU in uh 2024, 2025 had a multi-million dollar lawsuit about Title IX and the mishandling and misconduct. But not a lot of focus was placed on the students and their experiences after such a groundbreaking impact. And a lot of things are kind of focused on like helping in the now, and they’re focused on bystander prevention. But when these things happen and when they do, it really changes the campus culture. It changes the environment, it makes it a less safe place to learn and grow. So that drop off when it comes to the after-event experience is what Cloud IX is focused on. By mastering the response, we should be able to help prevention efforts because more people are reporting, more people are holding people accountable, more people are feeling comfortable sharing their story. By mastering that response, we can create a culture of prevention and ultimately a safer campus and community.

Stephanie Hepburn: How would you have felt had what you’ve created now existed back then?

Isabella Kulstad: I would be a different person. And I’ve always wanted to research, and I would be focusing on that, and I would be more active in my experiences, and I would be more available, and I wouldn’t have as much testing anxiety, and I would be a totally different person. Being assaulted was one of the worst experiences of my life, and it often is for so many people. But being assaulted has given me the idea for Cloud IX, and Cloud IX has brought so much good. We’re not even published and launched yet. It has provided so many positive experiences. It has given voice to so many people that would never share their story. I would definitely still be impacted as anyone is when their boundaries are crossed. I mean, it’s totally normal to feel that way and totally normal to feel like I have no idea what to do next. Like my my life feels like it’s over. But when Cloud IX exists, because I know it will, I’m certain that not only will more people feel comfortable staying on campus, but over time, less of these incidents will happen. We’ll hold people accountable, we’ll have a larger culture of respect. And gradually over time, we’ll create safer campuses and communities.

Stephanie Hepburn: That was Isabella Kulstad, founder and CEO of Cloud IX. Next, I’m going to speak with Dana Foss, the company’s chief technology officer, to get a better understanding of the architecture behind the platform and what happens if chats escalate. Dana, how did you meet Isabella? How did you become involved with Cloud IX?

Dana Fos: A tech event in New Orleans. Her excitement was primarily what caught my attention. At that time, she was a college student at Tulane. Yes. So at first I thought she was working on a project that was just for school. And that’s why I was open to help her. Let’s let’s do it. Let’s let’s put this together. But um, she had actually had built a company by the time I started and already had kind of the beginnings of a prototype. So she already had a lot there. I’ve been adding concrete architecture around the structure of how everything is operating. So that’s how we’ve moved from her prototype and into the actual MVP.

Stephanie Hepburn: And can you explain a little bit about the integration with OpenAI? What Isabella was describing, she said that essentially the core is your own, and that if there are gaps, that OpenAI fills those. Can you explain what that means?

Dana Fos: Yeah, it just means the call goes out into both directions, and the agent on our in-house agent determines which answer is supposed to be better. And it usually lands on the Cloud IX data answer.

Stephanie Hepburn: And what is the agent? What does that mean?

Dana Fos: The agent is the actual AI agent, what we built in-house, that is Sky.

Stephanie Hepburn: Oh, got it. Okay, so Sky itself will take the prompt that the user put in and then determine whether already in the architecture is the most appropriate response. And then if there’s a gap there, meaning that all of the architecture that you had done on the back end for some reason didn’t cover this specific area or this specific question, then that is when it falls back on OpenAI.

Dana Fos: Yes. Right now, most of the calls are going in both directions because we don’t have a lot inside of our own corpus because we don’t really have any university set up. So a lot of this is actually coming, a lot more than I would like is coming from OpenAI. But as we build in, it’s going to be less and less.

Stephanie Hepburn: I understand. So let’s say the user is on Tulane’s campus and they ask a question. The idea is as you scale and as you integrate more universities and more universities are using Cloud IX. That means that the Tulane student who’s asking the question, when resources are provided, it is going to pull from Tulane’s resources. And so that over time, it’ll utilize OpenAI less and less because it’s going to be tapping into those local resources.

Dana Fos: We’re also trying to figure out how to use the conversations that we will be getting as part of the information itself that the AI agent can then reuse. Yeah, we scrub the conversations before we store anything. So there’s no personal data or anything that could be conceived of personal data. So it’s more generic.

Stephanie Hepburn: So it’s not identifying information. So it wouldn’t include somebody’s personal experience, but what it may include is the overall prompts, what people are asking. So from like a data perspective, it would illustrate okay, 90% of users are asking this question and are seeking these answers.

Dana Fos: Yes. We’ll start to identify data trends as we start to get more conversations rolling in. Right now it’s still pretty scarce because we we only have test users.

Stephanie Hepburn: Sometimes chats escalate. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like? What happens if Sky identifies that somebody might be in crisis?

Dana Fos: It tries to guide them toward people rather than just using the chat bot. Even if it’s not sensing an escalation, it will try to do that. Sky does not like to pretend it’s a person or that is a mental health professional. It is really just a guide to get them to the professionals. I don’t believe AI can replace the professionals. We are also working on getting alert systems so that we can get people to reach out to them. The original chatbot is designed to be perfectly or as close to anonymous as possible. So we have to actually build something additional in order to have the reach out.

Stephanie Hepburn: So that’s what you’re working on next. You’re building out a crisis component.

Dana Fos: Yeah, that’s going to be one of the first next uh features that go out.

Stephanie Hepburn: The chatbots increasingly feel like they’re trying to be your friend or they’re trying to create a connection that’s intentionally not part of this design. You’re not trying to anthropomorphize Sky.

Dana Fos: We had a lot of feedback from professionals as we were speaking to them while we were in the design phase after the prototype came out. And they gave us all of this guidance. They immediately said this is one of the problems we see happening with chatbots. And I don’t want this to happen here.

Stephanie Hepburn: In building Cloud IX, how did you ensure that it’s not sycophantic? Because it sounds like it does provide support. So if somebody’s struggling or having a hard time, it doesn’t just provide resources, it also helps people go through mindfulness techniques. How do you ensure that it is empathetic yet not sycophantic?

Dana Fos: Yeah, that’s the biggest problem. It doesn’t just agree with everything they say, but it will give a gentle voice. It is, you know, this is not your fault. Let’s see what you need and what I can find for you, is how it starts. As the conversations grow, it will start to identify. And this is primarily in the way the prompting is engineered and making sure that when it does return a response, it’s not always just agreeing with everything they say. It was a very difficult prompt to build, and I’m sure we’re not done with it.

Stephanie Hepburn: So how did you do that? I mean, how do you in the prompts ensure that sometimes there’s a gentle pushback, but without it being sycophantic or just mirroring what the person is saying?

Dana Fos: Well, the prompting is built in different sections. So you have tone, so you can tell it to do a gentle tone, but you can also write in entire sections that tell it not to agree with everything. And these are the things you cannot agree with.

Stephanie Hepburn: Such as?

Dana Fos: Such as, I don’t feel like I want to be here anymore.

Stephanie Hepburn: So then it’ll push back, and that’s when it provides resources.

Dana Fos: Right.

Stephanie Hepburn: And then how can universities reach out to you?

Dana Fos: They can reach us through http://www.cloud-ix, cloud-ix.com. It’s a play off of Title IX. Or they can reach me, at dana@cloud-ix.com.

Stephanie Hepburn: So Dana, what do you hope to do differently than large language models?

Dana Fos: Our ultimate goal is instead of most of the large language models striving to answer everything about everything, and they are creating extremely wide, shallow pools of information. We want to be a narrow pool that’s very deep, only on one topic.

Stephanie Hepburn: Have there been some aha moments during the development of the architecture of Cloud IX?

Dana Fos: One of the things that surprised me was how many Title IX administrators didn’t believe that people who were going through it were not already coming to them. They were assuming that all of the reports they were getting, or all the kids they were getting, and even who didn’t want to report, was 100% of the incidents. That was one of my biggest surprises. And that’s when we did have to change some of our communication, not necessarily in Sky, but our communication to show how many people don’t go in to report. How many of the students don’t even know what the word Title IX even is?

Stephanie Hepburn: With Sky, you wanted to ensure that Sky wasn’t making those assumptions. How did you do so?

Dana Fos: It’s primarily in the prompting, is where that had to happen. And that’s engineering the structure of the prompt, making sure we did have a section of explaining even to a student that, okay, this is the area you’re gonna have to go to. This is called Title IX. This is what Title IX is. And if we have that university’s information, we can actually put the person’s name and phone number.

Stephanie Hepburn: That was Dana Foss. She’s the chief technology officer of the AI platform Cloud Nine, which is designed to connect students who’ve experienced sexual violence to resources on and off campus. Listen to the first half of the episode to hear my interview with Isabella Kulstad, the founder and CEO of Cloud IX. I’ll put a link to Cloud IX in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast. It helps others find the show. Thanks for listening. I’m your host and producer. Our associate producer’s Rin Koenig. Audio Engineering by Chris Mann. Music is Vinyl Couch by Blue Dot Sessions.