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How do you help disadvantaged students take action on opportunities they don’t even know exist?
In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Elliot Little (Product Manager) and Dan St. Paul (Software Engineer) from Zero Gravity, a UK-based platform that helps state school students access elite career opportunities through mentoring, community, and learning pathways. They’ve built an AI career co-pilot that acts as an orchestrator—not an automation tool—bridging the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
You’ll hear how they:
- Started with grand visions of AI mentors and synthetic avatars, then scaled back to something simpler and more effective
- Discovered that hiding the “LLM magic” backfired—students needed to feel the personalization
- Built context management strategies to handle multi-month student journeys without blowing up token counts
- Approached safeguarding as a first-class concern when building AI for 16-year-olds
- Used application logic rather than complex RAG architectures to manage tool availability and context freshness
It’s a practical look at building AI products that augment human relationships rather than replace them—from a team navigating the unique challenges of educational technology.
Show Notes
Guests
- Elliot Little, Product Manager, Zero Gravity
- Dan St. Paul, Software Engineer, Zero Gravity
What we cover in this episode
- Zero Gravity’s mission: breaking down barriers to elite careers for disadvantaged UK students
- The “knowing-doing gap”—why students struggle to act even when they know what to do
- Why their first prototype (a job suitability summary) didn’t create the “wow moment” they expected
- The decision to use text chat over voice input and why guided prompts beat empty text boxes
- Context management techniques: removing stale tool calls, summarizing history, exposing tools conditionally
- Using different models for different tasks (GPT-5 Nano for structured outputs, lighter models for quick replies)
- Safeguarding architecture: moderation endpoints plus external verification with Unitary
- Building a failure taxonomy through internal red team/green team exercises
- What’s next: long-term memory management for multi-year student journeys
Links & References
- Zero Gravity
- Unitary – AI-powered content moderation
- Blue Dot Impact AI Safety Course – free AI safety course Elliot recommended
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dan and Elliot
00:45 Zero Gravity’s Mission and Impact
02:14 Introducing the AI Career Co-Pilot
04:01 Challenges Faced by Disadvantaged Students
06:49 Zero Gravity’s Mentorship Program
09:14 Building the AI Career Co-Pilot
12:01 Early Prototypes and User Feedback
17:05 Refining the AI Career Co-Pilot
37:36 Introduction to Career Co-Pilot
38:02 Current Student Interactions
40:22 Technical Deep Dive
42:14 Context Management Challenges
44:43 Tool Call Optimization
51:48 Safeguarding and Moderation
57:52 Evaluating AI Performance
01:04:09 Future Directions for Career Co-Pilot
01:07:52 Concluding Thoughts
Full Transcript
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