Transforming Applied Behavior Analysis Through AI-Powered Tools with Adam Ventura (Part II)

ABA on Tap is proud to present Mr. Adam Ventura. (Part 2 of 2)

Adam Ventura, MS, BCBA, is a leader in the integration of artificial intelligence and behavior science. He is the Founder and CEO of Intraverbal AI, a company dedicated to transforming applied behavior analysis (ABA) through AI-powered tools that support ethical decision-making, supervision, and clinical efficiency. Adam's current focus is on leveraging technology to make data-driven insights and innovative systems more accessible to behavior analysts across settings. A graduate of Florida International University (FIU) and a long-standing adjunct professor, Adam blends academic rigor with cutting-edge application. Adam is an established author and speaker, he has contributed extensively to the literature on ethical practices, leadership, and now the responsible integration of AI in behavior analysis.

Adam speaks eloquently about his past experiences leading to his current project and heart work at Intraverbal AI. He has done it all in the field of ABA, and he forges forward with the most modern of technologies at hand. This is an innovative and refreshing brew you can enjoy over and over again, and it's only the first of two full pours. Sit back, enjoy this. tall, cold one, and always analyze responsibly. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly. All

SPEAKER_02: 0:52

right, all right. This is your ever-grateful co-host, Mike Rubio. Thank you for coming back. This is part two with Mr. Adam Ventura of Intraverbal AI. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04

Yeah, that's tough. And I feel like you had two questions there. So I'll start with the first one. So I'm assuming when you say KPM, key performance metrics?

SPEAKER_03: 1:16

Correct, yeah. And like what to evaluate people on and say the program's successful. Because my experience with working with private equity was always just about like efficiency base.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26

Yeah. And so that just becomes a scorecard, right? And I think it should be a balanced scorecard. And this was one of the key lessons that I learned from work doing OBM consulting for a few years is the importance of employee and organizational scorecards being balanced. You know, so yes, you can't, do you need profit measures on your scorecard? Yeah, you do. If you're not making a profit, you can't be in business. And people need to be able to say that out loud without getting pilloried for identifying the obvious. However, when you create these scorecards, that can't be the only metric on there. So yes, net revenue is important, but you also need to have... measures of social validity on there are the families happy more or less maybe that's the wrong word but are the families satisfied with the service that you are producing then you get into and I think Mike you just brought it up like how do you define quality service and I think there's some folks in our field that don't behave like honest brokers when we have those discussions are there some fair points that yeah it's really hard to measure because for example you can't or you're going to have trouble using a percentage measure because some behaviors are uh much more deleterious to the health and wellness of the client than others so you can say oh i reduced um some i i reduced stereotypy by 80 okay that's great but if you have another um topography like elopement where the client is running out into the middle of the street, I reduce that by 80%. That's good. But if he's still running out into the middle of a busy intersection, 20% of the time, that's still a life threatening behavior. So coming up with a, and I'm working in technology now, so I'll call it an algorithm. Coming up with an algorithm for these insurance companies to use is a big challenge. However, I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge. I think it's something that if you get some of the smartest behavior analysts in our field together, I think they could figure out. And are there gonna be some edge cases? Yeah, there is. But I think if we don't wanna do harm to our science, and that's really kind of my professional mission is disseminating and moving forward the science, I think we need to be very careful with this because if people are doing bad ABA therapy out there, it's going to reflect poorly on our science and then we're gonna start regressing scientifically and as a field more broadly.

SPEAKER_03: 4:28

That makes a lot of sense. My last question about your business and then maybe we can transition or I can pass it to you, Mike. I'm sorry, I've been asking a lot of questions here. So you created this business. had these conversations, expanded to 300 employees, and then you did sell, you said, to private equity. So can you talk about maybe your thought process with that, your thoughts on them being able to maintain your vision and mission, or even if that was a concern, and maybe if they were able to be successful with that or not?

SPEAKER_00: 4:57

Yeah. I didn't really speak publicly until recently on the Beyond the Science podcast about why I sold my company, but I had a... Family tragedy at the time. I had no interest in selling my company. I wanted to continue to grow it. It was my life's purpose. And I had a family tragedy. Somebody in my family passed away unexpectedly. No, no, no. It was seven years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was. And I realized that I didn't have... I didn't have a great relationship with my family at all. There were some people in my immediate family that I hadn't spoken to in a decade. And I realigned my priorities. I really felt like my legacy was my business. And when that happened, I made the decision that I needed to have a relationship with my family. I mean, I hadn't... I hadn't spoken to my dad in 12 years. I hadn't spoken to my sisters in like nine years. I hadn't spoken to my mom in, I don't know, five, six, seven years, something like that. And while the tragedy was tragic, it opened up an opportunity for me to be successful personally. And all I could think about, all that mattered to me was professional success. I had no relationship success either. I was a mess professionally. personally dating. I was a hot mess dating. I had no relationship with my family. And I just made a transition at that point when that tragedy struck to grow up personally. And I really made that transition and discovered that my immortality project, my legacy wasn't my business. It was my family. It was having kids. And it was getting married. It was having a stable relationship. And when I made that transition, I realized that I couldn't do that myself. I needed help. And I tried to transition somebody into the CEO role so that I could address what had just happened. Because when you have a family tragedy, a lot of people need help. And I needed to be there more for my family. Whenever something terrible happens and somebody has to step down from leadership role in any industry, they're like, oh, I have to spend more time with my family. I literally had to spend more time with my family. And I put somebody else in the role. And as soon as I did that, we got a Medicaid audit in Florida. And it was a mess. And as it turned out, Medicaid decided, Florida Medicaid at that time decided not to pay us for about five months. And they owed us seven figures of money. And I didn't have that money in the couch cushions in my home. So luckily, we managed to send everything over that they asked for, got through it. Funny enough, I always like telling this story. After we sold the company, Private Equity went to Florida Medicaid and said, listen, we're buying Adam's company. And they told them at the time, they're like, oh, yeah, we audited his company and he's one of our best providers. And I wanted to strangle them because it would have been nice if they would have realized that earlier. But that's OK. So I the company that bought us, we were their platform company and the first company that they bought and everything that they promised that they would do, they did. And. They grew to be a very big company and then ended up selling again after that. I understand how the business works, but I hold no ill will towards the notion of private equity. For as many bad private equity stories that we hear, I know personally of 20, 25 stories that a small ABA provider that doesn't know how to run a business that was this close to going under, private equity swooped in and saved them from their business going under. So I don't have that animosity towards private equity. Are there some bad behaving actors in private equity? Yeah. Are there some private equity platforms that shouldn't own an ABA business? Sure. But is there something inherently wrong with that business model? No, I don't think so. Dan, to your point earlier, they need to refine their scorecards, I think some of them, to include clinical quality, to include some of those measures of social validity. And that's where if they get behavior analysts to work with them, like I know some of private equity companies do right now, then things get better. And I guess that's my overall thoughts on private equity and their involvement in ADA.

UNKNOWN: 10:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 10:22

Well, thank you for sharing that story. That was very insightful, and I appreciate that. I was going to

SPEAKER_02: 10:27

say the same thing. Thanks for sharing the personal side and then getting into the private equity piece, and we're very glad for your experience there, and very glad to hear somebody share a positive experience on private equity, because those aren't the stories you hear, right? The stories you hear are all the negatives. What is it you think really goes wrong in those moments? Is it Is it a bad private equity actor usually? Is it people just not knowing how to deal with private equity when they're going through these interactions? What would you tell somebody out there who is maybe getting an offer from private equity or might need help to stay alive? What would you caution them about? What would be your best advice?

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

There's a lot of... So I'll answer the last question first. There's a lot of consultants out there that will help walk somebody through a sale of their business. Don't feel the other thing I would say to those folks is don't feel bad about wanting to sell your business. And, you know, I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from people because I sold my business in 2018. And that was really in the beginning of private equity and how that stuff happened. And I actually made the decision to sell my business in late 2017. My family tragedy happened in October of 2017. And I made the decision really within a month and a half, two months, something like that, that I was going to have to step down. And I really expected a lot of pushback. I really did. I thought people were going to vilify me and I was going to be pilloried from a public standpoint in our field. And there was a lot of people, a lot of colleagues that I had that worked in different parts of our field that when I told them, their response was, congratulations, good for you. And I couldn't believe I heard it, you know, and I felt like it was kind of reassuring. They're like, look, you know, I guess because this was people, these were people that knew me. I lived and breathed my company. It was the only thing that mattered to me. And That turned out to be part of the problem with my personal life is that's all that mattered to me. But they knew that for the few people that knew what was going on in my life, they understood why I was doing it. So I would say the first thing that I would say to those folks is don't feel bad about doing it. Second thing I would say is find a consultant that can explain everything to you, how everything works. I think that that's really helpful. I would say part of the reason why this goes wrong so many of these times is because a lot of these private equity companies bring a medical model into ABA. I don't agree with the idea that we should be making ABA the medical model that insurance companies are used to dealing with. I think there's a lot of problems with that. And I think private equity companies just swoop in and say, this is just like the... the string of dentist locations that we purchased last year and then sold for a profit. We can run it the same way as we do You know, a dentist's office or an orthopedist's office or something like that. And it just doesn't work that way. We have a very unique field with a tiered service delivery model that doesn't exist in other fields. So I think the smartest private equity companies are the ones that hire behavior analysts to help them make better decisions. I think if they don't, that's where the problems come in. I think most behavior analysts, especially seasoned behavior analysts that have been in the field for a while, that care about the clients, that care about the science will sit down with the private equity companies and say, yes, you need to make a profit. To make a profit, you need to be more efficient. Yes, agreed on both of those, but you also need to provide a good service, and here's what I mean by a good service, and here are the outcomes that you need to look for. And if those behavior analysts can communicate that appropriately and the private equity companies are willing to listen, then you get good outcomes. If those two things don't happen, you get bad outcomes.

SPEAKER_03: 14:48

So let me ask you this, and please correct me if I'm wrong, because like I said, I'm not too well-versed in private equity, but from some things that I've talked about with people, they've said that that does make sense, but since private equity a lot of times isn't there for the long run... by the time that they're going to have to pay the piper for the lack of clinical quality, they will have already sold and it won't be their problem anymore. It'll be on to somebody else. So if they can just make it more efficient, regardless of the clinical quality, get the metrics up and sell, that'll be on somebody else's doorstep.

SPEAKER_00: 15:22

I don't know how often that happens now. At least I think that they're becoming, these private equity companies have become They've been doing it now for almost a decade. So they're starting to figure things out, number one. Number two, if you sell a company, there's a whole bunch of provisions. And I learned about this when I was selling my company. There's a whole bunch of provisions in those agreements that say that if things fall apart three months in, you're in a lot of trouble as a seller. So I think... Private equity companies are becoming wise to this and realizing that it's not just a three-year turnaround anymore, that it's a three- to five-year turnaround, maybe five- to seven-year turnaround, and that it's bad business to run a bad business. So if you're running a business that all you care about is billable hours, and then all of a sudden audits show up, clients get hurt, social media plays a big role in this too. If you run a crappy company... Behavior analysts are going to make it well known in those Facebook groups and on LinkedIn and things like that. And you become, your brand becomes known for that. And anybody that's looking to acquire you, a bigger private equity company or whomever it is, they're going to do their due diligence. They're going to not just look at your books. They're going to look at your brand. They're going to look at how people have rated you on Glassdoor. So I don't think this is 2018, 2019, 2020 anymore. This is 2025. And those people that run those billion dollar private equity funds, they didn't become billionaires by making stupid decisions. And I think that they look back and say, you know what? We saw this company or that company collapse. Why did that happen? In a lot of cases, it's because they didn't care about clinical quality or treated their employees like crap.

SPEAKER_03: 17:28

Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate that. Like I said, I'm pretty ignorant to the whole thing, so I'm just saying what I hear, and thank you for clarifying that. That was very insightful.

SPEAKER_02: 17:35

Yeah, very good information. So you sold, and I'm going to skip over a few things here just in the interest of time. But now you're delving into artificial intelligence and how that's going to fit into the future of ABA, whether that's autism treatment or whatever that may present. And I think it behooves us to diversify more and more in how we're actually employing behavior analysis to help people. Talk to us a little bit about what you're doing now, what got you interested in that over time, and then anything else you want to share and we'll help you unpack it and discuss it. Yes, that was

SPEAKER_00: 18:15

great. Thank you for the question. Actually, one of the businesses that I moved into after I sold my ABA therapy company was opening a practice management software company. I made a lot of mistakes with that company. I learned what I like doing and what I don't like doing. When we were talking maybe about 30 or 40 minutes ago, I talked about how much I hate ABA admin. One of the things you have to do when you start an ABA practice management software company is you have to deal with a lot of admin and you have to really become a medical billing expert. It's interesting because I have a software team that I've been working with for 10 years. Something that our lead developer explained to me a few years ago and he's like, Adam, medical billing software is its own specialty because it's so complicated. You have to know so much about that industry and you have to merge two fields together, software and insurance companies. It's very difficult. Um, so I realized that, um, I didn't want to do practice management. It just wasn't something that I wanted to do, but I liked technology a lot, a lot. And when AI really started coming on the scene, uh, really even before, uh, chat GPT, everybody knows chat GPT and it kind of burst onto the scene a few years ago or a couple of years ago. Um, I started talking a lot to my development team about. where we can move forward and the answer that they always gave me was ai and i thought about what my professional mission is and my profession professional mission is to move the science and practice of behavior analysis forward that's what matters to me we were talking about the science earlier it really matters to me i taught at university for 12 years i enjoy teaching the science i enjoy disseminating it and when some of those large language models really burst onto the scene in 2022, we started having those discussions about how I can merge my professional mission with this new emerging technology. And where I kind of landed as our initial product offering was I wanted to make the practice of behavior analysis more evidence-based. So what do I mean by that? When we go into a home, a clinic, a group home, a school to work with a particular kiddo, there's almost exactly zero behavior analysts that show up with a binder full of journal articles. It's just not going to happen. And even if you did, it's not practical. If you've got a kiddo that's engaging in that spaghetti tantrum thing, you can't... response block that with one hand and page three in the idea that, because there's tens of thousands of journal articles out there, you know, that you're going to find the one and the intervention that's there, it's just not going to happen. So one of the things that we wanted to do was bring, with this technology, bring the science into the practice. And something that we started doing was setting up deals with publishing houses to connect these AI systems to that information and making it available in the moment. So you can literally pick up one of these mobile devices and say, my client's engaging in this, what should I do? Now, I want to make this very clear that, especially if you're an RBT listening to this, You need to do what your behavior analyst tells you to do, not what an AI system tells you to do. However, if you're a BCBA and you're looking for ideas on how to deal with a unique form of SIB or you want to set up toilet training in a unique setting and you need some ideas, you need a sounding board to bounce ideas off of, these types of tools are the way to do it. We set up our company called Introverbal AI, and we feel like the name of the company is appropriate because you plug a whole bunch of mans into our system. You ask questions, you make requests, and our system gives answers back. And that's why we came up with the

SPEAKER_02: 22:55

name. I love it. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00: 22:58

Thank you. Thank you. And with our system, our system... allows you to search through tens of thousands of journal articles to find the answers to not just clinical questions, but academic questions. And we took this base model and we started building on top of it. And we created a goals product that we have that helps you create goals for your clients. And then we ended up adding like 10,000 client goals or 10,000 clients worth of goals. It turned into like a million actual individual goals that it kind of pulls from. We developed a functional behavior assessment product that touches on not only those goals, but also the literature as well. So not to get too deep into the products, our system was really meant to improve the science and practice of behavior analysis and we tried to do that with um starting off with the foundation of the literature you know what were we all taught what was drilled into our brains in graduate school do evidence-based practice always reference the literature you know if you were in a good graduate program you were reading eight to ten journal articles a week you know and you really had to dive in do deep dives into these articles to make sure you understood why things were done the way that they were done and recognizing good research from bad research. And that was a big impetus as to what we wanted to do and I'll never forget the first time our lead developer came to me and he said, okay, we connected the two here and then I just started asking questions and it gave me answers instantaneously and it gave the in-text citation and then it gave a full reference list And it did it in like four seconds. And I was like, holy crap, you know, like just imagine the difference that we can make with all of this. And I think that was my introduction to AI and why I kind of fell in love with what we can do with this technology and how it can augment, not replace our practice.

SPEAKER_03: 25:19

Sold. I was going to say, I can vibe with that, but you are speaking this guy's language 100%.

SPEAKER_02: 25:25

So just, I'm already having visions of, you know, in all fairness, I can be very, I've been very critical on the show and in the past professionally about, you know, you've got these staff meetings and you end up taking time away from clients to sit down for two hours and talk about billable matters and, you know, efficiency. And you're not, training anybody you're not professionally developing anybody truly in the bread and butter of the the service delivery and and that knowledge so the idea that i mean i think a lot of that why that happens is it takes time to develop those training materials so as a bcba as a manager or whatever title you have if you're in a position of inciting that professional development it can be very cumbersome to go and find those articles that can be very cumbersome to read through those articles and what you're presenting here is going to really make that a lot easier much more accessible and that's super exciting

SPEAKER_03: 26:19

you mentioned read through the articles when I was doing BCBA study groups because we would do those a lot for people in their coursework studying to get the BCBA you put a journal article in front of them and it might have been might as well have been Mandarin Chinese like people did not want to read it didn't understand what it said and I mean to be fair like the way that they're set up isn't you know it's very lab heavy it's not great to read it's not like a Exciting. Well, exciting isn't the best word. It's not an easy read a lot

SPEAKER_02: 26:44

of times. No, no, no, it's not. It's not easy to translate or to apply. So you end up coming away with knowledge that you may not fully understand, that you have to process, that you have to discuss with other people, that you might need a language model to do some translation for you, to do some summary for you. That sounds fantastic. Tell us a little bit about some of the other features that you're looking at. So I would imagine that's one feature that's part of your system. What else are you developing?

SPEAKER_00: 27:09

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking about it. Yeah, that's really a great system. So some of the other products, our goal, our clinical goal right now is to go through the entire life cycle of the client. So from intake to discharge. So we're going to be releasing our assessment product coming up soon. And I'll use that as an example. We're super excited about that. So our assessment product allows people to upload all of that. You know, like when you go to do an assessment, you get a ton of information, let's say, from your office. Let's say you're a VCBA and you get a ton of information from your office. You get a diagnostic report. You get somebody else's behavior plan or re-auth or assessment or something like that. And you're expected to read through 40 pages of

SPEAKER_01: 28:01

documents. Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 28:02

before you go to see the client and good luck with that. Nobody's gonna be able to read through all of that. So the very first step in our assessment cycle is somebody at the organization uploads that documentation into our system. Our system processes all of that information provides a summary, and then suggested questions for the BCBA to ask during the interview portion of the assessment, and emails it to them and says, here, for this particular kiddo, here's a summary. This is everything that you're going to need to know, and here's some questions that we recommend asking. So when the BCBAs come in, they're armed with that information. Now, once they get in, the next step, and we're... Part of our goal, we have a two-pronged goal at Intraverbal AI. We want to solve a practical problem and do good science. Those are our two main values or pillars or aims at our organization. So we want to solve a practical problem. And another practical problem that you have when you're doing an assessment is you have a pen and you have your paper and you're furiously taking notes, trying to listen, trying to ask questions, and that's a huge challenge. So what we set up is practitioners can do this, whether they're doing telehealth or they're in-person, they can grab their mobile device or they can do it on their desktop. Our system transcribes the entire interaction between the practitioners and the families and it takes all that information in, and it allows them to press a button, and our system reviews the interview up to that point, and then checks the journal articles, the literature, and says, based on these two buckets of information, here are some questions that you should ask before you leave. So that happens to all of us. When you do an assessment maybe, You finish the assessment, you get in the car, you drive down the street and then you're like, crap, I forgot to ask about toilet training or I forgot to ask what medication the kiddos are on or something like that. Our system handles that for you and provides questions and says, hey, you forgot to ask about medications or hey, you forgot to ask about this. Once that's done, that's the indirect portion of the assessment. the assessment. So I was always taught that a good FBA involves three distinct sections, an indirect assessment, a direct assessment, and then a functional analysis if needed. So that takes care of the indirect assessment. Then our system does the direct assessment piece, where it records all of the data and observations that you take during the direct observation portion, allows you to upload data sheets into it. And then when you get to the last piece, which is the report, you go in, you sit down and you press a button and our system takes all of that information, the initial intake, the indirect assessment transcription, the direct assessment piece, puts it all together into a insurance ready report. And the way that we set this up is we hired BCBA peer reviewers that work at the insurance companies to evaluate the reports that we were creating. And we created a scorecard for them and they told us approve, not approve, approve, not approve, and here's why. And then we made the changes over the course of a few different iterations so that when our system generates the report, all that really needs to be done at that point is the behavior analyst needs to put their signature on it. And I don't mean just their actual signature, but make the report their own. And that's where this is really augmented intelligence, not artificial. We joke around that it's insurance ready, but it's really not. It requires that last step for the behavior analyst to come in and say, well, This isn't really in my tone of voice. I don't think maybe we should have this recommended intervention. I really think that the function of this behavior, the hypothesized function of this behavior is really this, and they come in and do that piece. But our tool solves a huge problem. It literally saves eight to 10 hours of report writing, and it does good behavior analysis. Sorry if I dragged on there, but I really wanted to capture the essence of what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_03: 33:10

So does your report, does that report also come up with hypothesized goals as well?

SPEAKER_00: 33:18

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So what we've really created in Intraverbal AI is an ecosystem. And something else that I think is very important to share is all of these products, I do not... I don't get 100% of the profit of these. And the reason that I'm bringing that up is because I've set up partnerships with a whole bunch of behavior analysts. And what Introverbal AI is, it's really an AI ecosystem for behavior analysis. And what we've done is we've partnered with a whole bunch of subject matter experts to put out different products and tools. We've got, and I know it's a long answer to your simple question there about the goals, but we've partnered with a subject matter expert for assessments, somebody for supervision, somebody for BACB test prep, which is going to be coming out at the end of the summer. And we've partnered with somebody for goals to generate goals within our system. So we've got a whole tool that just helps to generate goals. And that connects with our assessment system so that when the assessment report is generated, it generates suggested goals based on the assessment tools that you used during the assessment cycle. So whether you used a Vineland or a VB Map or an ABLES or something like that, it takes all of that into consideration. and the subject matter experts that we've worked with to create that report. And you can see it, we very proudly put that on our About Us section of our website, the different people that we partnered with, and we've got a whole bunch more partners that we're gonna be announcing. And I do wanna say this because I feel like it's very important to the mission and the values of our company is, What we wanted to create is a collective consciousness of information and behavior analysis. And we wanted to not just get all of the information from so many smart people that wrote those journal articles and did that research, but we also wanted to get the practitioners and the peer reviewers and set up all of these partnerships. So I am not the sole owner of Intraverbal AI. We are a community of behavior analysts that all have an ownership stake in the products that we're putting out here so that we can create this digital community of experts and expertise. Does that make

SPEAKER_02: 36:00

sense? A lot of sense. That's exciting. That's very exciting. And thank you for taking the time to explain all the elements there. I think it's very important. Starting with the idea, so I think that for me, a phrase that gets kicked around, especially in the old days when we did paper and pencil, it was very easy to create templates. And then before, we even talk about it at our company now, it's one of those words, I hear template and I'm like, oh, you're trying to save yourself And you're running the risk of being lazy and just replicating treatment plans across clients because it's similar enough. And obviously, there's a lot of problems to be had there. So when you first hear about sort of artificial intelligence, if you will, generating these things immediately, especially somebody of my age might be like, well, wait a minute, we're going to run into that problem. But the way you describe it clearly avoids that in terms of generating a wealth of ideas. And then I love the way you put the onus. on the professional. Make that your own. You're going to get a big lump of clay. You better sculpt that down to make sure it reflects your client or your purpose because otherwise then you do run that risk of going back to just a template, a very generalized cookie cutter template. The way you've described it though really presents a lot of safeguards and you're promoting people make this information their own. So yeah, let the computer pump out a bunch of possibilities and then you apply it to your particular client.

SPEAKER_00: 37:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because when I got into the field, I think in 2004, 2005, you know what we used to call treatment plans? They were called IVPs, individualized behavior

SPEAKER_01: 37:36

plans. And

SPEAKER_00: 37:38

somehow along the way, the I got removed to rather just behavior plans or treatment plans. And I don't know what happened to the I, but they should be individualized treatment plans. And the great part about this new technology is so much of it is based on and there's so many factors in the technology that so much of it is based on your data set. What do you have in your data set? And where is your data coming from? And how many different, exemplars and non-exemplars do you have that it can reference to get ideas from? And that's part of what makes it quote unquote smart. So I think that that's really important. And yes, absolutely. We've all seen, we've all worked at companies where we've seen that, where people just have the cookie cutter behavior plans. Yeah, the gold banks. Yeah, the gold banks. And look, I don't want to hate on the gold banks. I think the gold banks, can be helpful and something I say all the time because I use AI 25, 30 times a day. And I almost never take what AI gives me and use it. But, and I said this in another talk that I did, that I use, let's say, ChatGPT or Clod or Grok to come up with names for projects that I'm working on. I have never once actually used the name It's just given me a sounding board and said, hey, you know what? Here's a whole bunch of ideas. And then I read it. I'm like, that's a great way that I can think of a name. And I didn't think that I could come up with a name for this project in this format. And then I take that and I build on it and I come up with something of my own. And I think... That's really what our systems are meant to do. Does it solve problems? Does it save the BCBA eight hours of writing a treatment plan and fighting with, I don't know how long you all have been in the field, but when I first got into the field and Microsoft Office, if you try to grab a graph from Excel, copy and paste it into Word, it would literally explode on the Word template. Like it would go from a graph this big to a graph this

SPEAKER_03: 39:54

big.

SPEAKER_00: 39:54

Yep, been there. Yeah. And do we solve those problems? Absolutely. Do we save you frustration? Absolutely. But you as a BCBA are an intricate part of the service and you have to be because at Introvert AI, we do not do artificial intelligence. We do augmented intelligence. We partner with the scientists and the practitioners in our field to improve AI the science and practice of behavior analysis. Sorry, I don't mean to sound like a commercial here. I'm passionate about what we're doing, so it's exciting.

SPEAKER_02: 40:30

It's coming across, and we appreciate your passion. We are very excited about what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_03: 40:36

That is super exciting. Are you getting an echo on your end, Adam?

SPEAKER_00: 40:42

No, I don't hear an echo on my end.

SPEAKER_03: 40:43

Do you get an echo? Yeah, I'm hearing it

SPEAKER_00: 40:45

a little bit. It's okay.

SPEAKER_03: 40:50

Okay, the echo's gone. So what I'll do when I ask you a question, Adam, I'll just mute you for one second and then I'll because we just get an echo on our end and then I'll open it right up to you. But man, that is so, so exciting about like bringing the whole ecosystem together and also bringing like the legitimacy of the research back in, because that's something that I feel like is as long as people are getting reimbursed and the actual the. behavior service delivery, we've gone so far away from the researcher. We've lost our research base. That is so

SPEAKER_02: 41:20

exciting. I love the way it all comes together. One of my favorite things to do in terms of analysis and creating a treatment plan, for example, is brainstorming. And it's also one of the more taxing things that I do because it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of energy. Energy. It's back. But what you're talking about is going to save us that. It's going to create, it's going to generate the brainstorm in a sense. And then again, I can't stress enough how important it is that you are saying, take it, take it and make it your

SPEAKER_00: 41:52

own. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a critical piece here is, is it better

SPEAKER_02: 41:59

now? You're good. You're good. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 42:01

Yeah. That's a critical piece of what we're doing here because I know that there's a lot of fear that people are going to lose their jobs to AI. And I've been saying this from the beginning and I'll say it again now, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody that's using AI. And that's kind of the tough love that I like to give is you have to start using these tools and it's expected. Like at our organization, it is expected for you to use AI. When we send documents to each other, you know, you can always tell if something's generated by AI, there's certain markers that you can tell. When I see them, I don't get upset. I get happy in a sense because I know that they're making the most of their time and they're coming up with better quality policies and procedures or a new way for us to add a cool feature to our system or something like that but we work in in aba in a one of the most human fields imaginable and the way that i see this is you need humans to teach other humans how to be better humans and that's at the foundation of what we do in behavior analysis Some of those robots that companies are working on, I don't know if you all have seen like the Boston Dynamics videos or the Tesla robot videos. They're super cool. But if I've got a kid that's diagnosed with autism, I don't want him working with a robot. I want him working with another human being because there's so many nuances that are involved in being a human and being a good human. that can only come from other human beings. But I also want the humans that work with my family or work with any family to be able to make the most of their time. So be efficient, number one. And number two, and more importantly, be effective. And that's where connecting with the literature comes in is you can, yes, Our system, for example, makes reports easier to write. That's great. But I also want you to do better practice. And that's where the literature comes in.

SPEAKER_03: 44:26

I love that. We actually spoke with Michael Dowd from Alpaca Health. Have you heard of him before?

SPEAKER_00: 44:32

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Michael and I did a panel together on AI, I would say maybe about five months ago at a conference in New York. Yeah. And they were working on he's got a great understanding of AI and I think they were working on a Progress Notes AI. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 44:49

Yeah. So that was going to be my question. Yeah, I guess. Feel free to unmute yourself at any time. Just get rid of the echo. But like Mike said, my big concern from AI was that it's what I've seen from a lot of practice management software now is that it makes things more efficient, but It goes from helping people in ABA to now ABA develops all of their programs based around that. to fit into whatever the practice management software is. So it's not necessarily even helping anymore. It's now guiding and it's all just based on efficiency. And when I spoke with Michael and then now yourself, Adam, it's really enlightening to think about the new actual individualization that AI can actually provide to the service delivery model. And it's actually kind of almost the inverse of a gold bank because it's taking all of this information that is given to it in this FBA and the indirect and direct assessment And individualizing it for the client. So it's almost kind of the opposite of a gold bank, which is really exciting. I do have one question for you. So feel free to anything you want to add on to that. One thing that Mike has always talked about is with data. And you mentioned it, too, with the paper and pencil and something that for I've been in the field almost 20 years, Mike's been in longer. that we've always tried to grapple with, being able to take data while engaging the individual that you're working with. It's kind of like texting and driving. You can't really do both at the same time. So while we take data at our company, we really try to focus on the interaction versus running 100,000 trials to get data points. Is there a way in your program or something you're trying to develop, something you've brought up, a way of kind of recording a session or something like that and basically being able to take and quantify and track programs without actually taking data based on keywords that are heard or answers or things like that?

SPEAKER_00: 46:49

Yes, absolutely. So that's a big part of what we're working on now. And that's a component of our direct assessment piece right now. We're going to be expanding on that as part of our roadmap later on this year. But I love what you talked about there with regards to multitasking, whether you're in session or you're doing an assessment or whatever it is. If you're trying to take data and trying to maybe interact with a client, it's kind of an impossible task, to be honest with you. And there's so much cool technology that's coming out soon that involves capturing. So there's technology that we're doing research with right now called computer vision that can take a video of something that's happening in a particular setting and identify everything that's happening there, the number of times that it's happening, how long it happens for. Yeah, that's something you're interested in, Mike?

SPEAKER_02: 47:54

Very much. Very much.

SPEAKER_00: 47:56

Yeah, yeah, and that's just really going to change the nature of ABA data collection. So the way that the direction I think this is going is we're going to change from, we're going to go from data collectors to IOA experts. So we're going to go in and say, AI system, collect data, and then it's going to collect the data and it's going to report the data back to us. And then we're going to sit down and say, is this what we, is this the spirit and actuality of what we want to capture and reference to the data. You know what I mean? And so it's, look, capturing data is important. Knowing how to capture data is important. And this is a whole nother discussion for another day. I think graduate students still need to learn how to take data because there's little nuances that you learn as part of that process that you'll need to be a good IOA specialist. But once you get through all of that, there's a lot of circumstances where it doesn't make sense to sit there with paper and pencil or even a mobile device and button smash and take frequency data on self-stimulatory behavior that happens 100 times in 20 minutes or something like that. When you can be intervening or you can be looking at the surrounding environment, what else is going on during that time? And that's what this technology promises. And that's part of what we're so excited about.

SPEAKER_02: 49:29

One of the things I like to say is we've set up our implementation as though we're the only source of SDs in the environment. And what you just said, it opens that whole game up to really allow... other SDs in the environment to now be noticed. You can provide reinforcement to the behavior that results. Yeah, very exciting what you're talking about. So gentlemen, as I suspected, when Adam kindly popped up on the screen here to start our time together, we have breezed through these two hours. And we could probably spend a lot more time talking, but we've taken enough of your time and from you and your family. Let's think about some wrap-up points. It sounds like Dan's got something.

SPEAKER_03: 50:15

Yeah, well, just a question for you, Adam. And by the way, the echo just happened late, so it wasn't something that happened early. And I apologize for that. Thank you for following through. I hate to mute and unmute. I will open it up to you before we wrap up. Is there anything else that wasn't covered that you want to make sure that is... discussed today?

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

Yeah, absolutely. I think I want to stress a couple of things that we've already discussed, which is the AI is going to allow us as we progress with this technology to be better at our jobs and to do less of the tasks in our jobs that we dislike. I think everybody in our field likes interacting with other human beings. I think we like the interview portion of assessments. I think we like the supervision meeting portions of supervision. I think we like the parent interaction portion of parent training. We like one-to-one human interaction. And what this technology promises is a lot more of that. I talked about our assessment product that gives the practitioner more time to interact with the parents or the teacher, whomever it is that they're interviewing and connect with them, build a relationship with them on a human level. But the same goes for, we also have a supervision product that allows the BCBAs to have more time to interact with their supervisee and really understand what's going on in the supervisee's life as opposed to sitting there furiously taking notes and identifying is this direct or indirect hours and how many hours did you spend with the client versus doing indirect hours and doing all of those complicated formulas to figure out whatever the BACB requirements are at the moment. Our technology, and I'll just speak for ours at Intraverbal, Our technology is designed to make that process easier and more reinforcing. So it's not just low response effort, it's more engaging, it's more meaningful. You get to spend more meaningful time with your supervisee, talking about different case scenarios and experience. It allows you to dive deeper into the research. And overall, I think helps our mission, which is, Improving the Science and Practice of Behavior Analysis.

SPEAKER_02: 53:01

Right on, right on. Thank you so much. Love that. a plug, where people can find you, and that way our listeners, and we'll also include this in the show description, our listeners know where to find your products and where to find your information.

SPEAKER_00: 53:42

Yeah, thank you so much for asking. So if you all are interested, please check out introverbal.ai. So you can Google us, you can just go directly to our website, like I said, which is www.introverbal.ai. or you can reach out directly to me. The only social media platform that I personally focus on is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn pretty much all day. Feel free to message me anytime on LinkedIn, or you can use our contact form on our website. We do have an Instagram page for Introverbal and LinkedIn as well, so feel free to reach us. through any of those channels or if you see me at a conference I regularly present at conferences especially this year I'm all over the place presenting feel free to come up and talk to me if you'd like a demo of how our system works or if you'd just like to sign up or if you'd like to just have a discussion with us about

SPEAKER_01: 54:41

how

SPEAKER_00: 54:42

our system works on the back end feel free to reach out to us we can have a whole discussion about how we protect PHI and how HIPPO works in our system. Feel free to contact us at any of those channels and we'd be happy to get back to you.

SPEAKER_02: 54:58

Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. We'd like to do a few wrap-up points here, and you gave me a lot, so I had to write them down. So as we wrap up here, before our tagline, what would we learn from Adam? Solve the practical problem, do good science, make the report your own, augment your intelligence, don't make it artificial, and...

SPEAKER_03: 55:17

Always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_02: 55:19

Cheers. Thanks a lot, Mr. Ventura. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03: 55:23

ABA on

SPEAKER_02: 55:24

Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.