Science of People has spent the last two decades working at the intersection of behavioral science and technology, training thousands of students, major companies and government agencies. Today we’re announcing something new to bring interpersonal skills training to more people in a more personalized way than ever before.
CueShift is a social intelligence platform. We’re building the APIs and agents that help humans—and the machines that represent them—understand and improve how people interact.
We’ve raised a seed round from Science of People and Vanessa Van Edwards to make it happen.
Why CueShift Exists
Here’s the problem we kept running into: the demand for highly personalized people-skills coaching has always vastly outstripped the supply. Science of People has reached over 300 million people in the last year alone through Vanessa’s videos, books, and courses. Millions have taken our assessments. Hundreds of thousands have gone through our courses and People School.
And the number one request, every single time, is some version of: “Can you just help me with my specific situation?”
A difficult conversation with a boss. A text message to an ex. A performance review. A first date. A negotiation. A team meeting that keeps going sideways.
For twenty years, the honest answer was: we can teach you the principles, but we can’t be in the room with you. The methodology works. It’s backed by real research. But it lives in books and courses and workshops—one-to-many formats that transfer knowledge without reliably changing behavior.
That’s over now.
What CueShift Does
CueShift takes Science of People’s twenty years of behavioral science methodology and makes it programmable. We encode Vanessa Van Edwards’ specific frameworks and Science of People’s proprietary research findings into structured intelligence that any person or product can use.
CueShift does four things:
Assess. Feed us text, voice, video, or a full conversation transcript. We return behavioral scores based on the PSI-7 framework—measuring what people actually demonstrate, not what they claim on a self-report questionnaire.
Plan. Given a person’s behavioral profile, we determine skills to work on. Not generic advice. Specific named patterns, specific techniques from the coaching repertoire, specific exercises calibrated to demonstrated strengths and gaps.
Interact. We run real-time coaching interactions—role-plays, drills, guided practice—with adaptive difficulty and methodology-driven feedback.
Synthesize. We turn behavioral data into insight that actually lands. One sentence that makes someone go “that’s exactly me.” Or a full coaching report a practitioner can use in a session.
A new book by Vanessa Van Edwards
Every conversation is an opportunity.
If conversations have gotten harder, more awkward or less satisfying, you’re not imagining it. We’re simply out of practice. It’s time to find the joy in talking to each other again.
Who It’s For
Three audiences, and this is the part that matters:
People. Individuals who want to be better with people—in their careers, their relationships, their lives. As AI automates more of the technical work, the humans who can read a room, build trust, navigate conflict, and communicate with precision become irreplaceable. Every interaction carries more weight when interactions are rarer.
Organizations. Teams that need to work together better and faster. CueShift measures demonstrated capability, tracks development over time, and produces evidence that training worked.
Agents. AI agents are increasingly acting on behalf of humans—scheduling, negotiating, communicating, building relationships. Those agents need social intelligence. They need to know when to be warm and when to be direct, how to read resistance, when to push and when to yield. CueShift is the people-skills layer for a world of AI agents.
Why Science of People
CueShift isn’t starting from zero. We’re starting from twenty years of behavioral science research, two bestselling books, a coaching certification program, original research, and a methodology that’s been delivered to Fortune 500 teams and organizations worldwide.
The technology to deliver personalized coaching to millions enables social intelligence for all. We can now deliver a specific, opinionated framework for how people work—one that’s been embraced by millions of people and refined over two decades. Science of People’s investment means we have both the funding and the full depth of that methodology to build on.
What’s Next
We’re building now. If you’re interested in early access—whether you’re an individual who wants better people skills, an organization looking to develop your team, a coach who wants better tools, or a developer building a product that could use social intelligence—we’d love to hear from you.
