For decades, therapy has followed a familiar rhythm: a 50-minute session, often once a week. Within that time, clinicians listen, assess, introduce strategies, and help people make sense of complex experiences. These sessions typically offer tools people can carry into everyday life.
But life rarely cooperates with a schedule. When life happens, it is easy to forget what we learned in therapy.
And that is especially true for parents of children and adolescents. They do not get to choose when the hardest moments happen. Those moments usually unfold between sessions, during school pickup, at bedtime, in the kitchen, or late at night, when a child is anxious, dysregulated, or acting out and support is needed most.
That tension between how care is delivered and how families actually live has long troubled Eduardo Bunge, PhD, a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Palo Alto University (PAU) and a leading researcher at the intersection of mental health and AI. For more than a decade, Dr. Bunge has been asking a question that may sound simple, but has major implications for the future of care:
What if care didn’t stop when the session ended?
Dr. Bunge’s career has been shaped by a deep commitment to evidence-based care for children and adolescents. As Director of PAU’s Children and Adolescents Psychotherapy and Technology (CAPT) Research Lab, his work has focused on how digital tools might responsibly extend the reach of clinical interventions without compromising safety, fidelity, or the therapeutic relationship.
Early on, much of that work followed familiar academic pathways: pilot studies, randomized control trials, and peer-reviewed publications. The results were “Ok, but not mind-blowing.” In his own words. What lingered was a sense that something more fundamental needed to shift, not just the tools, but the delivery model itself.
That realization crystallized during a study involving a conversational agent. After interacting with the tool, one participant left an unexpected message: “I thank God that he put you on my way.”
The comment wasn’t directed at a clinician. It was written for a very rudimentary chatbot that one PAU student developed years ago.
Rather than dismissing the moment, Dr. Bunge paid close attention and noticed that when people have meaningful conversations, they bond with the source of support, whether it is a human or an AI. He thought of this source of support as a complement to therapist work, not a replacement. Suddenly, he felt the answer to his quest to find a way to extend the care between sessions was possible, but would clients and the therapist be open to it?
Most therapists see AI as a threat, but Dr. Bunge rejects that.
“Therapists are the professionals who promote change,” he often notes. “But we sometimes struggle to change ourselves to the new technologies.”
Over the past decade, the field has adapted to change, but with some significant reluctance.
“We got the chance to deliver teletherapy since 2003 when Skype was launched, but only when the COVID-19 global crisis hit in 2020, we made that change.
Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Bunge argues, presents a similar inflection point. Clients are already seeking support from generative AI chat platforms, often without clinician guidance or oversight. Ignoring that reality doesn’t protect the profession; it sidelines it.
The real risk, he suggests, isn’t that AI will replace therapists. It’s the clinicians who disengage from shaping how these tools are used, leave critical care decisions to systems that were never designed with clinical values in mind.
That conviction led Dr. Bunge to co-found ParenteAI, an AI-powered, evidence-based Parenting Assistant
ParenteAI is intentionally designed with a focused purpose. Rather than attempting to replicate therapy, it focuses on supporting parents and recognizing them as the most consistent therapeutic presence in a child’s life. The platform is designed to reinforce evidence-based, parent-led interventions, offering guidance and structure between sessions while keeping clinicians informed and involved.
What makes the approach notable is not the presence of AI, but the constraints placed around it. The system follows established treatment protocols, maintains fidelity over time, and clearly defines boundaries around crisis support. Clinicians review summaries of between-session interactions, allowing sessions to begin with shared context rather than retrospective catch-up.
In other words, the technology does what many clinicians wish they could: stay present between sessions, without replacing professional judgment.
“I wanted to build something I would actually feel comfortable using in clinical care,” Dr. Bunge says. “Something that augments the work, not something that competes with it.”
For clinicians, the implications are significant.
Between-session support has long been recognized as critical to progress, yet at times difficult to sustain. Much of the progress families make comes from applying strategies and insights in everyday life, as new situations and challenges arise between appointments.
ParenteAI offers a different rhythm, one where guidance continues as life unfolds, and where the therapist returns not to a blank slate, but to a clearer picture of what has worked, what hasn’t, and where support is needed next.
Early research led by Dr. Eduardo Bunge and his colleagues suggests strong engagement and promising outcomes. In a study published in Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, the team examined a hybrid parenting intervention combining therapist-led sessions with guidance from Pat, the AI assistant.
Parents participated in four live sessions with therapists while completing four additional Parent Management Training modules with Pat over eight weeks. During that time, caregivers exchanged an average of 376 messages with the platform, demonstrating high engagement.
The study found significant improvements in children’s behavioral and emotional symptoms, including reductions in aggression and attention difficulties measured, along with reductions in parental depression, anxiety, and stress.
Caregivers also reported high satisfaction and a strong therapeutic alliance with Pat. Notably, when asked what contributed most to their progress, parents reported attributing roughly 60 percent of improvement to interactions with Pat and 40 percent to therapist and group sessions combined. Not because Pat was better than the therapists, parents actually provided strong feedback to the therapists too, but the in-the-moment support provided by Pat was something parents never experienced before.
Additional randomized controlled trials by Dr. Bunge and collaborators are now underway to further evaluate outcomes.
Perhaps more importantly, the model reframes productivity as deepening impact. Sessions become more focused. Progress accelerates. Care moves at the pace of real life.
Dr. Bunge is careful not to overstate the promise of any single tool. Ongoing studies, including randomized controlled trials, continue to evaluate outcomes. But his broader message to the field is already clear: the future of mental health care will be shaped by clinicians who are willing to engage with change thoughtfully, rather than defensively.
This is where PAU’s role comes into focus, not as a technology incubator, but as an academic environment that encourages faculty to question assumptions, test ideas responsibly, and translate scholarship into practice.
Innovation, in this context, is not about novelty. It is about alignment, between evidence and experience, between professional values and emerging realities.
The story of Dr. Eduardo Bunge and ParenteAI is ultimately less about artificial intelligence than it is about professional agency.
Mental health care is evolving, whether the field chooses to lead that evolution or not. Clients are already navigating digital spaces for support. The question facing clinicians is not whether to participate, but how.
What would it look like to design care around the moments families actually need it? How might outcomes change if support didn’t pause between sessions? What tools would you trust if you helped shape them yourself?
These are not questions with easy answers. But they are the kinds of questions that define leadership in moments of transition.
For Dr. Bunge, the work continues, rooted in research, guided by clinical ethics, and animated by a belief that the most meaningful innovations in mental health will always begin with care.