Grupo Cala (Peru) is a consulting firm in the field of education. They help schools develop more individualised pedagogy. Along with Human AI (Spain), a startup specialised in AI-powered socioemotional assessment, they joined the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator to better support teachers in making their students shine.
Teaching hard skills first implies assessing effectively soft skills
Grupo Cala (Peru) helps private schools improve their culture, leadership, and management through strategic consulting, educational marketing, and training based on Christian values (such as integrity and humility).
As a result, the firm enables educational institutions to:
- Increase student enrolment,
- Strengthen community engagement,
- Build a purpose-driven and effective learning environment.
In their journey to better support schools, Cala has developed processes to assess students’ socioemotional skills (SES).
Identifying and evaluating SES can ultimately help students find more motivation, collaborate more effectively, and address anxiety and stress before they escalate.
In other words, a precise SES assessment enables the tailoring of a school’s guidance programme for each student, thereby maximising the chances of pedagogical success.
However, current methods (questionnaires and teacher observations) are manual, time-consuming, and far too subjective. Put differently, the SES reporting process is neither scalable nor completely accurate.
Not addressing this challenge would limit students’ development of socioemotional skills and thus have long-term consequences of reducing employability and life-readiness. At a wider scale, it would also widen educational inequalities, particularly between urban and rural communities.
Human AI makes socioemotional assessment scalable with real-time results
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Human AI is a Spanish startup that has developed an AI assistant that analyses text or transcribed voice to generate immediate evaluations of personality traits and socioemotional skills.
Main features include:
- GDPR-compliance,
- Assessment of 35 socioemotional skills regrouped in 5 pillars: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (this last trait refers to how emotionally stable or unstable a person tends to be),
- Analysis of text (e.g., essays, resumes, cover letters) or transcribed voice (e.g. interview recordings) that can be uploaded to the platform.
As a consequence, any school using Human AI’s virtual assistant would gain:
- A scalable process (there is no need to request teacher scoring or questionnaires from students). More assessments do not require more time from teachers and students.
- Real-time results.
As schools can now visualise complete and detailed socioemotional profiles, they can take targeted actions like providing extra counselling to anxious students or grouping peers with complementary strengths for better teamwork.
Human AI and Cala have thus joined forces to better equip schools with socioemotional assessment.
PoC, open innovation training, and funding opportunities with the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator support
By joining the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator, Cala and Human AI will benefit from the following acceleration services:
- PoC design & Prototyping (delivered by IESE Business School):
The PoC & Prototype Designing service will support the Cala–Human AI partnership in testing how effectively Human AI’s socioemotional assessment tool performs in real educational environments. The pilot will begin with an assessment of the social-emotional skills of management teams at six educational centres in Peru, aiming to strengthen their leadership and familiarise them with the methodology before extending it to teachers and students. Both partners will be able to define a clear pilot scope, validate how easily text data can be collected and analysed, and assess the accuracy and usefulness of the results for school staff. At the same time, the service will help identify potential technical risks, such as data privacy compliance in Latin American schools or integration challenges with existing school systems, before scaling the solution.
- Open Innovation Bootcamp (delivered by IESE Business School):
The Open Innovation Bootcamp can help the Cala–Human AI partnership to create a space for both teams to align expectations, share working methods, and learn best practices for corporate–startup collaboration.
Cala can better understand how to integrate agile tech development into its education services, while Human AI can adapt its platform to the real operational needs of schools.
- Access to funding (delivered by EBN):
The service will guide the partners through the complex landscape of EU and regional grants, subsidies, and calls for proposals relevant to edtech innovation.
Making teachers more aware of each student’s individual personality
By the end of the programme and in the months that follow, Cala will implement Human AI’s socioemotional assessment technology in some of their client schools.
The goal is to increase teacher satisfaction by at least 30% through more accurate student personality analysis.
Teachers are indeed on the frontline, taking into account the insights delivered by Human AI’s tool.
Based on whether a student appears to have, for instance, low (1) self-esteem, (2) concentration, or (3) empathy, teachers can:
(1) Insist on positive feedback,
(2) Give clear structure and micro-deadlines,
(3) Pair the student with classmates showing more emotional diplomacy.
On the other hand, Human AI will be able to:
- Validate its solution in real pedagogical settings,
- Adapt it to the Peruvian educational context,
- Build a scale-up roadmap,
- Get insights from educators and students to iterate and make the solution smarter over time.
