Meet “Sassy,” an AI-powered career exploration guide. It’s a chatbot that can help students in Oregon brainstorm possible careers, create action plans for how to get their dream jobs, prepare for an interview, and even stay motivated.

Sassy—short for Sasquatch, Oregon’s “Bigfoot”—was created by the Oregon Department of Education in partnership with the nonprofits Journalistic Learning Initiative and Playlab.ai.

It’s part of the state’s investment in expanding career-connected programs to engage students in relevant learning, complete unfinished learning, and improve their mental well-being and sense of belonging, according to a statement from the state education department.

The development of the AI tool comes as more states and school districts are emphasizing career readiness. In 2023, 47 states passed career-education laws, with a majority of the new laws adding accountability measures for the programs and supporting more industry partnerships and work-based learning for schools.

Education Week interviewed Ed Madison, a University of Oregon professor and executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, about the chatbot and how he envisions students and teachers using it.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How did this chatbot come about?

Because our nonprofit has contracts with the Oregon Department of Education in several areas around [career and technical education or CTE], we proposed creating this Sassy tool. If you go to Career Connect Oregon, we manage the development of that. We also have a whole series of videos that we’ve created for the state under careerjourneys.org.

So this [chatbot] was kind of an extension. If you’re going to have this web portal, how can we help students, even at the middle school level, start to explore different areas of potential futures?

What’s the benefit of using a chatbot interface?

First of all, we know that the adviser or guidance counselor-to-student ratio is pretty high. [Sassy is] a way for young people to explore—generally under teacher supervision—different opportunities, but also to copy and cut and paste that into a document, so when they do sit down with the counselor, they actually have something, a basis, to work with.

It’s not designed to replace human professionalism or expertise, but actually enhance it. Counselors are sort of having to repeat rote information, as opposed to really having more substantive time with the student who they’re advising to get into the specifics of the student’s interest or needs.

What information is it trained on? Does it collect any data?

It doesn’t collect any personal data. As a matter of fact, if you try to enter information, it’ll say, “I don’t need your personal data. Thank you.” It’s not really necessary for the narrow function that it performs. And I know everyone’s talking about what happened in Los Angeles—they were trying to do too much with their tool, but in the narrow nature of what we’re doing, we don’t need personal data. It’s not an area we want to get into because of FERPA (the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and all the other issues related to that in terms of the documents or what it’s drawing from.

The state of Oregon, like most states, has generated guidebooks and pamphlets and all kinds of career and technical education helpful material. These materials are things that you can, on your own, probably go and find and turn to a certain page and address a question or concern that you have. But the ability of AI to actually tap that information as needed, as specific to your question at that time, is something that AI allows that I don’t know that there’s another way to do so efficiently.

When you open the chatbot, Sassy gives some options for what you can ask. How did you decide on those?

Our mandate is to make sure our students are prepared to enter the world of work. I intuitively realized that there’s some gaps that happen in the career readiness space that I wanted to address. It’s one thing to just give young people a tool that explores possible careers, but then does it also prepare them for job interviews, or does it prepare them for the follow up? Does it help them stay motivated?

How do you envision students using this tool?

What we need is more opportunities to honor students’ interest. Students come to school with all kinds of interest, most of which don’t get honored. The example that we give is that a kid can say, “hey, I’m interested in video games,” and in many classrooms, teachers would not necessarily respond in a way that honors that kid’s interests. However, video game designers make a lot of money. It’s a growing area.

Here’s a chance for a kid to just share an authentic interest and get some feedback and learn: “Oh, by the way, there’s a degree program at University of Oregon, or there’s a community college that offers this.” Or, “Hey, have you thought about looking at these companies that create games and going after an internship?” and “here’s how you would prepare to get that internship,” and those kinds of things.

The conversation so far around AI has been around concerns about cheating, when really the conversation should be more about, how do we harness this new tool in a way that empowers kids?