The impact of technology on our wellbeing has long felt like a paradox – connecting and disconnecting us at the same time. At the heart of this conversation is Poonacha Machaiah, CEO of the Chopra Foundation, an organisation dedicated to conducting scientific research on the effects of mind-body practices on health and wellbeing. He is also the co-founder of Cyberhuman.AI, a personal AI digital wellbeing companion. He discusses what we must do to ensure technology and AI in healthcare can be forces for good – foregrounded by his consciousness-based approach to wellbeing.

Read his full interview with our CEO Adam Penny below, condensed and edited for clarity.

Adam: Can you tell us about your work with the Chopra Foundation and Cyberhuman.AI? How do these two roles intersect?

Poonacha: I’ve been working with Deepak at the Chopra Foundation for over two decades. His vision has always been clear: how do we reach a critical mass of a billion-plus people living in a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier and joyful world? Every morning when I wake up, that’s the vision I hold.

Not everyone can afford to see a psychiatrist or therapist. In Bangalore, where I live – with 12 million people – we simply don’t have enough therapists. We realised: technology is the only way to democratise access to wellbeing. And that’s what led us to start Cyberhuman.AI – to use technology to make wellbeing affordable, accessible and available to all.

Adam: What are the key problems you’re aiming to solve?

Poonacha: In my village in India, if I’m having a bad day, someone might say, “let’s go have a cup of tea”. Today in New York, days can go by without anyone asking how you’re feeling.

The silent pandemic is the mental health crisis. Every 40 seconds, we lose someone to suicide globally. Loneliness is one of the biggest pandemics we’re facing right now. When we talk about suicidality, it’s often viewed as the end point, but 99% of what leads to it happens before that moment. Five years ago, the Chopra Foundation began to tackle this issue with a consciousness-based approach to mental wellbeing.

We’re also exploring how we can make disease optional. Only 5% of diseases are due to fully penetrant genes; 95% are lifestyle-related. So we’re asking: can we help people manage their lifestyle more effectively?

Adam: Could you elaborate on your consciousness-based approach to wellbeing?

Poonacha: When you look at mental health, a lot of it is just a diagnosis. We take a very complex human being and we diagnose them. Our goal was to help people move beyond that.

If you can answer the question, Who am I? – everything changes. But don’t confuse yourself and your selfie. Forget about your LinkedIn profile. It’s your soul profile that matters. They say anxiety is a dizziness of the soul. So if you can actually help people understand: Who am I? What do I want? What’s my purpose? What am I grateful for? – then real transformation begins.

“Forget about your LinkedIn profile. It’s your soul profile that matters.”

When you get to know who you really are, you’re never going to be lonely. There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is beautiful, actually. In solitude, you ask the deeper questions. So for us, it really became about helping people get to know who they are. Because what’s the point of understanding outer space, when the most complex thing is inner space?

There is a campaign we launched from this approach called Love in Action, based on four attributes. The first is attention, deep listening. The second is appreciation, helping people appreciate each other. Third is affection – love, kindness, tenderness, compassion – and the fourth is acceptance. When we do these four things we really give life to this consciousness-based approach to wellbeing.

Adam: Tell us more about how far has Cyberhuman.AI developed, and what your vision is for its future?

Poonacha: Our goal is to create an intelligent, agentic AI for wellbeing. We focus on the 11 pillars of wellbeing to help improve quality of life. We look to integrate traditional medicine, complementary medicine, and lifestyle medicine to create personalised lifestyle prescriptions – so we can prescribe you a lifestyle. We look at a person in totality, not as a specialty.

We use Deepak’s knowledge as our base – 95 books of knowledge and the wisdom of a neuroendocrinologist. We integrate personal health data: your metabolic profile, blood tests, genome, epigenome, microbiome, exposome. We then sync this with wearables, creating a more complete picture of your physical state.

What we’re working on now is life event ontology – understanding how different aspects of your daily life impact your wellbeing. For example, what if we could show you that on days you slept less than five hours, your stress levels spiked? Or that high UV exposure and long commute times correlate with lower energy or mood changes? It helps people make meaningful, personalised changes.

Adam: You mentioned democratising access. How will you make this technology accessible to everyone?

Poonacha: Our innovation lies in making this technology accessible. Someone in India should be able to use it for one hour, one week, or one month. What I want to do is make transaction-based pricing very transparent. This is what it costs, this is how much it costs us to operate, this is how we offset the carbon footprint, and this is our margin. If you look at it today, what’s the number one thing needed to build trust? You have to be transparent. You have to make and keep your commitments. 

Adam: In our increasingly digitalised world, is there a danger that AI might diminish human connection rather than enhance it?

Poonacha: I think technology is neutral. How you use it is what’s more important. I started working in the AI space in 1992. Today, I’m asking: can we use technology to help us understand who we are? It’s kind of an oxymoron – in one way, technology is alienating us, but if it’s used consciously, it can be a bridge to form human connections. 

My mom lives in India. I lost my dad two years ago. My only lifeline to her every day is my phone. Without it – without FaceTime – I think I would lose something. Every technology comes down to the ethics and consciousness with which we use it. I believe technology can connect us if it’s used consciously. 

We can even take it to the next level with ambient computing: where a phone no longer needs to be a physical device but a command. If you can say, “I want to call Deepak,” and it happens, you’re much more present and connected.

AI is also going to enable us to be more creative. Art, appreciation, music, dance, wholeness. It’s going to free us from routine, repetitive tasks. What you do with that time is up to you, but it’s going to give you that time.

We want to be on the side of using technology for good. When we use things like gene editing or CRISPR to eliminate disease, that’s incredible. But if it’s used in biological warfare, it becomes dangerous. That’s why we need a critical mass of people using a consciousness-based approach to technology.

This interview took place at Davos 2025 in association with Finnish Flow. Finnish Flow coordinates the Finnish business community’s participation in the side events of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland.