Humanity - The Final Frontier

2026 will be a watershed moment for how humans, business and technology mutually exist. It’s not going to be pretty.

We’ve been in the Community Affective Technology (CAT) space for a long time and over multiple continents. CAT is essentially media technology, platforms, tools and products that help people become healthy, safe, happy and supported in overcoming barriers at work, in school, in society or anywhere else that productivity matters. In short, better outcomes.

For us that has meant building powerful tools that help mentor organizations organize their relationships and resources that are delivered just-in-time and produce positive outcomes that defy statistics ranging from job attrition to recidivism. What’s pretty amazing is the irrefutable evidence that the way people overcome barriers is similar across endeavors: whether leaving the foster system, discharge from the military, re-entering society after incarceration, keeping a middle-skills job with a GED and yes, even a six figure manager coping with AI in the workplace. They all have margins they need to breakdown and overcome, and technology works best when it’s a belt of tools that wraps around the person. A bridge of connective tissue that opens the door radical kinship and life altering productivity. Technology that releases everyone’s hero potential is why we build CAT.

One line from 2011 remains a stand out for everything we do, and the more we develop, the more we find it to be true and our north star:

“There is simply no better joy than to create and facilitate the networks for replicable integrated systems that connect and empower the historically oppressed, marginalized and insecure.”

Little did we know in 2011 that fifteen years later that AI technology would essentially make us all at risk of marginalization. The same technology that has made it possible for us to learn, track and guide the journey to the human-centered future of work. For this reason 2026 is the year humanity must conquer, and our company is the ones that need to do it.

Our co-founder Deborah Connelly fought hard on Capitol Hill to bridge the digital information divide that the internet created, now we fight for something far more existential a threat — the intelligence divide. Tools that can make humans obsolete, without purpose or dignity other than to exist in a tech-feudal dystopia. Small signs of this realization are hitting the news, and from Governors who can see the writing on the wall: The critical need for technology to serve people — ie. radical humanity. radical compassion.

This is not “woke” this the battle for capitalism, the dignity of work and right to be industrious as pleasing to God. If no one makes a decision about the moral role of tech in society the industry will. Turns out, the research shows, and HeroBridge’s products have proven, that wrapping tech around people is far more profitable and sustainable than any notion of replacing people with machines. This is a fact and the failure of “tools first” B2B AI adoptions has failed in over 85% of corporate adoption.

The good news is we’ve taken our years of know-how in productivity mentorship technology and turned it into a powerful tool that any and every company in the world needs — a rulebook on how to build a human-centered AI workplace culture that is productive, profitable, sustainable, ethical and moral for people first.

Both founders are the children of small business owners, and former corporate lawyers who love the free market capitalism. But Dodge vs. Ford is not built for this scenario, very little of the laws we have are ready for what’s coming: shareholder capitalism must give way to stakeholder capitalism. there is no choice and B-Corps and PBC’s have made humanity ripe for the change…charter companies that agree that humans must be in the middle of workplace AI. The age of human super-performance is the future we want. Period.

2025 was the bellwether. Is this the world we want to live in? Deep fake, weaponized news, astronomic tech debt designed to build the tech that replaces everyone. Don’t get us wrong, this technology has made us what we are today, including collaborations with MIT Media Lab and several Amazon Web Services Innovation grants. There is nothing wrong with the tech, its the application. This is where America and business should be focused on supremacy.

We are all in the process of becoming marginalized. This isn’t about regulation, far from it, it’ll never happen. This is about open source e/acc that allows businesses to create and buy the tools that bring about a sane future built around human design that drives human super-performance. Building around the human has been proven as the best path to “the productivity frontier” since early 2023. It’s therefore the same reason company’s aren’t realizing the promise of productivity. They were sold a farse that AI can replace people. It’s can’t. It only creates the illusion that it knows what you are asking it to do. Fact.

Is effective acceleration going to cause problems, yes. like any tool people are going to do bad thing. Case in point, when B2B AI failed, enter Sam After Dark adult content. This is a technology without morals. So those who build tools that create the guardrails and moral codes built-in, like our new product Mentor Hero, will race to take up as much market share as possible and usher in the next age of business ethics and techno-morality.

HEROBRIDGE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY: MENTOR HERO AI

As is our custom, since 2020, we wrap up each year with a state of technology and knowledge that advances our mission of building the most advanced mentorship technology to drive safe, healthy, predictable and productive communities.

As information tools continue to advance, and allow themselves to be designed to suit, we have taken what we’ve gathered and learned from five years of proprietary unorganized interaction data (representing millions upon millions of broad, real world mentorship interactions) and have been able to use the massive computing power of LLM’s and RAG’s to develop a “machine” that can listen, learn and predict the most effective mentorship modalities that assures long term health ,safety and productivity in any organization.

This year, thanks to two Amazon Web Services Innovation grants we have finally created what we dreamt about over a decade ago — Mentor Hero a Cognitive Resonance Cycle ™ (CRC) toolkit for businesses adopting AI tech in their workplace.

CRC is our core affective computation framework that models that layers all we’ve learned about how individuals and groups process, reinforce, and act on shared meaning within a mentorship-driven community. This can range from the healthcare industry, to a tech-enabled factory to a nonprofit helping veterans return to civilian life. Any and every organization you can imagine, large or small.

Through our flagship HeroBridge private community app, Mentor Hero transforms raw engagement data into predictive behavioral insights by cycling through five layers of machine learning and analysis. Some of these layers we’ve used for a while, others we recently added to fill out what is now a powerful loop of strategic transitioning with guardrails that assure safety, privacy and sustainable productivity:

Perception Layer – Ingests human signals (text, voice, media, interaction data). This layer has been the core of HeroBridge’s “connective tissue” mentorship platform.

Interpretation Layer – Applies affective computing and sentiment recognition to understand socio-emotional state. This is where our multi-year collaboration with MIT Media Lab Affective Computing advanced our ability to develop “Readiness signalling” detection.

Resonance Layer – (New) Aligns individual states with community narratives, mentorship frameworks, and organizational goals. This was the “secret sauce” that came from our AWS grant development of a retreival access generation (RAG) pipeline that detects, learns and organizes these mentorship frameworks so they continually improve and provide evidence of lives touched.

Feedback Layer – (New) Generates personalized impact stories and feedback loops that test and prove strategy and use these findings to tune mentorship resources back to the perception layer where they can be applied in real time, just in time. This layer also drive the Donor Resonance Cycle that provides curated content to our nonprofit clients.

Prediction Layer – (Updated) Produces data models that anticipate future behaviors, engagement risks, expected outcomes and organizational opportunities. Learning from the RAG and Feedback layers, organizations can continually be more human-focused, safer, healthier, communal and productive. Most interesting of all, these predictive layers inform the newest versions of HeroBridge so our community platforms continue to improve through data informed architecture.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Mentor Hero suite of tools has developed the most expansive moat for HeroBridge Media Technology as well as delivering the most effective version of the Future or Work that respects the dignity of the person, the foundations of capitalism as well as philanthropy — and most importantly represents the best use of technology that ushers in the age of human super-performance. We expect companies and State governments to see the true value of adopting Mentor Hero as it’s human-first, morally aligned, answer to the future of work in America.

For more information visit www.mentorheroai.com and subscribe to our Medium Channel for thoughtleadership and product updates.