When I first spoke to Bobbie CEO and Co-founder Laura Modi for Forbes in 2024 , the story was how two former Airbnb execs turned a mastitis crisis and a very personal feeding journey into a company that is successfully challenging the moat that is a $70 billion formula duopoly. the conversation has shifted. Two years later when we chat in Washington DC, like seemingly every founder in 2026, she’s talking about AI. Yet unlike most, she's applying it to 3 a.m. feedings instead of enterprise workflows.

Today, the company launches ‘ Ask Bobbie ,’ a 24/7 AI-powered feeding assistant that stitches together three layers: the tech, aka the agent, expert-led group sessions, and 1:1 clinical consultations powered by NAPS. But its most interesting feature is what it does not do.

"Ask Bobbie can answer your 3 a.m. feeding questions, but it can’t replace the personalized guidance and support that comes from real experts," Modi shares.

The timing is important. Data shows that 71% of parents have turned to large language models for parenting advice, a shift recently covered by Forbes , noting Peanut logged a 2,041% jump since February 2025 in women turning to GPT, Gemini, and Claude for maternal queries. The thesis behind ‘Ask Bobbie’ is that general-purpose chatbots were not built for the emotional rollercoaster that is new parenthood.

Why general AI models fall short for parents

"There’s no other time in life where you probably have more questions than your future four-year-old will have, and that’s when you become a parent for the first time," Modi tells me. "AI should give you all of the information you need where information can support very direct help. But where it can't, AI can also prompt the moment that you need to meet with a real person one-on-one."

The distinction between information versus real help, was the core focus for the Bobbie product design team, who spent six months training a custom agent on six years of its own feeding data and content. But Modi acknowledges that like all AI agents it is always learning and the system is constantly reiterating based on new data and findings.

The AI-First Product Thesis: Prioritizing Help Over Information

It’s an agent designed to look at the issue holistically, from physical and clinical concerns to the emotional challenges many parents experience, such as guilt, loneliness, and the detriment of self-doubt.

"Ask Bobbie is engineered with strict guardrails to eliminate the AI hallucinations common in general-purpose models," she shares. "When a query falls outside its parameters, the tool never fabricates an answer; instead, it seamlessly routes the parent to Bobbie's dedicated Care Team."

Modi’s metrics are targeting the toxin of self doubt. "I suspect we're going to find we're prompting people to connect with a feeding consultant 20-30% of the time," she said. "My hope is that we can get more people off AI, because we now know when real community or real clinician handholding is better than four bullet points on a page."

Redefining AI Success Metrics in Parenting Tech

That is, of course, not how most consumer AI, nor this digital age we live in, is designed. Session length is the goal, and many founders are already wrestling with whether AI risks cannibalizing the paid communities that built their brand trust.

The cultural backdrop to parental screen time is heavy. Forbes has already chronicled many of these tensions, from AI’s potential to deepen the motherhood penalty to the debate over whether AI companionship can ease loneliness or further mask it.

Navigating the Motherhood Penalty and AI-Driven Loneliness

Modi, however, is unsentimental. "In this digital world you can find 10 different ways to swaddle your baby before you've had breakfast, but you're still having lunch alone," she said. "People need help; they don't always need information. What Perplexity and all of these current AI bots have not done is start optimizing for when they need to tell people to shut them down and go speak to a real human."

When it comes to building a tech based on lived experiences, this is not her first rodeo. Before founding Bobbie, she ran hospitality at Airbnb, training two million hosts. "Our most successful programs were not us sending around blogs and information," she said. “We created a host mentor program where we connected experienced hosts with new hosts. You have your essentially pen pal to turn to. Ask Bobbie is the same idea, retooled for feeding: information at the front door, humans in the back room.”

Applying Hospitality Lessons to AI-Driven Infant Feeding

The subtext for other consumer AI founders- the Joy parenting app , Peanut’s community layer, among many others- is that in categories built on trust, the winning AI is the one that hands you off. "AI stops at information," Modi said. "People are not growing socially because they're just handed a book. They're growing as humans because they are surrounded by community, family and friends."

For a brand that has always sold perspective at the core of their product, that may be the most on-brand launch Bobbie could ship.