Advisor AI / PathWise Shark Pit Pitch
A pitch for Advisor AI, the career and major recommender that evolved into PathWise, focused on student purpose, STEM pathways, and personalized roadmaps.
- ↗ Pitched Advisor AI as an AI-powered career and major recommender for students.
- ↗ Connected the product direction to student purpose, STEM pathways, mining education, and personalized roadmaps.
- ↗ Won 2nd Place and $4,000 at the SME Tucson Shark Pit Innovation Pitch Competition.
- ↗ Used the pitch validation to continue evolving the product direction toward PathWise.
Overview
Advisor AI was the early product direction behind what later became PathWise: an AI-powered career and major recommender designed to help students discover paths that match their interests, goals, skills, and future opportunities.
The Shark Pit pitch became an important validation moment because it forced the product story to become clearer: students do not only need information. They need direction, structure, and a way to understand how academic choices connect to real careers.
The problem
Students, especially undecided, first-generation, or early-career learners, often need more than a list of majors.
They need a roadmap that connects:
- Identity
- Interests
- Skills
- Academic choices
- Career pathways
- Real-world opportunities
- Next steps they can actually take
The problem is not that information does not exist. The problem is that students often do not know how to organize that information into a path.
That is where Advisor AI began: helping students move from confusion to a clearer direction.
The pitch
At the SME Tucson Shark Pit Innovation Pitch Competition, I pitched Advisor AI as a purpose-driven tool for career and major exploration, especially connected to mining, STEM, and workforce pathways.
The pitch focused on how AI could help students explore options more personally and turn broad career uncertainty into structured recommendations.
The goal was to show that career guidance could become more interactive, adaptive, and actionable.
Product direction
The pitch focused on several early product ideas:
- Agentic AI roadmaps
- Psychographic and interest-based matching
- Gamified career exploration
- Major-to-career pathway guidance
- Semester-by-semester planning
- Mining and STEM workforce visibility
- Personalized next-step recommendations
These ideas later informed the evolution toward PathWise, which became more focused on career pathways, advising preparation, institutional workflows, and student-success systems.
Why it mattered
The Shark Pit pitch helped validate that the problem was real and that the product direction had potential beyond a general student-support idea.
It showed that career clarity, pathway planning, and AI-guided exploration could matter not only to students, but also to educators, workforce partners, and industry groups trying to build stronger talent pipelines.
The pitch also helped sharpen the bridge between mining education and broader student-success work: students need to see how classroom concepts, majors, skills, and careers connect.
Visual proof
Advisor AI / PathWise pitch during SME Tucson Shark Pit.
Award and recognition moment from the SME Tucson Shark Pit.
Press and feature visual connected to the pitch.
Outcome
The pitch received 2nd Place and $4,000, helping validate the direction and support continued MVP development and exploration.
More importantly, it became a turning point in the product evolution from Advisor AI toward PathWise.
The product direction became clearer: instead of only building a recommender, the stronger opportunity was to build a guided pathway system that could help students understand options, prepare for advising conversations, and connect academic planning to career outcomes.
What I learned
A pitch is not just a performance. It is a compression test.
You have to explain the user, the pain, the product, the market, and the next step in a way that makes sense quickly.
This pitch helped me understand that the strongest product stories are specific. “Helping students find purpose” is meaningful, but “helping students connect interests, majors, skills, and career pathways into an actionable roadmap” is much more buildable.
That lesson directly shaped the evolution into PathWise.