Why Children Are Opening Up to AI Before Their Parents, with Will Zhang - Ways to Wealth EP158

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Will Zhang, CEO of EmoX, an AI mental health companion that has grown to 450,000 users since launching in 2024.The idea started as a joke. A friend showed up late to coffee after the worst road rage incident of his life, and someone said: what if you could just scream at an AI instead? That conversation led Will and his co-founders into a much bigger problem. One in three New Zealanders face mental health issues, but there are only 15 therapists per 100,000 people. The gap cannot be closed by training more humans. It's too slow.What makes this conversation different is that Will is building an AI product while openly questioning how far AI should go. His team deliberately made the voice feature sound less realistic so users wouldn't form unhealthy attachments. They're working on making the AI more assertive rather than endlessly agreeable, because constant validation turns out to be its own kind of harm. And research his team conducted with the University of Lincoln found that children will share more with a robot than with their own parents or teachers.Will also talks about a side effect of AI that nobody in the productivity conversation seems to be addressing: when your team can research in two minutes instead of three days, you end up making 10 to 20 times more decisions per day. You might be creating more value, but your mental health is dropping. His closing advice is two words: just be human.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth PodcastCheck-out Will’s Start-up, The AI Health Innovation Hub#waystowealth #mentalhealth #aicompanion #emoex #healthtech #startup #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #wellbeing #autism #ai #loneliness #digitalhealth #wealthbuilding