ADHDifference

S2E33: Evro AI: Neurodivergent Friendly 'Second Brain' for Meetings + guest Dr Jay Spence

Julie Legg Season 2 Episode 33

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0:00 | 33:18

Julie Legg is joined by clinical psychologist and tech entrepreneur Dr. Jay Spence, co-founder of Evro AI, an innovative software platform purpose-built to support neurodivergent professionals.

Drawing on years of research and clinical insight, Jay shares how Evro is reshaping workplace communication by translating meetings, externalising tasks, reducing overwhelm, and acting as a cognitive co-pilot for ADHD and autistic thinkers. From memory scaffolding to emotional tone translation, this AI tool is designed to work with the brain, not against it.

Jay offers powerful insights into how neurodivergent professionals are already using AI as a productivity lifeline and how platforms like Evro can reduce burnout, support disclosure decisions, and radically shift how we experience work.

Key Points in the Episode:

  • Why neurodivergent professionals are early adopters of AI
  • How ADHD brains use AI tools to reduce burnout and organize thoughts
  • Autistic professionals using AI as a social translator
  • The hidden communication workload neurodivergent people carry at work
  • What the Evro AI platform does differently for ADHD and autistic users
  • How to use AI as a working memory prosthetic
  • When and how disclosure at work can be helpful (or risky)
  • The business case for neurodivergent-inclusive teams
  • One practical to start: use AI to externalize and prioritize your mental load

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JAY: Yeah. So, interestingly, as part of the survey that we did, we saw that neurodivergent people are some of the earliest adopters of AI. They're picking up these tools faster than other people. In the neurodivergent community, AI is really polarizing because there's a group that people are very worried about what the effects can be. But there's also a group that are realizing the strengths and benefits that can be there as using it as a prosthesis to be able to leverage its power to get ahead or to equalize the playing field as you just said. So some of the ways in which we've been hearing from ADHD users in particular is about using it as like a working memory prosthetic. So by that I mean they might take something this is you know sometimes from clients of mine or clients of my colleagues where they might outsource some of the lifting of holding lots of things in mind. So instead of just being able to generate a standard to-do list, it'll take the to-do list, it'll break things down, it'll make sure that everything is time estimated. It will even go further into kind of understanding like how activity could be regulated through a high spoons day, low spoons day, and how you can regulate your energy and prevent burnout. So it's just going that extra level from a standard task, you know, working through that and into a lot of depth of breaking down the task and understanding when and where and how those tasks can be done.

JULIE: Welcome to Season 2 of ADHDifference. I'm your host, Julie Legg, ADHD advocate, author of The Missing Piece, A Woman's Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing, and Living with ADHD, and an unapologetic doer of many things. This season, we're turning up the volume with a global lineup of brilliant guests, bringing their lived experiences, insights, research, strategies, and resources. And of course, along with a healthy dose of humor and humility. Whether you're neurodivergent yourself or just curious, there's something here for every curious brain. Let's dive in. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Jay Spence, a clinical psychologist, serial entrepreneur, and co-founder and co-CEO of Evro AI. Jay has spent his career at the intersection of psychology and technology, translating clinical science into tools that genuinely improve the way we communicate, connect, and support each other at work. While Jay is neurotypical himself, he has devoted years to understanding the lived experience of ADHD and autistic professionals and the very real barriers they face inside workplaces that often move too fast, communicate too unclearly, and rely heavily on soft skills that were never designed with neurodivergent brains in mind. Today we'll be exploring what neurodivergent professionals are telling us, how AI is being used to level the playing field and what it really takes to create workplaces where ADHD and autistic minds can thrive. Welcome to the show, Jay. [Thank you for having me.] Look, I'm really excited to do a deep dive into Evro, but before we do, I'd love to wind it back slightly because you've spent your career in a space of psychology, technology, and human connection. What originally drew you as a neurotypical clinical psychologist into the world of neurodiversity, ADHD, autism, and workplace well-being? 

JAY: I have been working as a clinical psychologist in private practice for maybe 14 years or so and I had more and more clients that started to come during the pandemic looking for ADHD diagnoses and then more recently I think autism diagnoses. When that started up during the pandemic I just got more curious about what was happening and then it was much easier for neurodiverse people to start to explain their experience as the stigma dropped down. And so I began hearing the kind of more emotionally mature clients talk about this as their superpowers or the great things about them and the things that they loved. And that was a shift away from the old thing where people were coming in for treatment. "I, you know, I'm struggling. I'm in a lot of emotional pain. I just want to be fixed." When I kind of got that this was not about trying to change people and more into saying that you know, that ADHD client is incredible with these areas and we just need to work on trying to figure out where the strengths are. I just kind of got more and more curious about, okay, was this meant for treatment? You know, how are we going to think about this a bit differently here? It's not the conventional way of having somebody come along where you're just looking at how to deal with mental health symptoms. It's about incorporating strengths. And then I got into the startup into Evro because I have got a really close friend who I've known for many, many years and love very dearly who is on the autism spectrum/ ADHD and she would often kind of talk to me about her experiences in workplaces and she's an absolute genius. She's a mess level, off the charts IQ person and so she could just articulate it in a way that I started to really get it. I kind of was like listening to her talk about these struggles that she was having every single day with just trying to do what I would think is fairly straightforward communication for myself as a neurotypical but she had to put in so much more work to make it happen. And then when we kind of went through the problems of workplace communication, what we realized is, oh, we should maybe think about doing a startup together because it would be interesting to do something with a clinical psychologist and a bit of a genius, especially someone who's got that lived experience. And what we did, what happened was is we started to kind of have really classic neurotypical neurodiverse disagreements. But I think instead of clashing, we were able to kind of use that in a way where we started it as a conversation. So we would say, "Okay, what's happening here?" Like you're obviously looking for something. I'm looking for something totally different. What's going on? Usually it's that classic kind of shift of she wanted precision, structure, depth, and I was much more interested in kind of like moving across things in a much lighter touch, which was driving her a bit crazy. So I think I was kind of recognizing more and more my kind of natural inclination is more towards that ADHD side. Hers is much more on the kind of depth side. So how do we communicate together? How do we get along? And we started to use all of that as ways to build the product together. We looked at the conversations, looked at what worked between us and then we looked at how AI could be used to start to improve that. Yeah. 

JULIE: And you talk about the spectrum of experience in neurodiversity. From your perspective, what are some common neurotypes you see in the workplace? And what do leaders often misunderstand about ADHD and autistic professionals? 

JAY: Yeah, I mean the main clusters that we're talking about here, ADHD, autism, dyslexia are probably the more prevalent ones for ADHD individuals. The strengths that I see all the time both with clients and then more with Elaine, my co-founder, is that's the superpower there is obviously that they're great at scanning and they're great at kind of really fast problem solving. They're really good at creativity, hyperfocus if it's something they're interested in. Obviously, there's some Achilles heels that can be around around distractability, time management, things like that obviously. But I then on the next cluster you've got autism which is not quite as prevalent but I'm hearing about it more and more through my private practice now and its huge strengths in detail-oriented work, logical analysis much more kind of depth oriented. But then the equally being around sensory overload, burnout, difficulty in understanding non-verbal cues. Dyslexia comes up quite a bit as well. I think dyslexics, I'm generalizing here but you know they tend to be a little bit more on better on things like big picture reasoning, empathy, interpersonal relationships. But then it's difficult to read and get things down on a page and so things might slow down in some of those areas. I think what the shift is that I am hearing when I'm talking to leaders and working in organizations I used to work a lot in consulting and luckily I feel like I was mainly in workplaces where the leaders had an understanding, not a deep understanding but a desire to learn. And what I was hearing from them is that they're starting to kind of understand it's not a deficit. It's not a problem. It's about trying to understand how the environment is going to need to be adjusted for that person in order to be able to thrive. They're still struggling with the logistics of how to do that a lot of the time. So I think there's a very long way to go in terms of advocacy, especially for general kind of education and things like that. But I would hear them kind of start to talk a bit about, oh yeah, so and so, that client, sorry, that that colleague, they're really good at ABC activity. So, it was kind of like this shift between language where that person may have previously been described as really scattered and now kind of start say, ah, that person's really good at scanning. This person's really good at synthesizing these types of things, so we'll think about it in that way. So, it's starting to happen. Long way to go, but it's starting to happen. 

JULIE: We've mentioned a couple of times about the strengths and we referred to them before as superpowers and I'm really glad that shift has been made. Several years ago, the word and maybe still today, the word superpower, it seemed to be like such a polarizing word when so many people were struggling with their neurodivergence and a feeling that that was holding them back and even the thought of looking at their strengths just seemed like a foreign country, it's just far too difficult. So, I'm really glad that we're bringing it around now and looking at those strengths because they are pretty magic. Now, I'd like to talk to you about Evro because you recently surveyed more than 300 professionals, half neurodivergent and half neurotypical, and the findings were astonishing. And I was wondering if you could walk us through some of those key insights. 

JAY: Sure. So, there's 302 people in the survey. It was a survey done through an online platform. Mostly people in the US were responding some from Europe, some from Australia and Asia. And what happened in that was we asked a couple of questions that weren't directly saying are you know neurodivergent but they were proxies for them. So some of the questions we would ask is do you tend to spend more than 2 hours per week thinking a lot or worrying about your communication with others in the workplace? And a cluster of those we would think would mean that some people were going to be more neurodivergent leaning than others. Ended up being a 50-50 split, which is not what we were expecting, but it just, you know, perhaps goes to show that there might be a lot more undiagnosed neurodivergent people out there than we think right now currently. But 68% of all respondents reported frequent anxiety, confusion, or fatigue in meetings. That's pretty big. I mean, it's all of us kind of coming out of those meetings. My wife is a raging extrovert. I think she might be the one exception from the rule. She seems to really love them all. So choosing that other 30%. There's also some parts that came out that like not only are they fatiguing, but they're also quite anxiety-provoking for a lot of people. So neurodivergent leaning people in particular were much more likely to report feeling quite anxious in the meeting or after the meeting. And so that's kind of part of what I wanted to talk about today is like I think the survey finding was really showing that that there's two things that are happening for neurotypical versus neurodivergent people at work in two layers. Neurodiverse people are doing the job that they're paid to do, but then they're also doing this all of this extra work on top that neurotypical people might not be aware of all the time. And so it's the masking, it's the thinking, it's the planning, it's the adjusting, it's all of this stuff which is I think something which is important to think about. When you're coming into a workplace trying to have a conversation that if you're dealing with someone who's neurodiverse, a they're working considerably harder than the neurotypical person in that conversation, but they're going home tired and they need more time to recharge. So I'm looking at some more data here. Almost half of people, just this is out of the whole sample, struggled with knowing when to interrupt, but that was almost doubled again for people who were obviously on the autism spectrum. We also looked at the time that it took to recover from meetings during the week and neurodiverse people said that it was taking them on average about five 5.2 hours per week. Neurotypical people saying it was less was about 3 hours. So that's a significant delta there of about an extra 2 hours per week just to recover from meetings. People who are neurodivergent are much more likely to reflect on the meetings. So two and a half times more likely to think back through a meeting. I don't tend to do that after a meeting unless it was a really kind of difficult or tense one. But it was really interesting to kind of see these survey responses about the amount of thought and I think kind of thoughtfulness and care goes in for neurodivergent people. Sometimes it might be worry as well but I think it's also just trying to think through how to do better in next meetings. They're often self improvers. Yeah so the picture overall I think was really about this this delta between the neurotypical and the neurodivergent of for a neurodiverse person it's their job plus it's all this extra communication work. 

JULIE: So Jay with regards to how neurodivergent professionals are using AI at the moment, you've gathered these fascinating insights into how neurodivergent professionals are using tools like Chat GBT at work. What patterns are you seeing and how are neurodivergent early adopters using AI to level up the playing field or to get ahead? 

JAY: Yeah. So, interestingly, as part of the survey that we did, we saw that neurodivergent people are some of the earliest adopters of AI. They're picking up these tools faster than other people. In the neurodivergent community, AI is really polarizing because there's a group that people are very worried about what the effects can be. But there's also a group that are realizing the strengths and the benefits that can be there as using it as a prosthesis to be able to leverage its power to get ahead or to equalize playing field as you just said. So some of the ways in which we've been hearing from ADHD users in particular is about using it as like a working memory prosthetic. So by that I mean they might take something, this is you know sometimes from clients of mine or clients of my colleagues where they might outsource some of the lifting of holding lots of things in mind. So instead of just being able to generate a standard to-do list, it'll take the to-do list, it'll break things down, it'll make sure that everything is time estimated. It will even go further into kind of understanding like how activity could be regulated through a high spoons day, low spoons day and how you can regulate your energy and prevent burnout. So it's just going that extra level from a standard task, you know, working through that and into a lot of depth of breaking down the task and understanding when and where and how those tasks can be done. And I think for autistic users, it's more about using as a translation layer. So, one of the things that's been particularly startling for me is the AI, even though it's obviously a machine is very good at understanding interpersonal behavior and it's even good at understanding interpersonal behavior from the perspective of a meeting transcript for example. So a lot of people who are autistic will take their meeting transcripts, put it into Chat afterwards, ask it for tone analysis, ask it how their communication landed. And depending on the strengths of the prompt and how good that person is at understanding the risks of AI, because the risks are very considerable if you're perhaps not experienced using it or interpreting it as data then but they can often extract out of it much more objective information. And so for somebody who might kind of come in out of a meeting and may have missed some social cues like may have missed that someone was feeling frustrated or that there was a lot more tension in the room. I've been hearing more and more about people who are autistic who can pick up those things and then respond to them because they missed it in the meeting but then the transcript picks it up and they've got a much clearer idea both of when and where how it occurred and also of how to come back. There's some real balances here about kind of like needing to change and masking and neurotypical behaviors and how AI might be encouraging of just assimilating towards neurotypical behavior. And at the same time, I have been hearing from people about how important it has been for them to be able to progress in their careers, communicate effectively, do things that they have wanted to be able to do personally, not from a masking perspective, but just from a clarity perspective, and the AI has enabled them to be able to do that. 

JULIE: That's awesome. I'm excited with Evro, it's such a compelling idea. So, it's really an AI powered communication co-pilot that helps people, especially new divergent professionals, communicate more clearly and more effectively. As well as it's you know, as you had said it's not just a meeting transcripts offering and it dives deep and it really pulls everything together. I'm very excited. So what inspired the creation of Evro and what's exciting you most about where it's heading right now? Where are you at?

JAY: What inspired me most of all about Evro was my co-founder. So she is neurodivergent, talking to her for many years about her experiences in the workplace and how difficult it was at times to communicate effectively or to deal with burnout. At the same time, she's one of the smartest and most brilliant people I've ever met. And it just tweaked for me about how many people were probably like her, sitting in offices and workplaces all around the world, but probably either hidden. I don't know whether people would have always recognized Elaine and how good she was or burning out. So being in the workplace but then being sabotaged because of how much work was required. So the inspiration was mostly about her to jump in and look at how can we solve this. The second inspiration was about mental health. So my background as a clinical psychologist has meant that I've looked at the research for a long time. There are really clear links about how the workplace can cause mental health difficulties. Some of those mental health difficulties come just from communication differences, misunderstandings, biases, cross-cultural problems. All of those when I was sitting there and looking at them with Elaine, what we thought was that there was this kind of moment in time from AI where we had an opportunity to solve some of them in a way that couldn't be possible before. And so the inspiration really was about Elaine, about wanting to solve for communication, about wanting to solve for mental health, and about using her background as a starting point, being able to solve specifically for people who are neurodiverse in the workplace because they think so much about communication and they've got so many ways of being able to work that we could help and then use their knowledge to be able to help neurotypical people to understand them as well. Yeah. 

JULIE: Evro, at the moment it's in a beta mode. You're working on it still. By the time this episode goes to air, which will be mid January, can you tell us where it will be at and what might be available to some of our listeners to try and test it out? 

JAY: Yeah, we would really welcome all of your listeners to be part of the next software release. We're releasing a beta round in early January, so probably around the first or second week of January 2026. In that beta round, you are very welcome to try out the software. And for anyone who comes in, who are your listeners who is trying out the software in this first round, we will give them a year's worth of free access. And so what the platform is about really is if you imagine for someone who's neurodiverse on those days where they might kind of end up at the end of the day really exhausted because of a day worth of meetings where a lot of the energy might have gone into trying to read the room or hold a thousand things in their head or think through vague instructions or worry about things that might have been missed. Evro is that communication co-pilot that sits next to their meetings. It's totally private. People can switch it off so that people don't know it's being used. But it acts as a second brain for communication. It does things like it will take the meeting notes, it will create the action items like a meeting notetaker, but it goes beyond that to offer other tools for people with ADHD, autism, dyslexia to help them to organize what's going on. So, because it's been designed by Elaine, who is neurodivergent, really what she was doing was building out all of the things she needs as somebody who's got ADHD and on the autism spectrum to be able to organize all of her communication and thinking. There's tools in there which act as a translation layer. So, helping to kind of like think through how to communicate better and how to communicate more effectively. There are tools in there to help people with ADHD to kind of get back on track if they lose track in a meeting, like how to regain focus, what was missed, and bringing them back in quickly. And there are other tools in there that are really about trying to make sure that communication for the individual is slowly improving over time so that they can get raises, get ahead, and progress at work. And the testers in the previous round said that it was life-changing, and that was amazing for us to hear. And so we're really looking forward to anyone that might want to be involved in the next round if you want to just get in touch with us in January. 

JULIE: That's exciting. And the way you've described it, Evro, is not a crutch. It is a tool. And that tool if it helps us analyze our own behavior and learn from it, we're actually improving ourselves along the way too. And tell me Jay, it works alongside other AI bits and bobs like Zoom for example. It can... it could all interconnect? 

JAY: Yeah, it can work with any meeting note taker. It's you can use your existing software. It's just going to sit next to your meeting software and then for privacy you've got the option to let people know that you're using it or to keep it hidden if you prefer not to. 

JULIE: That's brilliant. And for someone who may be listening who struggles in meetings or with written communication because of their ADHD, how might a tool like Evro meaningfully shift their day-to-day experience? 

JAY: Yeah. So imagine that you're about to come into a meeting and it's kind of feeling a bit unprepared. So one of the things it does is kind of help to give people meeting agendas with all of the context. It remembers all of the previous meetings and then there's a button to click where you can bring up that straight away and say, "Okay, here's the full history. Here's the things that are important. Here's the things that you would need to think about to get the best out of this meeting." And it learns about the individuals, both the individual who is the user and also the people that you're having meetings with. And so over time, it can give better and better ways to understand both like what's the strategy for this meeting and what's the communication style that's going to work best with this. And during the meeting it can track the discussion. It can clarify action items. It can help to regulate cognitive load for people who are neurodiverse. And it can help to organize the tasks afterwards. So it can automate the creation of meeting tasks. There's a task list that gets created. It gives clear summaries so you don't worry about whether or not you've missed something. But in order to go a bit beyond what a standard and meeting note taker does, it's really about thinking about how do we reduce the friction of communication, improve the clarity of the communication, and stop some of the burnout factors that happen for people with ADHD and autism where they're carrying so much because the tool does that for them in terms of organizing. 

JULIE: With regards to the workplace, many adults with ADHD are unsure whether to disclose at work. So from a clinical and organizational perspective, when can disclosure be helpful and what needs to be in place for it to feel safe for that individual? 

JAY: Well, I think we've come a long way in many workplaces, but there's still workplaces that aren't safe to disclose. I think it comes down to looking at leadership and checking to see the degree of psychological safety. So if the leader is kind of being clear and consistent and curious and open and not punishing people who might be honest, that's probably a sign that the workplace is safe. And then if disclosure is done in a workplace like that and it can lead to more support or better understanding, I think that's really helpful. But I think it's also really important to understand not all workplaces are like that. Some workplaces are not safe. And even though stigma is reducing for ADHD and ASD, we still got a lot of workplaces that don't understand these conditions. And so I think it is important to be prudent. I've definitely heard from clients about negative experiences of disclosure in the workplace where it's led to people having a reaction of less understanding rather than more understanding. But I feel hopeful that things are moving slowly in the right direction. And I do hear from leaders that even though they may not understand these conditions, they're trying really hard to and sometimes I think those leaders are neurodiverse themselves, they're just coming to terms with that. 

JULIE: And what's the real business case for embracing neurodiversity rather than simply tolerating it, which is a word that I've heard many times. 

JAY: Yeah. I personally think this area is really interesting because I realize it's controversial for some people, but it makes total sense to me. I think the research has supported it as well, but to me it's about that if you've got a much more diverse team, whether or not that it's in terms of ethnicity or in terms of thinking styles and profiles, then you get better outcomes. I think a perfect example of that is myself and Elaine. I am fast. She's a slow thinker. And so what we get out of that is I can be execution oriented, but I might miss the details. If I'm on my own and I pair up with another fast person, we'll move at a million miles an hour, but we might be kind of almost running in circles. Whereas, if I pair up with someone like Elaine, she's so much better at understanding strategy and logic and thinks clearly that she can orient the two of us in a direction that I can then run in. I would miss that without her. And I think that's what it's about. I think it's about recognizing that it's not the person in the office that might be quirky and strange. It's the person in the office that you may not have understood yet to understand where their strengths are. And once I think that person is much more deeply understood and then you can see much more clearly about these are areas where the superpowers occur. This is how we bring them into work together. Not that my way is better and their way is worse or vice versa but when and where how do we use both of these things. 

JULIE: Agree. It's a combination of ultimate productivity and workplace wellness, isn't it? If you're neurodiverse and you're doing a role or a job and really struggling and you know, it could be seen as wasted hours or wasted strengths by not leveraging their natural ability in that team environment or projects. Today, if you had to offer one practical evidence-based strategy to help ADHD adults navigate communication challenges at work, especially in meetings, what would you recommend they start with? 

JAY: Yeah, look, I'd love to introduce people to using AI tools if you haven't thought about it. And I think that the tool that I have found is starting to work really for clients of mine in particular who are neurodivergent is using the tools to externalize their working memory. So if you're just starting I think it is important to really understand what the risks are with AI because they don't always produce accurate information. So you know buyer beware. However, it's such a powerful tool and there are incredible communities on Reddit who are sharing the ways in which they're using these tools and externalization of working memory is about taking AI and using it as a thinking partner to say put down a lot of ideas if somebody is ADHD and then using the AI to start to synthesize them in different ways or taking down long to-do lists that might need prioritization and getting the AI as a thinking partner to do that. I think it's incredible about helping people to take things that are sitting in their brain that might cause them to burn out because they're holding it all the time and then having somewhere where they can put it down and organize it together. And it takes so much energy to hold bits of information and when there's multiple bits of information or tabs open as we often say, it's a lot to hold on to yet still function really well and productively. 

JULIE: Thank you. Thanks very much for that. And lastly for neurodivergent professionals who may feel exhausted or misunderstood or overwhelmed by workplace expectations, what message would you most want to leave them with today? 

JAY: I am talking mostly from the perspective of some of the clients that I hear and I would want people to understand that if you're feeling broken in the workplace, we're at a time and a place culturally where that probably isn't really about you. I think it's about the system and perceptions changing that would lead to alleviation of some of the brokenness that you're feeling because we know that people who are in workplaces that are affirming of neurodiversity that they don't tend to feel that brokenness. So it's a product of the workplace probably more than the person. And if people are feeling really shattered, burned out, tired, exhausted, to not see that so much as a deficit, even though I know that that's hard to just kind of switch off thinking to that, but more kind of think about that this you may be in a workplace that's not particularly well designed for you. And if that's okay and endurable, great. If it's not, then it might be a workplace that you may be capable of changing through advocacy or getting help from advocates to change. Or it might not be the workplace for you. 

JULIE: I would just like to thank you so, so much for being on the show today and explaining all about Evro. It sounds like a very exciting software tool that those in the workplace who are neurodivergent or otherwise by the sounds of it, it sounds like a remarkable all-rounder. It's going to just make so much of a difference in the day-to-day working life for so, so many people. So I wish you all the very, very best for that project. And just a reminder to listeners that those links will be in the show notes. So if anyone would like to check out and be involved with some of this beta software moments or trials for the first year that would be most welcome. So again thank you Jay. [Thank you. Appreciate it.]