How SAM works

How a session runs

A session moves through four stages. Welcome: SAM picks up the context of the day, what is weighing on you now, how much time you have. Exploration: it digs, reflects back, looks for the specific fact behind the general statement. Insight: it names a pattern, connects two things you had kept separate, offers an angle you did not have. Action: it brings things back to something you can actually do.

The session closes on a ritual: a two-or-three-sentence synthesis, one concrete commitment doable in under two minutes, and a bridge to next time. This is not politeness — it is checked before the reply is sent, and a closing reply that opens a fresh question gets corrected.

• Welcome — the day’s context, the constraints you state
• Exploration — the specific fact behind the general statement
• Insight — a pattern named, a link made, a new angle
• Action — one concrete step, one at a time
• Closing — synthesis, micro-commitment, bridge to next time

What carries over between sessions

At the end of every session an episodic summary is produced: the themes, what moved, what stayed open, the commitments made. That summary feeds the next session.

SAM also keeps an opening anchor: the sentence you said that carried the most weight. That is what it comes back to at the start of the next session, in your own words, rather than an interchangeable "so, how have things been?".

Commitments do not vanish. If you left with something to do, SAM comes back to it in the first few exchanges next time — whether you did it or not.

Honest limit: this memory is a structured reconstruction, not a full recording. SAM keeps the substance of a session, not every sentence spoken.

Benevolent confrontation

A coach who validates everything is useless. When the same theme keeps coming back across sessions without moving, a check fires and asks SAM to name it — rather than walk around it one more time.

Confrontation here means: naming the pattern that repeats, connecting facts you kept apart, pointing out a contradiction, and leaving the conclusion to you. Never judging, never deciding for you.

It is suspended when it would be misplaced: in a first session, under emotional saturation, and at any sign of distress. Safety comes first, always.

The tools

SENSAÏ ships a library of 98 structured coaching tools — guided exercises, thinking frameworks, reference sheets, tracking templates. They cover action, cognition, communication, confidence, the body, emotions, self-worth, motivation, parenting, regulation, relationships, patterns and values.

SAM does not run through them mechanically. A tool fires when you ask for something concrete, when a theme has been circling for several exchanges, or when the session is ready to move to action. The number of tools started within one session is capped: being handed three exercises in a row is not being helped.

Supervision, during and after

During the session, an algorithmic supervisor reads every turn before SAM replies. It uses no language model and runs in a few milliseconds. It watches for specific drifts: three questions in a row without offering anything, your first name repeated, an emotion expressed and left unacknowledged, an explicit request for concrete help still being met with questions, the same opening formula recurring. When it catches one, it corrects SAM’s instruction for that turn.

After the session, an evaluator scores it on seven axes and flags anti-patterns. These evaluations are not about scoring you: they measure coaching quality and correct what drifts.

Crisis detection and honest orientation

Every message is screened for acute distress signals before anything else runs. That screening depends on no cache and no session state, and keeps working when the rest of the infrastructure is degraded — an invariant tested under real outage, not an intention.

When a serious signal is detected, SAM does not play therapist. It names what it hears and points to the resources appropriate to the user’s country. A human-notification mechanism exists on the team side: these situations are escalated through several channels.

What that mechanism does not do: it guarantees no callback window, it does not dispatch emergency services, and it does not replace calling them. If you are in danger right now, call your local emergency number.

What SENSAÏ is not

SENSAÏ is not therapy. SAM is a coach, not a therapist — and an executable check stops it from presenting itself as one, in any session language.

SENSAÏ does not diagnose. It names no disorder, qualifies no pathology, prescribes nothing.

SENSAÏ is not medical care and replaces neither a doctor, nor a psychologist, nor a psychiatrist. When professional support becomes necessary, SAM says so and points you there.

SENSAÏ is not an emergency service. Nobody monitors conversations in real time in order to intervene.