I’m participating in an AI Conference where so much of the discussion is around agentic AI. A number of speakers have focused on the concept of “Real time AI coaching.” I’m also seeing a lot of this in many of the new AI selling platforms, it seems to be THE next thing in driving seller performance.
The scenario for this real time AI coaching is something like this. Imagine being on some sort of Zoom/Teams or other call. There’s a window on the side of your screen, an AI agent is monitoring the call, “whispering” into our ears….. “Dave you just missed a buying signal, ask this to go back to that issue….” Or “Dave, you seem to be losing their attention, do this to get them re-engaged….”
The promise of this real time coaching is remarkable. Think of the past dozen calls you’ve made. Did you forget something, could you have achieved more, could you have had a bigger impact? Hindsight helps us a lot, but it doesn’t recover those missed opportunities in these conversations.
But Real time AI coaching solves that problem for us. Fewer mistakes, fewer missed opportunities, we can accomplish so much more. On reflection, however, despite all the help we can get from Real time AI coaching, there are some potential problems.
First, let’s look at these conversations from the perspective of the person we are engaging in the conversation. They don’t know you are getting “helpful coaching.” All they experience is these pauses in the discussion. Broken eye contact, a slight hesitation–just a moment longer than necessary. To them it feels like you are distracted and not listening. They perceive you as being detached and engaged.
Then they notice the natural rhythm and flow of the conversation becomes more choppy and disjointed. Perhaps the shifts in the conversation. Or the conversation becomes stilted as the person unconsciously repeats what they are reading from the coach.
And as this continues, they get disengaged. If you aren’t fully present, then they start getting distracted (God forbid they are listening to their own Real time AI coach). And they start losing trust.
These Real time AI coaches attempt to make us sound better, but they make the person we are speaking with feel worse.
These micro distractions produced in Real time AI coaching have a greater impact. There are countless research studies showing that even short disruptions have a measurable impact, increasing strain and degrading performance. Microsoft Research shows that when distracted, our minds tend to stay stuck on that distraction, reducing our performance on the central task. APA research shows as much as a 40% productivity loss in constant task switching. Other research shows that even the presence of a device reduces concentration and focus. The phone on the table, flashing alerts, is now replaced by the Real time AI coach, flashing it’s alerts.
Think of it. In meetings we tell people to put their devices away so they can focus and pay attention. When we are driving, we know that we can’t be simultaneously read text messages. The impact of these micro distractions have enormous adverse consequences.
Then there is the de-skilling this drives over time. The more we depend on this Real time AI coaching, the weaker our ability to be active listeners, thinking on our feet, leveraging our judgment, engaging others in collaborative conversations. The new term, workslop, starts to come into play. AI is flooding our inboxes and social channels with workslop. Now it will do the same to our conversations. As the quality of our thinking erodes, the quality of the conversation tends to degrade. Stated more bluntly, “help makes everything worse!”
As we start looking at the overall impact of these things, over time, over many conversations, we see trust eroding. As the people we are engaging sense that someone is whispering in our ears, authenticity disappears. As they see us paying less attention to them, trust drops further.
Then finally, perhaps ironically, the more we depend on Real time AI coaching, the more we realize we don’t actually need the human. We might as well have the AI Agent conducting the conversation.
AI coaching can be very powerful. But it is most impactful pre/post game. Getting coaching as we are preparing for a meeting or conversation can help us better plan, anticipate surprises, and accomplish more in the meetings. We can even rehearse as we are thinking about the meeting.
Post meeting coaching can help us analyze and understand what happened and what we might change for the future. With AI, we can start recognizing patterns, bad habits, and other things that happen over time, getting coaching to help improve or eliminate these.
AI coaching, complemented with great human coaching, offers massive improvements in our ability to perform and achieve our goals. And to leverage them they require our full attention and focus.
And as sexy as Real time AI coaching sounds, I can’t imagine it doing anything to improve our ability to engage others in high impact collaborative conversations. Conversations in which there is shared learning and constant building of trust.
Afterword: This is a fun AI based discussion of this article. Again, hearing these AI characters talk about the problems of AI characters is ironic, but the content of the discussion is very good. Enjoy!
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