Can AI Teach Workers to Be More Human?

It started as an experiment. A little over a year ago, the chief talent and development officer at pharmaceutical firm Novartis ran a pilot. Paula Landmann, who’s responsible for making sure the company has the skills it needs, wanted to know: Can we use AI for the personal development of our workforce?Employees already had access to internal coaches, but humans are limited by time, and so it could be weeks before a coaching session was available. They also had access to tools like Copilot and ChatGPT, which they could consult about any number of things. But what if they put some real power behind it? If Novartis could roll out an AI-powered coaching program specifically designed to interact with employees the way a personal coach might, could the workforce actually develop itself?Apparently, the answer is yes. Last October, Novartis rolled out its AI coaching platform, called Mira. Unlike traditional coaching programs, which are provided only to high-ranking managers and those headed for the C-suite, every employee at Novartis, at every level, has access to Mira—whenever they need it. Less than a year later, 14,000 employees, or just over 18% of Novartis’s workforce, are using the tool, which remains optional, and many of them keep coming back. They’re getting better at making decisions, talking to one another, and working together.Novartis is hardly alone. Customer-experience platform Qualfon developed its own AI-powered roleplay simulator to help employees improve communication, and media company Scripps licensed an AI coach that gives feedback to reporters on drafts and sourcing. Twenty percent of the newsroom employees use it daily, said senior L&D director Ginger Summers during a From Day One webinar. Those employees now use the tool one to two hours per day, saving roughly 20 minutes of work each time.These are what might be considered uniquely “human” skills, like critical thinking, communication, cooperation, collaboration, and conflict resolution—things typically developed only through interaction among humans.The interpersonal friction that begets these skills can, in theory, cost a business time and money, so companies are looking at AI and wondering if it would be faster, possibly even more effective, to develop those same skills with AI. The promise is great: AI could effectively furnish each employee with a personal coach whose sole focus is that employee’s development. But are these skills, when developed in collaboration with AI, as strong as they could be? And what’s lost when the experience with humans is removed from human skills?A Closer Look at AI-Powered Skill DevelopmentTo answer those questions, AI for skill development is being heavily studied by academics and by the companies building the technology. Consulting firm BCG put its own program to the test, placing human trainers (in virtual classrooms) head to head with virtual AI coaches and found that “the gen AI tutor delivered results that were on par with the classroom session, but with significant improvements in terms of personalization and efficiency.” And not only did the BCG researchers favor AI, learners themselves said the AI was better than humans at supplying personalized notes. BCG lauds AI’s ability to tailor the learning based on individual work context in a way a human just can’t.AI can be more succinct than humans, making for time savings, and it can also make learners less fearful of making mistakes. It’s far less embarrassing to fumble in front of a bot than a person, especially if you might sit in a meeting with them later. Landmann of Novartis said employees were “very loud and clear” about this advantage. “AI doesn’t judge me,” they told her.Paula Landmann, chief talent and development officer at Novartis (company photo)Employees at Novartis also prefer the AI coach to human coaches for their availability. While the company does make human coaches available, their time is limited. So if your coach isn’t available for another month, but your difficult conversation happens tomorrow—Mira can offer help right away. And users can practice in their preferred style: via keyboard, like an instant messenger, or via voice, like a phone call. Employees can start with a theme, take a personality assessment, engage in role play, or simply jump into conversation about their problem—these coaches don’t need time to prepare. They’re always on and always ready to go.Still, some skeptics are sounding the alarm, or at least seriously questioning the hype over using AI to train people to do people things. Constance Noonan Hadley and Sarah L. Wright, both academic researchers, posit that overuse can cause social skills to atrophy by making it easier to choose relatively frictionless AI interactions over humans that might push back or simply make us uncomfortable. “Talking with an always reachable, sycophantic AI chatbot can be more appealing than conversing with real people,” they write in Harvard Business Review. And “by removing the need to go to colleagues for help, AI can undermine opportunities to build trust.” They recommend that “coaching, mentoring, conflict resolution, and team building remain primarily human functions and be conducted in person to build relationships.” In other words, leave the human skills to the humans. “The friction, the back-and-forth, even the occasional miscommunication—these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features,” writes HBR editor Amy Gallo. And the less interaction we have with our colleagues, the lonelier and more socially isolated we can become.The Sycophancy TrapZoë Wigan, a former employment attorney and current head of the resolutions team at consultancy Byrne Dean, worries that AI is making it too easy to escalate problems that are better dealt with face-to-ace. One sign is the number of grievance letters HR leaders receive.  She told From Day One that grievances—that is, formal letters of complaint that an employee submits regarding a colleague or manager—are overwhelming people teams. “Almost every time I have coffee with someone in HR and you say, ‘What’s keeping you busy?,’ almost everybody says ‘AI grievances.’”This may be the result of AI sycophancy. Someone who suspects their manager is being unfair will almost certainly hear that reinforced by an AI coach. And it might even push them along, offering to write up a grievance letter then and there. Qualms escalate to the level of formal grievances more quickly than they otherwise would have—qualms that, in another time, may have been handled without HR at all.Landmann was concerned about this from the start. “I always worry that AI can be very nice to us, very soft,” she said. “It wants to please us constantly, right?” But a good coach doesn’t do that. When testing tools for Novartis, she was keen on finding one low on sycophancy and willing to challenge users both during the coaching session and after the fact, following up to find out how it all played out.Managers in a PinchWhen Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company would be laying off 14% of its staff, he noted that there would be “no pure managers,” and anyone who remained must be “a strong and active individual contributor,” and managers everywhere cradled their heads in their hands.People managers are under tremendous stress, being asked to take on more responsibility, which lately includes rolling out AI tools, if not finding use cases to begin with. Many are handed AI and told to use it, but they’re often not told what to use it on. The time-consuming act of coaching employees seems as good a use as any.Given the pressures, they can hardly be blamed for what some are calling overuse. “I think most organizations are probably sleepwalking into just how complex it’s becoming for managers,” said Byrne Dean’s CEO Nick McClelland. “Work has just got more complex, and AI itself actually increases the complexity in terms of managing people.” He told From Day One that he expects to see a significant increase in the number of difficult conversations managers are asked to have—“with their team, with peers, with senior members of teams because of the complexity of work”—and AI can be a huge help.AI has and will always win when it comes to scalability. While no organization can afford a personal coach for each employee, it probably can afford universal AI licenses. Byrne Dean, which will still continue offering its traditional classroom training sessions on difficult conversations, is launching its own AI-powered conversation tool, currently in its beta stage.McClelland explained that this could be the tip of the spear for HR, which “is seen as a cost center as opposed to a profit generator.” Difficult conversations are all too easy to avoid, or at least postpone, to the extent that the company suffers from poor performance, infighting, just the clog of team politics. “HR can start to flip the narrative,” McClelland said. When AI affords ample opportunity for practice and preparation, “being able to have that conversation and rehearse ahead of time feels like a really natural business gain.”But Landmann sees it differently. The Mira platform isn’t actually saving Novartis any money. On the contrary. “It’s an investment in people,” she explained. “The biggest business case is the growth and development of our people.” This is a long play, she said, and it has already been worth it. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured photo by Style-Photography/iStock by Getty Images)