Building Human-First Digital Twins on AWS with Praxis AI

Praxis identified a common challenge across education and workforce development: People often need individualized support when a human expert is unavailable. Learning management systems can provide cultural context or serve as knowledge platforms. But they don’t always give the human-centered guidance that people need between classes, shifts, coaching sessions, or career transitions.

Additionally, underserved rural and tribal colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, and workforce programs have been underfunded and might lack resources to provide personalized guidance. This widens gaps in confidence, progress, and opportunity. Limited funding can affect an organization’s ability to add faculty, expand advising, or offer specialized support outside class, even when students need more individualized help. “The faculty don’t have enough time, and students really need that one-on-one experience,” says David James Clarke IV, cofounder and CEO of Praxis.

The company wanted to address this challenge with a cost-effective solution that integrates with the systems that organizations already use. To realize this vision, Praxis needed AI and cloud infrastructure that could support multilingual, mobile-friendly learning experiences at scale while keeping costs low for underserved organizations. Using an AWS Accelerator and the AWS Education Equity Initiative, the company turned its concept into an affordable, scalable solution that’s designed to be secure.

Praxis helps education and workforce-development organizations maximize both financial and human resources by extending expert support across classroom learning, mentorship, and student services. The company works with each educator or workforce expert to capture the materials, methodology, lived experience, personality, and communication style that make their guidance distinct. Source materials can include lecture notes, podcasts, course materials, playbooks, policies, and training content.

This foundation helps Human-First Digital Twins carry an expert’s authentic voice, values, and verified expertise into relevant moments of learning and work. For Praxis, “AI is Amplified Intelligence.” The aim is to extend human reach and preserve human judgment, not to produce generic answers. Through its IP Vault, the company preserves an expert’s intellectual fingerprint and creates amplified expertise, trusted guidance that keeps the real expert at the center.

Praxis powers the digital twins’ responses by using Amazon Bedrock, a solution for building generative AI applications. This way, the company can select from more than 100 foundation models as needs evolve. Amazon Quick Sight provides AI-powered business intelligence to support learning analytics and personalized pathway analysis. Using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to create and control keys, Praxis helps protect sensitive data under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. By combining Retrieval Augmented Generation with knowledge graphs, the company improves response accuracy, context, and speed.

Using AWS infrastructure, Praxis is putting its high-tech, human-touch philosophy into practice, delivering mobile-friendly experiences in over 100 languages and supporting offline access. “With all the underlying infrastructure technology and the ability to deliver a rich experience in rural or low-bandwidth environments, AWS proved to be a natural fit for us,” says Clarke.

Praxis has created more than 3,000 digital twins, reaching over 300,000 students, teachers, and workers in 180 organizations globally. Faculty members now save up to 100 hours per semester, and students’ grades have increased by one letter on average. The solution also maintains a weekly engagement rate of over 70 percent, compared to 20 percent with generic chat agents.

At Alabama State University, the company extended personalized academic support to 5,000 students. Stretched thin, the faculty couldn’t connect with every student who needed guidance. By rolling out the solution, the university helped students access support, while building a model that is expanding into admissions, financial aid, and advising.

Praxis also collaborated with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to extend access to Native-centric perspectives on health science, training several thousand American Indian faculty and students in Native health sciences.

A professor who previously answered about 50 questions per week reported that students asked his digital twin about 2,000 questions per week. This visibility into the questions that students weren’t asking before helped the professor identify where learners needed extra help. It also showed that students were more comfortable seeking help from the digital twin, which could respond at almost any time.

“People saw the proof points and started talking to each other,” says Clarke. “Word got out that Praxis is in the business of helping people.”