Your next tough work conversation could start with an AI avatar

Imagine you're a manager who has a tough conversation with an employee coming up. You're not great at confrontation and you have to tell this person that they're not getting the promotion they've been angling for. How do you practice such a conversation in a safe way?

One way might be with an AI avatar. Yes, an avatar. At least, that's the vision that Synthesia, a British AI startup, is trying to sell with a new product called Roleplay Sessions, which it released last week. The company has been best known as an AI video production platform.

The avatar lets you practice these kinds of conversations without the pressure of a real interaction, says company CTO Peter Hill. "You can ask a question. If I didn't understand the question as it was articulated, I can go back. I can ask again," Hill told FastForward. "If my question or if my answer wasn't deep enough, it will ask me again. It'll push. It'll probe and ask me to go deeper, explain it a different way, give me feedback."

Laura Gonzalez, the company's Head of people, says that this has a number of advantages. It helps retain managers by making them feel more comfortable with the difficult parts of the job, it helps retain employees by giving them better managers and it lets the manager get comfortable with these kinds of interactions in a non-threatening way.

"So it's more practical and in the moment whenever you want to use it in a safe space where you're not being judged, you're not being assessed, and you can get to the point where you deliver a good one," Gonzalez said.

Besides manager training, the nature of the platform also works for sales training, customer feedback or even interactive training, among other ideas.

Privacy implications

While some people may feel better talking to an avatar, they still need to trust that it's not simply a way for the company to be collecting information about them behind the scenes. Rehearsing is a useful tool ahead of a discussion, but rehearsing with a company-provided AI avatar could also make a person feel like they are being monitored, whether it's true or not.

In fact, Hill says the system has a practice mode. "So if you are the participant, you can choose practice mode, and that's not recorded. That doesn't go to your manager. That doesn't get put into a central database. That's not queryable, and that's something where I can just go and I can just try different approaches," he said.

In cases like testing proficiency or collecting customer feedback, it will be clear that the answers are being recorded, but Gonzalez acknowledges that this is not something that's going to be for everyone in every situation.

"There are a lot of things where I would want to have a conversation, and I cannot scale that conversation, and through this technology, I can do it, but it needs to be used on a use case that makes sense," she said.