Hy Tests AI to Record 'Forest Walks', a New Bet Amid the Loneliness Crisis

A venture ecosystem from San Francisco, Hy, is testing the use of artificial intelligence to document and analyze face-to-face conversations—a step rarely taken amid the rapid adoption of AI for digital services. In an experiment dubbed a "forest walk", participants walk together with a human listener while AI records and summarizes their conversation.

This approach positions AI not as a replacement for social interaction, but as a tool that allows humans to retain control over the meaning and direction of the conversation. Weston Mossman, product and experience lead at Hy, said the system can document conversations, preserve decisions, or map collective knowledge, while responsibility for interpretation remains in human hands.

Hy claims to have run 21 experiments since launching in the Bay Area on 19 September. The company is targeting more than 100 communities and organizations, including technology companies, financial institutions, startup ecosystems, and communities of practice. A second expansion is planned for the Lisbon area of Portugal in November.

The phenomenon intersects with a surge in loneliness that has long been a problem in many developed countries. A 2025 American Psychological Association survey found that 54 percent of US adults feel isolated, while 69 percent say they need more emotional support than they receive. At the same time, 92 percent of respondents cited interpersonal relationships as a source of meaning in life.

Some people are beginning to look to AI as emotional support. A NAMI/Ipsos poll in November 2025 showed 12 percent of US adults plan to use chatbots for mental health treatment or therapy in the next six months, and one percent already do. Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Torous, in a congressional hearing the same month, revealed that millions of Americans each week use AI tools not designed for mental health support, though many feel helped.

On the other hand, interest in gathering offline is actually growing. Strava's Year in Sport 2025 report recorded new club formation nearly quadrupling over the year, totaling one million clubs. Running clubs grew 3.5 times year-on-year, while club-organized events rose 1.5 times. This data comes from the global Strava platform, not the US population as a whole, but it indicates momentum in organized communities.

"Growth, in our view, can spread through local communities and diverse contexts, allowing ideas to adapt to the people and environments that receive them," Hy founder and CEO Ariana Bahrami told Newsweek.

Hy describes itself as an incubator for a "life-centered economy". Rather than building its own AI models, the company experiments with existing models to serve what it calls "love, life, and joy". They adopt researcher Dave Snowden's framework: AI handles "salience" (surfacing and organizing information), while humans hold "sapience" (meaning-making) and "sentience" (the emotional experience underlying decisions).

Mossman claims this approach changes how Hy works internally. A 90-minute conversation that once took hours to document can now be processed much faster, leaving more time for discussion and relationship-building. Still, Hy acknowledges it is developing metrics to measure the impact of its approach.

Loneliness is not a byproduct of generative AI, and existing data does not prove AI worsens it. But Hy's bet is that as AI takes over more of the work around us, a market will grow for something technology supposedly cannot provide: human connection. The question is whether such a model can be replicated in Indonesia, where urban loneliness and device dependence are also rising—or whether it will remain a niche experiment in developed countries.