Creating Connection: How to Build an Emotionally Responsive AI Leadership Coach

In the heady summer of 2017, I discovered Soul Machines.?? Mark Sagar delivered an incredible presentation in which he shared his emotionally responsive virtual baby.?

One audience member asked Mark what it was like to "turn his baby off at night," to which Mark replied "it's an easy bedtime routine" which was both amusing and ... a tad unsettling.?

This year, Soul Machines launched Digital Mark Tuan (K-pop star) a celebrity digital twin who powered by ChatGPT 3 'chats' to fans.

The lifelike CGI characters are powered by a Digital Brain that drives their perception, understanding and to imitate human behaviours and emotions.

It is the Digital Brain that makes the Soul Machine digital humans significantly differ to other virtual-humans such as those created in products like D-ID, Synthesia and Meta-Humans.

Many of you are aware that I'm a Sci-Fi lover, teacher and long-time geek on a mission to democratise learning.??So, for my MIT 'Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy' final assessment I chose to plan the development of an emotionally responsive AI Leadership Coaching Bot.

I created a fictitious organisation and its current state by summarising the situation many L&D teams have shared with me recently.??

Then I had a good go at creating a plan of action for building an emotionally responsive AI Leadership Coaching Bot.

Once completed I thought it useful to summarise the key points and pop the plan into my first LinkedIn article. Ta da!

As we navigate the world of learning technology solutions, we often find that the tech itself can be quite straightforward, almost 'binary' if you will. That's a 1 for simplicity and a 0 for complexity. But don't be fooled by those basic numbers; it's everything else – the organisational and human intricacies – that truly takes time, energy, and perhaps a more sophisticated algorithm to decode!

Stacey Edmonds 2023

The summary of my response.

Summarise your plan for the strategic implementation of AI into your chosen organisation.

The problem we are solving is to improve the leadership development capabilities of the organisation, enabling leaders to develop skills and capabilities aligned to the strategy.

We are planning to design and deliver a personalised leadership coaching bot to augment the current more traditional ‘sheep dip’ approach to leadership development at scale.

It demands collaboration across various organisational functions and alignment with overall corporate strategies and organisation nuances.

Describe the current state of your chosen organisation.

The organisation currently faces several challenges in the L&D space.

1. A dispersed and disjointed learning technology stack.
2. A global reach but a requirement for all data to be onshore in Australia.?
3. The existing infrastructure is not optimised for modern learning design and delivery needs.
4. The Senior Leadership Team, Senior Stakeholders and the L&D team's traditional learning design approach and lack of data and digital capability adds a layer of up-skilling and cultural change requirements.
5. While there is an abundance of data related to leadership development, including models, approaches, mindsets, and behaviours, this data is unclean, some of it is outdated and due to many vendors having contributed to the learning content there are many models and potentially conflicting approaches.??
6. There may also be a question around IP ownership and usage.

Outline your proposed initiative for using AI in your chosen organisation to achieve competitive advantage.

Whether the plan is to be the lowest-cost provider, to differentiate through unique offers, or to focus on certain market niches, strong leadership is the backbone that enables these strategies to be implemented and sustained.

Detail your plan of action for using AI in your chosen organisation.

Phase 1: Preparation and Analysis:

Stakeholder Engagement: Identify and engage key stakeholders including the target audience.?Define governance and success measures. Executive sponsors, business unit heads, legal, compliance, risk, and product owners to provide oversight, budget, and alignment.

Learning: Align leadership learning objectives to strategic goals and behavioural framework.

Identify Project Roles: Technical leads, Data scientists, Data engineers, Software engineers, UX/UI designers, Project Consultants, Accessibility Leads and Leadership Experts, BAU.

Data Cleaning and Integration: Start by cleansing and updating the existing leadership data, ensuring its relevance, accuracy, and IP usage.

Technology Alignment: Collaborate with the L&D team, providing necessary training and support to enhance their tech proficiency.

Phase 2: Design, Development and Integration:

Design and Development of the Coaching Bot: Engage in a comprehensive HCD design process that emphasises user experience, relevance, accessibility, and ethical considerations such as data privacy and bias prevention.

Define Technology Specifications: Use of supervised and unsupervised learning, this will help the chatbot to learn to identify patterns in the data without being explicitly told what to do. This could be helpful for tasks such as identifying leaders who are at risk of burnout or who need additional development (insert ethics here). Apply deep learning, for understanding context.?Platform choice: Microsoft Bot Framework or open source, Rasa for example.

Chatbot character and name: Explore the use of Soul-Machines, https://www.soulmachines.com/ to create an emotionally responsive digital-human.

Compliance with Data Onshoring Requirement: Develop data handling protocols that comply with the organisation's onshore data storage requirements.

Phase 3: Implementation and Support:

Introduce 'Maverick' the bot, providing continuous support, facilitating integration into daily workflows, and actively engaging with users.

Phase 4: Monitoring and Evaluation:

Implement ongoing assessment, tracking user engagement, dynamic data analysis, success in leadership development, transition to BAU, compliance with ethical considerations, and overall ROI.

Measures of success - as identified in phase 1, for example:

1. Effective creation of Emotionally Responsive AI Leadership Coaching at scale.
2. Increased engagement and satisfaction among leaders.
3. Increased self-efficacy in the identified behaviours.
4. Measurement of higher engagement scores through regular surveys and assessments.
5. Observable enhancements in leadership qualities and competencies, such as decision-making, communication, and innovation.
6. Evidence of more effective execution and alignment of leadership activities with organisational strategy, measured through achievement of strategic milestones.
7. Improved financial performance in areas influenced by effective leadership, such as revenue growth, profit margins, or cost reductions.
8. Improved customer satisfaction scores, possibly correlated with enhanced leadership within customer-facing teams.
9. Enhancement in employer brand and reputation in the market, possibly measured through employer ranking surveys or social media sentiment analysis.
10. Compliance with ethical considerations and Australian and global data regulations.
11. Actionable data insights.

Conclusion

Creating an emotionally responsive leadership coaching bot requires comprehensive planning and execution, considering the audience, stakeholders, technical feasibility, data requirements, machine learning models, creative and engaging software tools, organisational readiness, ethics, governance, and regulatory compliance.

In leadership development, we aren't building machines; we are sculpting human experiences. We're not merely teaching; we're facilitating self-discovery. Rome wasn't built in a day, neither will our coaching bot be. However, with iterative development, continuous monitoring, and a brush of creativity, I think we can make it an effective and impactful part of our leadership development experience, at scale.

The future of learning is here. Live. Learn. Lively.

If you would like to know more, indeed build a 'Maverick', please do contact me.

Let’s do this crazy digital human coach thing!

Stacey Edmonds

Lively, a Learning Agency

[email protected]

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