Powered by Operation HOPE and HOPE AI. Inspired by my mother, Ms. Juanita Smith.
My mother made between $15 and $18 an hour as a seamstress at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft for 32 years. She had a high school education. She also had a credit score of 854, a number that barely exists anymore, and when she passed she had bought and sold seven houses and was worth a million dollars.
I told that story again last week at the Good Soil Forum in Irving, Texas, in a conversation with Nichole Deal, National News Anchor and Money Correspondent for iHeartMedia’s Black Information Network. She asked what working families can do right now, with groceries, gas and the market all pulling at them. I answered the way my mother taught me. If she could do it, anybody can.
Then Nichole asked about Juanita AI, and I could hear what the room already knew. This is the part of my work I care about most.
Why I built her
Operation HOPE has more than 2,000 offices and about 400 full-time employees. Our coaches are experts in home ownership, small business and consumer credit, and they are extraordinary. But a coach goes home at five. A coach is not on call on a Saturday. Our Juanita AI is there at two in the morning on a Friday, when the worry is loudest and the bank branch is dark.
I kept asking myself one question. God could not have given us artificial intelligence without the least of these in mind, so how does it reach the single mother working two jobs? I wanted high touch inside high tech, streets and suites in the same room. Juanita AI is the first AI agent modeled on a single, working-class Black woman, and she carries my mother’s name.
An “and,” not an “or”
Juanita AI does not replace a HOPE coach. She works beside them. She can take more client questions at one time than all of our offices combined, and she knows a little about everything a family needs: credit, a first home, a business, a budget. A coach can bring the personal touch, the intimacy and the encouragement, while Juanita AI answers in the background the question that falls outside that coach’s specialty.
That is why I tell my own team the same thing I will tell you. Your job is not going to be replaced by AI. It may be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. Embrace it, and you become more powerful and more effective than you were before.
Ask her yourself
Juanita AI is available at no cost. Ask her how my mother became a millionaire. Ask her what it takes to save for a $180,000 home, and how much you would need to put away each month, and for how many years. Ask her what it was like to grow up in East St. Louis with no hope in sight. She will answer.
My mother is in heaven now, but I still hear her when a family finds a way up. Meet her at portal.operationhope.org, and read how she came to be in the original Juanita AI Bryant Journal piece.
Thank you to Nichole Deal and the Black Information Network for a wonderful conversation.
Keep reading
- JUANITA AI. The Bryant Journal piece on the day Operation HOPE launched her.
- My Mother Answered My Money Questions. Now She Can Answer Yours.
- The Operation HOPE announcement of Juanita, the HOPE AI Financial Coach.
- Meet Juanita in the Operation HOPE client portal.
John Hope Bryant, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Operation HOPE, founder of Bryant Group Ventures, publisher of the Bryant Journal, and author of the bestseller Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America.
