We delivered an AI practice assistant for a Mount Pleasant wellness coach whose clients sit down with her once a week — one that captures the session on a wearable recorder for clients who have signed her waiver, pulls out commitments in the client's own words along with names, conditions, and the things said only once, and hands her a one-page brief ninety seconds before the next person walks in.

In the eighth session, a client asked whether she remembered the dog's name. She did not. The dog had died between the second session and the third, and it was the reason the morning walks stopped — which was the thing they had spent five weeks trying to solve without ever naming why it had broken. It was in her notes somewhere.

It was not in her head on a Thursday afternoon with four more clients to see. She has coached full time since 2021 out of a small second-floor office in Mount Pleasant, and she carries thirty-eight active clients. Sessions run fifty minutes, most people come weekly, and she sees about twenty-six a week. That is the whole problem in one number: between one Tuesday and the next, she has sat with twenty-five other people and their sisters-in-law and their shift schedules and their knees.

Notes did not close the gap. Taking them during a session meant looking down, which is the opposite of the job. Taking them after meant a seven-minute turnaround between clients, so they piled up until Sunday, when she wrote twenty-six entries from four-day-old memory and they all came out sounding the same. What survived was the metric — weight, steps, sleep hours.

What evaporated was everything that actually moves a person: that he calls it "the thing with my knee" and never uses the word; that she said once, in week five, that she did not want to discuss the scale that day; that the goal had quietly stopped being weight around week nine and become sleeping through the night, which the client never announced, because clients do not announce that. Not every client is recorded. Before any of this ran, we built her a plain-language waiver — what is captured, where it lives, who can see it, how long it is kept, and how to revoke it in one sentence at any time. Thirty-one of her thirty-eight have signed.

Any client can say "not today" and the device goes in the drawer without discussion. The seven who have not signed get the same coaching on handwritten notes, and she was immovable that nothing we built could quietly make the unrecorded clients worse off. For those who consented, she wears a Plaud Pro and the session is captured whole. The design work went into what gets pulled back out, because a summary is useless here.

It extracts commitments in the client's own phrasing rather than paraphrased, because "I'll try to get out before the kids wake up" and "I'm walking at six" are different sentences from different people. It extracts stated obstacles with their conditions attached — if the standing meeting moves, this does not happen. It holds names: people, pets, the specific gym, the shift rotation, the town the mother lives in. It records language preferences, including what a client has asked not to discuss.

And it flags things mentioned exactly once and never again, which turned out to be the highest-value category in the system, because those are the sentences people float to see whether you catch them. There are four templates — intake, weekly check-in, plan revision, and returning after a gap, which needs a different opening than the other three. Ninety seconds before a client comes up the stairs she gets one page: what they committed to, what they said would get in the way, what happened, three ways she might open, and one line marked handle carefully. Afterward it compares the session against the last four and shows drift — a goal that has migrated, an obstacle appearing for the fourth consecutive week.

It does not diagnose and does not produce clinical impressions. She asked for that boundary to be built in rather than assumed, and it flags when something a client has said sits outside what a wellness coach should be handling, so she can refer out. It has done that twice in five months. She says she would have missed one of them.

Five months, about five hundred and ten sessions. Sunday admin has gone from three and a half hours to twenty-five minutes. She no longer writes anything down while a client is in the room. Average engagement has moved from eleven weeks to nineteen.

"Nobody is paying me to remember," she said. "They are paying me to notice. I could not do the second one while I was busy doing the first."