Diotima of Mantinea was a Greek priestess and philosopher who reportedly taught Socrates all about the nature of love.

Her modern namesake, an Irish AI-powered education technology platform, has no ambitions in that direction.

Instead it wants to change how people learn by giving them feedback while they are still working, rather than waiting until an assignment is finished.

The idea behind this approach, known as “formative feedback”, is that intervening while someone is in the learning phase is likely to lead to better results.

The problem is that while this approach might work with a handful of students it’s almost impossible for an educator to implement it at scale using traditional feedback methods.

This is where Diotima fits into the frame. The platform uses artificial intelligence to carry out the time-consuming aspects of the work, providing individual-specific feedback in a fraction of the time it would take a teacher to do so manually.

Diotima ingests an organisation’s teaching materials, curriculum and desired learning outcomes. It then builds assessments and drafts student-specific feedback based on the approved material. Trainers and teachers review this feedback and can edit or change anything they’re not happy with before signing it off.

“Assessors use the platform for assessments and feedback, and learners use it to access their assessments and review their work before submission,” says Jonathan Dempsey, who cofounded Diotima with Siobhán Ryan earlier this year.

“Learners work through assessments at their own pace and can attempt a question more than once before submitting,” Dempsey says. “As they review their answer, Diotima prompts them to check their own reasoning rather than handing them the solution. The criteria their work is judged against are revealed once they submit, not before. That keeps the assessment honest and keeps the learner thinking rather than working backwards from the answer.”

Diotima is the brainchild of Ryan, a biochemist by background, who spent more than a decade working on the brewing side in Diageo before taking a career break to raise her family.

She subsequently retrained as a teacher and worked in education before starting to tease out an idea she’d had for an AI-related project that would transform exam preparation for students.

At the time Ryan was working on her idea alone and, feeling she could do with some support, she applied for an Enterprise Ireland innovation voucher. This allows entrepreneurs to tap into the skills of third-level institutions.

Ryan used hers with the Learnovate Centre at Trinity College, which specialises in education technology and innovation.

With input from Learnovate and academics in the schools of education and computer science, Ryan shifted her focus from exam preparation to using AI to deliver personalised feedback at scale.

Ryan was introduced to Dempsey during her time working at Learnovate. A 20-year veteran of the edtech sector, he subsequently joined Diotima as co-founder to lead the business side of things.

Following a feasibility study and an injection of just under €500,000 in commercialisation funding from Enterprise Ireland Diotima is now ready to spin out as a stand-alone entity. The company, which is fully funded for now, will begin operations with four employees.

The first iteration of the platform is aimed at the corporate training market and professional education, training and membership bodies.

Diotima will work in any educational setting. However, Ryan says the company is starting with professional education, as it’s easier to manage and less fragmented than the primary and secondary school systems here.

With a successful trial of the system under its belt with the Law Society, Diotima will be ready to sign up paying customers in a few months’ time, and its revenue model will be a subscription linked to the size of an organisation and the number of users.

“Diotima will work for any organisation that runs courses or oversees certification or continuing professional development where their assessors are basically spending too long marking and writing feedback,” says Ryan, who adds that the system is built for educators, not IT departments, so if someone can use everyday online tools, they can use Diotima.

“Essentially, Diotima removes the repetitive manual work so educators can spend their time on the human connection that only they can provide. What’s absolutely key here is that everything we do has human oversight,” she adds. “Nothing reaches a student without an assessor reviewing and approving it first. That’s the core design commitment of our platform and what makes Diotima different from other AI tools, where the output goes straight to the learner.”

Dempsey adds that while AI is a key part of Diotima’s solution, it has to be managed and fully compliant with the European Union AI Act.

“Diotima has been engineered with EU AI Act Annex III compliance at its heart rather than being added after the fact, as compliance is not something that is easy to retrofit. Learner material from our customer organisations is never used to train AI models, and that’s also strictly built into our platform,” says Dempsey, who recently participated in the AI ecosystem accelerator programme run by NovaUCD in partnership with CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI.

“Under the Act there is a high-risk category which includes anything that is deterministic in the future of an individual. An educational result would be an example of this, so there must be a human in the loop,” says Dempsey, who points out that breaches of the Act carry potentially far heavier fines than GDPR violations.

“We empower educators to be their best while ensuring we also protect their organisations from risk,” he says. “This makes it possible for organisations to cost effectively adopt AI for feedback where it is otherwise too risky.”

There has been a lot of debate about AI regulation, with those who oppose any regulation arguing that it will stifle innovation. Ryan disagrees. “I think that’s nonsense,” she says. “The regulations have not held us back. We were still able to build Diotima, and it’s fully compliant. I’m on my soapbox here, but I think it’s a lazy excuse. If the mindset is there, you can do it.”