Peppy, a parent-assistant AI tool designed for modern families, grew out of founder Tina Provost’s very relatable goal: to “not go crazy” trying to organize camps, activities, and summer fun for her 9-year-old son, Theo—a challenge familiar to nearly every parent of school-aged kids.

“I started Peppy, and assembled a brilliant team, because I desperately needed a tool to help me as a working parent,” Provost says of starting her innovative company. “Our team feels we have an obligation to other smart, modern families so they can spend time where it counts…utilizing our AI tool will reduce time spent planning summers by 95 percent.”

Peppy was built because its founders wanted a smarter, happier way to organize family life without it feeling like another full-time job. Their combined backgrounds in tech, business, and organization (plus real-world parenting experience) lends to helping families plan less and play more, so both parent and child win.

Provost, an OSU alum who cheered for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball, always had an itch for problem solving. The majority of her career was spent as a “lean Six Sigma Black Belt,” working with health company Covetrus leading the North American team through process improvement and efficiency projects.

Her tenacity for leading high-impact projects paid off when one of her inventions, a provisional, patented and beta-tested wearable which allows people to use touchscreens without their hands, won funding from the Pentagon to continue prototyping the product to be tested for military use.

Shortly after, she built a technology company amid the change in college sports and the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness, referring to the right of college athletes to profit from their personal brand), where fans could stream events and send money to athletes as they made plays on the field in real time.

“As we were transitioning from that company, I was experiencing extreme frustration with planning summers for my son,” Provost says. “It is absolute chaos. I have actually felt this way for years, and when I realized no one else had solved this, it was time.”

When creating Peppy, Provost says she needed to make sure parents had one place to find and assess options, plan with other parents, and save the time and cognitive load that comes with scheduling sports clinics, art camps, and the infinite amount of options there are for kids today.

“This means we are bullish on removing planning and coordinating tasks from parents’ plates,” Provost says. “We do this with a niche AI agent who is specifically built to tackle tasks for parents,” literally doing the planning tasks for you, keeping in mind your geographical location, and saving you the headache of option overload.

“I feel like we are all just trying to figure it out as parents,” Provost says. “But if there’s something I learned in business, it’s that technology and AI will not replace good, deep relationships. But it can replace the menial things we do day to day so we can spend more time on the good stuff.”

WEBSITE: getpeppy.io

INSTAGRAM: @getpeppy