The Secret I Found in AI: How I Created The Dementia Assistant®

I Think I Found the Secret of the Universe

For years, people have talked about the secret of the universe.

Manifestation. Positive thinking. Meditation. Visualising the life you want. Putting your thoughts out into the universe and somehow attracting back the things you need.

I’ve heard all of it.

And over the last few months, people have started asking me a completely different question:

How did you create The Dementia Assistant®?

Where did it come from?

How did you manage to build something of this size?

And, perhaps most importantly, how did you do so much of it yourself?

The answer is that I didn’t.

Not really.

I think I simply discovered a different kind of secret.

I learned how to work with AI.

And that has completely changed what I believe is possible.

For most of my life, I have had ideas.

I’ve known what I thought dementia care should look like.

I’ve known what families needed.

I’ve known what professionals needed.

I could see gaps in services, gaps in education, gaps in communication and gaps in the support people receive when dementia suddenly changes their lives.

The ideas were always there.

The problem was that I couldn’t build what I could see in my head.

I’m not a software developer.

I’m not a computer scientist.

I didn’t have a huge technology company behind me.

I didn’t have hundreds of developers sitting in an office waiting for me to describe what I wanted.

I had knowledge, experience, ideas and an enormous amount of determination.

Then I started learning AI.

And suddenly the barrier between imagining something and creating something became much smaller.

That is the part I find extraordinary.

AI became the bridge

I began to realise that I didn’t necessarily need to know how to code everything myself.

What I needed to learn was how to explain what I wanted.

I could describe a problem.

AI could help me turn that problem into an instruction.

That instruction could then be given to another AI capable of creating, testing, writing, designing, analysing or building.

And gradually, something that had existed only in my imagination started appearing in front of me.

A real platform.

Real tools.

Real learning.

Real dementia support.

Real systems.

And eventually Hugo.

That is why Hugo means so much to me.

Hugo represents far more than an AI assistant inside a dementia platform.

For me, Hugo represents what becomes possible when human experience and artificial intelligence learn how to work together.

The Dementia Assistant has now grown far beyond what I originally imagined.

Not because an AI magically built it while I sat back and watched.

Quite the opposite.

It has involved an unbelievable amount of work.

There have been mistakes.

There have been things that haven’t worked.

There have been days when I have wanted to throw the computer out of the window.

I’ve questioned things, rebuilt things, challenged the AI, changed direction and learned constantly.

But the possibilities just keep getting bigger.

And I think that is the part of AI that people still underestimate.

You don’t have to be the cleverest person in the room

I keep receiving messages asking me to appear on podcasts, take part in interviews or talk about what I have created.

And the strange thing is that this frightens me far more than learning AI ever did.

I worry that I’ll go onto a podcast and make an absolute fool of myself.

I’m not the most academic person in the world.

I don’t always speak eloquently.

Sometimes my words come out in completely the wrong order.

My grammar isn’t perfect.

I can know exactly what I mean in my head and still struggle to explain it beautifully.

But AI doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that.

That has been one of the most empowering discoveries of this entire journey.

I can speak naturally.

I can explain something badly.

I can ramble.

I can describe half an idea.

And AI can help me organise it.

It can understand the intention behind what I’m saying, turn it into something structured and then help another system understand what needs to be created.

Think about how powerful that is.

For generations, there have probably been millions of people with extraordinary ideas who never had the technical ability, education, money, contacts or confidence to turn those ideas into reality.

AI has the potential to change that.

Perhaps this is what manifestation really looks like

For years I’ve been told:

Meditate.

Visualise.

Manifest.

Put positive thoughts into the universe and eventually those thoughts will become reality.

Maybe there is value in that.

Meditation can calm you.

Positive thinking can change how you approach problems.

Visualising something can certainly help you understand what you are aiming for.

But I have discovered a much more practical form of manifestation.

Learn how to use AI.

Take the thing that exists in your imagination.

Describe it.

Break it down.

Question it.

Research it.

Turn it into instructions.

Build it.

Test it.

Improve it.

Then do it again.

That, to me, is manifestation with a set of tools attached.

AI does not remove the hard work.

In some ways, it creates more work because once you realise what is possible, your imagination becomes enormous.

Every answer creates another question.

Every new feature creates another possibility.

Every problem makes you think, “Could we solve this too?”

That is exactly what has happened with The Dementia Assistant.

What began as one idea has become an entire ecosystem because AI allowed me to keep asking:

What if?

What if families could receive help when they needed it?

What if professionals could learn while they were working?

What if children could understand dementia differently?

What if people could speak to Hugo in their own language?

What if care planning could become more intelligent?

What if knowledge normally buried in books, policies and training courses could become available in the moment someone actually needed it?

And then the most dangerous question of all:

Why not?

The opportunity belongs to ordinary people too

I think sometimes AI is presented as something belonging to technology companies, programmers or extremely clever people.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Some of the people who will create the most important things with AI over the next decade may not be technologists at all.

They may be nurses.

Carers.

Teachers.

Parents.

Builders.

Shopkeepers.

Social workers.

Small-business owners.

People who understand a problem because they have actually lived it.

AI can give those people something incredibly powerful:

the ability to build closer to the speed of their imagination.

That doesn’t mean expertise no longer matters.

It absolutely does.

It doesn’t mean AI is always right.

It isn’t.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you press a button and your dream magically appears.

You have to learn.

You have to challenge it.

You have to check what it produces.

You have to understand its limitations.

You have to work ridiculously hard.

But the door is there.

And once you understand how to open it, the world starts looking very different.

So perhaps I have finally understood what people meant when they talked about unlocking the universe.

I just found a slightly different key.

For me, that key was AI.

I had the ideas.

I had the knowledge.

I had the need.

AI gave me the bridge between those things and creation.

And if someone like me can learn how to use that bridge to create something like The Dementia Assistant, I cannot begin to imagine what millions of other people are going to create when they realise that the same bridge is available to them.

The secret isn’t simply believing something will happen.

The secret is learning how to take what you can imagine and turn it into instructions, actions and eventually something real.

That is the extraordinary opportunity AI has placed in front of us.

And I think we are only just beginning to understand the magnitude of it.