Built by someone who needed it.
COYL is built by Iman Schrock — a founder whose own behavior was the first dataset.
Iman Schrock, PhD
Founder · COYL
PhD, Organizational Psychology · Disruptive Strategy certificate (AI focus), Harvard · AI Strategy certificate, Cornell
It was 11:14 PM on a Tuesday. The freezer drawer had been opened, closed, and reopened three times in twenty minutes. I wasn’t hungry. I was tired, frustrated, stuck on a deadline I’d already missed twice — and I was watching my own hand reach for the drawer for the third time that week.
I’d spent most of my adult life studying behavior. A doctorate in organizational psychology. A lifelong fascination with the gap between what people say they will do and what they actually do under load. I knew the literature. I knew the frameworks. And the hand reaching for the freezer drawer belonged to someone who had lost the weight twice already and gained it back twice. Watching it happen in real time was the moment the question I’d been studying academically became the question I was living in my own kitchen. The pattern wasn’t a finding in someone else’s data set. It was running on autopilot in mine.
What changed wasn’t more psychology. It was a Disruptive Strategy certificate at Harvard, focused on what emergent AI was actually about to do — and an AI Strategy certificate at Cornell that gave the disruption a shape. Sitting in those rooms I watched the two halves of my work, the psychology and the technology, stop arguing with each other and start agreeing. The intervention I’d needed at 11:14 PM didn’t exist because nobody had given AI permission to live in the moment before the slip. They’d given it permission to chat after.
COYL is what came out. A behavioral interrupt protocol, four open specs underneath it, a reference engine that runs them — built so a large language model can step outside the chatbot box and intervene at the exact three-second window where decisions actually get made. Not a coach you summon. Not a tracker that grades you the next morning. Something that lives in the moment, with the right context, with the right script, with one quiet sentence at the threshold.
This is not a replacement for therapy. It is not a replacement for your physician or your psychologist or your real coach. It is the layer underneath all of them — the moment-by-moment accountability that, until now, was only available to people who could afford someone in the room. COYL is what happens when the protocol underneath that “someone in the room” finally exists, and the access cost falls to the floor. Coaching, as it’s been dispersed for a hundred years, is about to look different.
The founder’s own behavior was the first dataset. It still is. Every interrupt in this product was tested against the worst version of the person who built it, before it was ever tested against anyone else.
AI has never met human behavior before.
For thirty years software watched what you did and reported it back. For two years language models answered what you typed. Neither system has ever shown up at the moment your hand reached the handle — the moment between knowing better and doing it anyway.
That moment is where life actually happens. The diet works until 9 PM. The deep-work block works until the third tab. The recovery plan works until Sunday night. The gap between intention and action is not a willpower problem; it is an interface problem. Nothing has ever sat in that gap.
Three things finally arrived at the same time: models that understand patterns in real human language, edge devices that are always on your wrist or in your pocket, and twenty years of behavioral science about the cue-action-recovery loop. COYL stands in that gap. It is a 30-second call-out from a system that already knows your script is about to load.
The anchor
AI for the moment before behavior happens.
For journalists and analysts.
Press inquiries: press@coyl.ai. The short version of the company, the category sentence, and the founder quote live on the press page.