– Project EMMA (Empathetic Moms Mentoring AI) is designed to leverage the acute emotional intelligence of mothers to help PlanetSpark’s AI tutor develop emotionally sensitive response patterns for kids
– The edtech’s AI tutor is trained on over 0.5 million class recordings and 5 years of proprietary life skills curriculum. This emotional modelling will help it better recognise emotional cues such as hesitation, disengagement, or enthusiasm
Gurugram, 10th July 2025: PlanetSpark, India’s leading platform for AI-powered life skills education, has launched “Project EMMA (Empathetic Moms Mentoring AI)”, a breakthrough returnship initiative that puts experienced educator-mothers at the centre of building emotional intelligence into its AI tutor. As PlanetSpark’s AI tutor transforms how children learn critical 21st-century life skills like public speaking, collaboration, and creativity, the company is now going a step further by making empathy, encouragement, and emotional nuance core to its AI-powered learning experience.
Project EMMA invites skilled educator-mothers on post-maternity career breaks, into a six-week fellowship designed to co-train PlanetSpark’s AI systems on emotional engagement with children. This initiative reimagines mothers’ return as a contribution to frontier AI innovation, which will drive the future of AI-powered learning. Fellows will help train the AI to better recognise emotional cues such as hesitation, disengagement, or enthusiasm, and co-develop response patterns that make the learning environment more compassionate, responsive, and child-centric.
PlanetSpark’s AI tutor, already trained on over 0.5 million class recordings and 5 years of proprietary life skills curriculum, can dynamically adapt lesson plans based on learning pace and style.
“Teaching confidence, collaboration, and resilience requires emotional fluency—something even advanced AI struggles with. This is where the deep behavioural intelligence of mothers becomes transformational. Time spent raising young children gives rise to a rare, instinctive mastery over emotional nuance—an understanding of how children communicate confusion, disengagement, joy, or frustration even when words fall short. Their day-to-day experience in guiding children through moments of resistance, self-doubt, and emotional highs equips them with one of the most underappreciated but vital capabilities in education: emotional calibration. These are precisely the skills that our AI tutor now needs to evolve into a truly human-centric learning companion,” says Maneesh Dhooper, Co-founder, PlanetSpark.
Through structured reviews of anonymised classes, dialogue scenario design, and live feedback loops, these mothers will train PlanetSpark’s AI to navigate emotional subtleties that only lived parenting and classroom experience can teach.
Speaking about the initiative, Kunal Malik, Co-founder of PlanetSpark, added, “We’re not just bringing mothers back into the workforce; we’re bringing them to the forefront of AI evolution. Emotional intelligence is the invisible curriculum behind life skills, and there is no one better than mothers to help us model it. Project EMMA is our way of converting career gaps into innovation opportunities.”
By the end of the fellowship, each participant will graduate as a certified AI Co-Training Fellow, with an opportunity to transition into roles across pedagogy development, quality assurance, and AI training. Their work will feed directly into PlanetSpark’s next-gen AI release, ensuring that the emotional scaffolding within the system is as strong as its technical foundation. With Project EMMA, PlanetSpark is reinforcing its belief that the most effective life skills education lies at the intersection of innovation and empathy.
About PlanetSpark
PlanetSpark is India’s only edtech platform for AI-powered life skills education. With LIVE 1:1 online classes and asynchronous practice sessions, the platform intervenes at an early-stage of children’s development journey to transform them into masters of life skills. So far, PlanetSpark students have become TEDx speakers, published authors, podcasters, and digital influencers across 18 countries, including India, the US, UK, and more. Founded in 2017 by XLRI graduates Kunal Malik and Maneesh Dhooper, PlanetSpark is backed by marquee investors such as Prime Venture Partners, FIITJEE, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Dr. Ashish Gupta, Gokul Rajaram, and Shirish Nandkarni.
