SHIFT Global helps frontline workers, counselors, educators, and humanitarian teams practice complex conversations, receive competency-based feedback, and build real-world capability before they enter the field.
Grounded in 18 years of global mental health, crisis-response, and implementation research across 25 countries.
Helping skills are built through repetition, feedback, and supervision. But live role-play is scarce, feedback is often delayed, and the highest-stakes conversations — safety, disclosure, resistance, and crisis — are the hardest to rehearse safely. SHIFT gives trainees repeatable practice with structured feedback at the moment it matters.
AI makes realistic, repeatable practice possible at a scale traditional training cannot match. But in high-stakes helping work, simulation only matters if it is safe, supervised, culturally responsive, and tied to observable competencies. SHIFT is built for that gap.
Simulated clients stay in character, respond to the trainee's exact words, and adapt to the scenario's difficulty, persona, and cultural context.
Responses are assessed for quality in context: whether the skill was well-formed, well-timed, and responsive to the client.
SHIFT doesn't just light up "open question." It quotes what you said, explains why it landed or didn't, and offers a stronger line to try next — turning every turn into a lesson, not just a score.
Each session ends with strengths, missed opportunities, quoted examples, and targeted next steps.
Programs monitor growth, review sessions, spot skill gaps, and focus supervision where it matters most.
A built-in walkthrough, plain-language skill definitions, sentence-starters and a worked example bring non-specialists up to speed fast — from orientation to independent practice.
Select a skill pathway or scenario matched to the learner's role and setting.
Respond turn by turn to a simulated client with a realistic presenting concern.
Each response is scored turn by turn — tap any skill to see why it landed and a stronger line to try next.
End with a graded, supervisor-ready debrief — strengths, focus areas, and a model response for each skill.
Step 4 in the app — every session ends with a structured, AI-assisted debrief: what the trainee demonstrated, what was missed, and what to practice next.
SHIFT assesses core competencies that can be practiced, observed, and improved over time — empathy and rapport, open questions, technique use, safety and referral, and action planning. Each is scored on a three-level quality scale: not just whether a skill appeared, but whether it was well-timed and genuinely responsive to the client.
Reflective listening, validation, and warmth that make a client feel understood.
Questions that invite elaboration and draw out the client's story.
Applying the module's core skill appropriately and in context.
Checking risk directly and calmly, and planning a concrete step when warranted.
Closing with one small, specific step the client agrees to try.
From foundational helping skills to safety and risk management — with new modules added regularly. Here's a sample of what trainees are practicing today.
That need scalable practice and feedback for large cohorts.
Who need visibility into trainee growth and where to focus support.
Working across contexts, languages, and high-stakes settings.
Teaching high-stakes interpersonal skills.
Studying AI-supported capability development and skill transfer.
Supervisors can see where trainees are building competence, where they need support, and how performance changes over time.
SHIFT is being developed alongside a review of AI-enabled training in global mental health settings, with a focus on competency measurement, safety, cultural validity, supervision, and skill transfer. The research agenda is practical: can AI-supported simulation help people develop demonstrable, transferable helping skills — safely, equitably, and at scale?
SHIFT studies how people develop capability with AI in high-stakes interpersonal work, and builds validated measures to assess whether AI-supported learning transfers into safer, more effective practice.
SHIFT addresses the implementation gap in global mental health by making training, practice, supervision, and fidelity assessment more scalable and culturally adaptable.
SHIFT is not a therapy chatbot, diagnostic system, crisis service, or replacement for clinical supervision. It is a practice-and-feedback environment designed to complement formal training, live supervision, face-to-face role-play, and case discussion under appropriate program oversight.
Try the interactive demo in your browser — no install, no account. Or reach out to bring SHIFT Global to your program.
Designed for use in settings such as universities, humanitarian organizations, public health programs, and workforce training teams — informed by experience across global mental health, humanitarian response, refugee health, and workforce wellbeing.
Developed by Dr. Alvin K. Tay, Adjunct Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University; former United Nations global mental health technology and strategy advisor. LinkedIn ↗