"Can an AI Learn to Truly Listen? The Making of Markos" The story of building a conversational AI for men who've stopped talking and what we learned about silence, trust, and what it means to be heard.

"Men Don't Need Better Listeners. They Need to Start Talking."

There are 17 veterans dying by suicide every day in America. Most of them never told anyone they were struggling.

We're not building a better therapy app. We're not building a journaling tool. We're not building another wellness chatbot with a calming color palette.

We're building an upstream intervention an AI that meets men in the silence before the crisis, and asks the question that cracks it open.

mrkos.ai is a bet that the hardest problem in conversational AI isn't sentiment analysis or context windows. It's this: how do you build something a man who doesn't want to talk will actually talk to?

This session is the honest answer. The philosophy behind it. The psychology inside it. The engineering decisions that kept us up at night. And what 571 questions taught us about what men actually need to hear. Live demo. Real conversation. Bring your skepticism.

• Startups
• AI/ML