One of the things David Proulx is most proud of is building an AI agent that has handled more than 100,000 mental health conversations without a single hallucination.
David is the Chief AI Officer at HoloMD, where an AI agent becomes a third party in the Therapeutic Alliance. The patient wants to feel better. The psychiatrist guides their care. HoloMD adds a daily point of contact that checks in, gathers context, tracks medication adherence, and offers support between visits. Psychiatrists stay fully in charge while gaining a clearer picture of a patient's life than a single appointment can provide.
In this episode, Daniel talks with David about his path from building a social network for moms with 600,000 downloads to locking himself in a room for nine months learning AI, then co-founding HoloMD, which won the 2025 Mental Health Tech Innovator of the Year Award from the GHP Mental Health Awards. They explore what it takes to engineer safe clinical agents, how long-term memory was solved in their system, and why guardrails matter more than engagement tricks.
🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- ✅ How HoloMD uses daily check-ins, mood scoring, and medication adherence tracking to strengthen the Therapeutic Alliance
- ✅ Why prompt, flow, and context engineering shape safety in high-stakes AI systems
- ✅ How HoloMD validated safety with synthetic patients, human-on-the-loop review, and a rigorously tested escalation pathway
- ✅ Why David sees over-regulation as a risk for countries that want to stay competitive in AI
- ✅ How real patients have used HoloMD to self-report to the ER and get timely care
🔗 Resources & Links
- 🌐 Learn more about HoloMD: https://holomd.ai/
- 🤝 Connect with David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidproulxoui/
- 📩 Subscribe to the Artificial Insights newsletter for key takeaways: https://manary.haus/podcast/#haus
- 👉 Have a guest in mind? Reach out to Daniel at daniel@manary.haus
💬 Know someone building AI in a high-stakes domain like healthcare or public safety? Share this episode with them.
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