Sonder was built on a simple but ambitious belief: that people everywhere should have access to the right care, at the right time, and be supported and empowered to be at their best. For a decade, we have been working toward that goal. AI is the most significant opportunity we have ever had to get closer to it.
The potential is not incremental. AI can extend the reach of every part of how we deliver support, deepen the quality of every interaction, and bring meaningful care to people who might never have accessed it before. We are not talking about automating care. We are talking about amplifying it.
We see an extraordinary opportunity to fundamentally change the way people access care. Not just to make existing services faster or more efficient, but to reach people who have never had access to meaningful support before. To intervene earlier, when it matters most. To keep people well, rather than waiting until they are not.
That is the vision that drives how we are approaching AI.
But we are also clear-eyed about the risks. As the first technology company to achieve accreditation for healthcare support services by ACHS, we have always held ourselves to the highest standards of governance. We know that in healthcare, trust is paramount and speed alone is not a virtue. There are already documented cases where AI systems deployed without adequate safeguards have caused serious harm. These risks are not hypothetical.
At Sonder, we are clear that increasing access to care and delivering safe, effective care are not competing goals. With the right approach, AI makes both possible.
Our core principle: human-led, AI-assisted
While Sonder is a digital platform, we have always understood the value of human connection. Our team supports people in their most vulnerable moments, regardless of how they choose to connect with us – whether through chat or a call in the middle of the night. We stand alongside our members to help them navigate their way through critical incidents and provide support through some of the most traumatic experiences a person will ever face. This is not a process we are looking to automate.
This is why, today, every Sonder interaction is human-led and AI-assisted. Our team retains full decision-making responsibility for every case using AI to augment their response speed to the member, consistency, and insight. Every response, decision and moment of care is owned by a person who brings context, empathy, and real-world judgement to the situation.
What that looks like in practice
We have built a suite of AI-powered tools that put this principle into action – for example:
- Sonder Care Copilot provides our team with live, empathetic response guidance tuned to Sonder’s model of care, guiding high-quality conversations without replacing the human leading them. It also retrieves pathway recommendations in real time based on case context and member entitlements, helping our team navigate complexity faster.
- Case notes accelerates context-gathering into seconds, actively identifying and flagging risk while giving our team an instant picture of a member’s situation so they can focus entirely on the person in front of them.
- Our Care Quality Engine continuously evaluates case quality against our defined standards and governance framework, helping us maintain and raise the bar across every interaction.
None of this replaces the human on the other end of the conversation. All of it makes that human better at their job.
A foundation of trust
Data protection is not an afterthought at Sonder. We apply rigorous processes to remove personal identifiers, maintain strict compliance with global data privacy laws, and we do not train or deploy AI in any way that compromises the trust our members place in us.
Where we are heading
AI unlocks a new frontier in what is possible: the ability to support millions more people in their hour of need, and to have a profound impact on their lives in a way that simply was not imaginable before.
That is the future we are building toward. And as the technology and regulatory landscape mature, Sonder will continue to evolve to meet it. Our mission, however, remains unchanged: providing the right care, at the right time, with the human connection that makes all the difference.
