“Understanding people isn’t just about asking questions—it’s about asking the right questions and deeply understanding the answers. And if you can’t do that, you’ll never truly know what they need, what they feel, or why they act the way they do.”
Every business claims to know its customers. Most fail. They rely on shallow surveys filled with leading questions, expensive market research reports, and gut feelings disguised as insights. Michelle Gilmore, CEO and Co-Founder of Hey Juno, recognized the problem firsthand. The way companies gather and utilize human understanding needs improvement. Therefore, she created a better solution.
As a system and service designer, Michelle spent over a decade traveling the world conducting behavioral research with people across diverse contexts. She attempted to train individuals to conduct research with others, but quickly realized their widespread inadequacy in this skill. She observed that humans often struggled, asking leading questions, injecting their own biases into the data, and ultimately bending participant truths with shaky methods and tactics.
AI offers a new approach. With Hey Juno, Michelle and her team have leveraged decades of expertise to create the world’s first human understanding engine. A tool that helps businesses, governments, and organizations listen with depth and clarity.
As Michelle puts it, “Human understanding is the answer to most, if not all, problems.”
Read on to discover the story behind Hey Juno and the woman who’s determined to revolutionize how we connect with the human experience.
From Designing Systems to Designing Understanding
Michelle Gilmore always had a builder’s mindset. Trained as an Industrial and System Designer in Australia and Malaysia, she focused on creating things that served a purpose—products that made life easier, and systems that solved real problems. However, she felt that the design alone was insufficient. She wanted to understand the people using these systems, what drove their decisions, and how businesses could make better choices by listening more carefully.
This curiosity led her deep into human behavioral research, where she discovered a gap—companies gathered data, but few knew how to use it effectively. She explored how human insights could refine design thinking and, ultimately, influence business strategy at every level. To sharpen this approach, she integrated her intellectual property into a Public Policy master’s program at City College in Harlem, broadening her expertise in real-world problem-solving.
Her work took her across the globe, working with brands, organizations, and governments that needed to understand their customers and citizens better. Each project, whether a corporate expansion or a policy shift, reinforced a single truth—understanding people deeply and accurately held the key to better decision-making. She learned from failures as much as successes and built a career around one core belief: human understanding solves problems.
The Birth of Hey Juno
Michelle and her Co-Founder, Josh Davey, initially set out to scale human understanding through purely human efforts, an approach no one had truly achieved before. However, this initial endeavor revealed significant limitations; they discovered that relying solely on human researchers often led to missed insights, irrelevant questions, and ultimately, data that lacked depth and utility.
Recognizing the need for a more effective solution, they began experimenting with augmenting their deep domain knowledge, intellectual property, and existing data with the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This pivotal experimentation ultimately led to the development of an early prototype for what would become Hey Juno.
As AI and machine learning advanced, the missing piece clicked into place. The technology was finally able to close the gap—automating research without sacrificing depth. They developed Hey Juno, a system built on 15 years of expertise in human investigation. What used to take entire research teams months to accomplish, Juno could now perform in just minutes—asking better questions, gathering insights, and refining results with each interaction.
The concept was both simple and powerful: to make human understanding effortless. Businesses would no longer need to rely on expensive research firms or outdated data methods. With Hey Juno, they could instantly gain genuine human insights that felt natural, precise, and actionable.
From the very beginning, Hey Juno prioritized truth—not just data points, but real experiences and sentiments. As Michelle and her team continue to refine the platform, one thing remains clear: the world makes better decisions when it listens well.
Redefining Research: What Makes Juno Different
While most AI tools are designed to make something or predict something, Hey Juno has a fundamentally different purpose: to listen and understand. Inverting the common use case for AI, Hey Juno is designed to ask questions and listen to humans, focusing solely on achieving true comprehension.
This is the key difference. Michelle Gilmore and her team didn’t just create another AI-powered research tool; they integrated decades of domain expertise into Hey Juno. This system thinks like an expert rather than merely processing information. While AI is becoming increasingly accessible, deep knowledge—something that only comes from experience—remains rare. Juno bridges this gap by transforming complex research into something that is simple, actionable, and immediate.
The process is effortless. Users tell Hey Juno what they need to know and from whom, approve their study, and let the system do the rest. Insights arrive in real time, stripped of unnecessary noise, complex graphs, and overwhelming data dumps. This leads to a clearer understanding of customers at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research. Companies that use Hey Juno become smarter instantly—not through guesswork, but through direct human insight.
Great Research Comes from Great Questions
Hey Juno does more than simply collect responses; it asks well, which is where its true power lies. It has been trained on real-world experience, incorporating not only diverse data and use cases but also the knowledge of experts who have dedicated their careers to understanding human behavior and done the job of the agent they have built.
Moreover, the system continually adapts (under Michelle’s direction and governance), refining its approach based on new data and user feedback. Every conversation enhances its performance, making it sharper and more precise.
Trust Built from Day One
In the AI-driven world, data privacy is not optional. It is foundational. Michelle and her co-founder, Josh Davey, recognized this from the very beginning. They built Hey Juno with the strictest security standards in place—not because it was mandatory, but because they believed it was the right thing to do. While many companies treat privacy as an afterthought, Juno prioritized it from day one.
Their approach adheres to industry best practices, ensuring that companies using Hey Juno can trust the insights they receive without compromising security. The goal has always been clear: to deliver deep understanding, protect user data, and operate with integrity.
Steering Juno with Clarity and Purpose
Michelle doesn’t envision her leadership as wielding a traditional helm. Instead, she sees her role as one of custodianship. While Hey Juno may still be in its early stages, its mission is firmly established, and Michelle considers herself the guardian of that mission. This approach brings freedom and clarity to building Juno. She intentionally fosters a culture of proactive growth.
She focuses on three main objectives. Make the product better. Make customers happy. Make sure the world knows about Hey Juno. Every decision is guided by a simple question. Does this make human understanding easier? Faster? More useful?
All other aspects of the business naturally align with these primary goals. Growth, innovation, and impactful market presence are seen as direct outcomes of a foundational principle: to create a solution so indispensable that businesses find it essential for their operations. This represents a robust and indeed, a promising foundation for a world-class business.
Measuring What Matters
Hey Juno constantly evaluates user experience and behavior against a unique set of attributes and factors. Michelle and her team evaluate how quickly businesses can consume and action outcomes insights, how intuitive the experience feels, and whether customers trust the results enough to act on them.
Every interaction contributes to an evolving definition of value, shaped not by abstract KPIs but by how customers utilize Hey Juno to make better decisions. These indicators may change as Hey Juno evolves, but one thing remains constant: If customers hear customer truth they make better decisions.
Breaking Barriers without Labels
Michelle does not define herself by a single attribute, nor does she allow others to define her that way.
Being a woman in tech presents challenges, but she believes that obstacles arise from multiple dimensions of identity, not just one. People face judgment, underestimation, and unfair treatment for a variety of reasons—gender is only one aspect. Michelle is not vying for a seat or industry airtime. Instead, she is focused on building her own system, deliberately choosing to operate outside of traditional notions and conventional playbooks—a system that embraces difference, challenges norms, and creates true equity.
For her, progress does not come from fitting into an existing structure. It comes from changing it. And if Hey Juno succeeds in reshaping how businesses understand people, it will be because of that mindset, not just the technology behind it.
Building the World’s Human Understanding Engine
Michelle wakes up every morning with one goal: helping the world listen better.
Hey Juno is not just another AI tool; it is an engine for human understanding, designed to cut through the noise and reveal real insights that lead to better decisions. The next step is both simple and ambitious—scale this technology to reach more industries, leaders, and problem-solvers who need to understand their customers with confidence and clarity in whatever format they choose.
Every update, refinement, and decision made at Hey Juno is aimed at this broader vision. The path ahead is not just about improving AI; it’s about ensuring that businesses, governments, and organizations use it to genuinely understand people, rather than merely collecting data. For Michelle, this is a future worth building.
Balance is a Moving Target
Michelle does not pursue the illusion of a perfect work-life balance because she understands that it does not exist. Instead, she engages in activities that require her full attention—such as scuba diving, basketball, and surfing. During these moments, her professional work can’t access her, allowing her to fully immerse herself in the present.
Her approach is simple: work with intensity and disconnect fully often in ways that light you up. This rhythm helps keep her grounded, even as Juno operates at full speed.
A Challenge and an Invitation
Michelle believes that human understanding should be effortless. And with Hey Juno, it is closer than ever.
For those curious, she has an offer—30 free interviews, no strings attached. The best way to understand Juno is to experience it firsthand. The future of AI-led customer listening is already here. The only question is: who is ready to listen? www.heyjuno.co
Quote
“I believe the world will be better if we can listen to and understand another’s experience deeply.”
Also Read: Tech Innovators: The 10 Most Influential Women in 2025
