For parents, planning their children’s summer activities can be a bit mind-boggling at times.

“It is overwhelming, for sure, as a parent, to try and navigate all the options, and even just discovering them is a process in itself,” said Brett Dooies, a Wilmington resident and father of three children ages 10, 7 and 4.

Dooies and Daniel Henderson, also a dad whose day job is in the tech industry, decided to leverage their knowledge of the struggles parents face and artificial intelligence to make the task of summer camp planning less arduous. They created the Campy.ai platform with the aim of targeting summer camps at first and eventually expanding to additional children's activities.

“I think one of the hardest initial problems for parents is just the season of planning summer camps starts at the beginning of the year or sooner, and by the time Christmas rolls around, if you're not asking what are we doing this summer, you're kind of already behind the eight ball,” Dooies said. “So the first thing we wanted to do is create a system that's going to make it transparent and obvious that here's all the options coming up next year or next summer, and we're going to help you remember when you need to actually take action on these things."

Campy.ai is a side project for both Dooies and Henderson. Dooies works with data and AI in his director of product role at Wilmington-based financial technology firm nCino, which is not affiliated with Campy.ai.

While some AI tools already existed for the kind of planning parents need for complicated activity scheduling, others have come along more recently that help Campy.ai distill unstructured data from around the internet into a structured form, Dooies said. “That’s helping us make it possible to get all this in one place,” he said.

Describing the user side, Dooies said parents can set up a profile for each of their children – "so just names, interests, age, grade level that they're going into, kind of the things that would dictate which ones they are going to qualify for so that we can start to do smart filtering on behalf of parents and say, ‘Hey, for Johnny, who's 10 years old and going into fifth grade, here's the sports and art camps that you said he's most interested and these are their availability,’” he said.

Dooies said he and Henderson are launching Campy.ai to what they call beta users now to get their feedback. They hope to have Campy.ai formally launched in time for parents to start planning 2026 summer camps.

During an interview last week, Dooies said he's been impressed by how much easier it is today to use certain AI tools. "Some of the same things I did six months ago that didn't work very well worked pretty well this week," he said. "So a lot of development is happening in that space, and it's kind of a cool time to be involved in trying to apply it to different problem spaces."