By Chris Weller and David Rock
According to Gallup, organizations could realize an extra 18% in profit and 14% in productivity by doubling the proportion of employees who feel that they have chances to learn and grow at work. Could AI be a possible solution for raising those numbers?
Picture a typical corporate learning program. A senior-level talent leader buys an online leadership course for 250 middle managers. The leader’s expectation is that people will go through the training, retain the information, and then apply the insights to their work so that team performance goes up over time.
What’s wrong with this picture? For starters, the traditional learning experiences are slow, impersonal, and don’t really build new habits. In most digital experiences, whether synchronous or not, people quickly get bored, tune out, and few apply what they learn. As a result, organizations leave enormous amounts of unrealized potential and profits on the table.
To address the “bored and tuned-out” problem, many organizations try to deepen people’s focus by bringing them together in small groups, to experience a program in-person. While this has obvious benefits, scaling this to 250 managers is incredibly complex, expensive, and cumbersome, so firms end up back where they started, with something digital that in theory should work, but in practice does not deliver consistent results. Or they develop 25 of the 250, but not the rest.
The clever use of artificial intelligence in any kind of learning experience can address each of these drawbacks: It can dramatically accelerate learning; it can personalize the learning to each individual learner; it can achieve far greater results with building habits, and it can scale across an infinite number of team members. The results can be transformative. In a matter of months, not years, organizations can see meaningful behavior change that drives performance and healthier bottom lines.
The good news is, such an AI is no longer the stuff of thought experiments. It exists, and it can begin accelerating learning within your organization today. And it can do this not just for leadership development, but for any kind of human skills an organization may need.
Meet NILES
All-purpose generative AI (GenAI) chatbots have exploded in popularity over the past few years, most of them inspired by ChatGPT’s functionality as an “everything AI.” These AI partners may help with everyday requests for recipes or workout ideas, but when it comes to the highly specific nature of developing better leaders, generic AI chatbots can’t get the job done by just telling them what to do. Neither can generic coaching AI partners, which often rely on formulaic approaches that are only slightly less generic than everyday chatbots.
Given the complexity of modern leadership, organizations need highly specialized, highly trained AI partners that understand leaders better than they understand themselves. The need is similar to other industries needing tailored AI partners: law firms needing legal-specific AI, or medical providers needing health-specific AI. That’s why we created NILES, the Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System, the world’s most intelligent natural-language AI coach designed to understand leaders, their thinking, and help them sort through common organizational issues — whether in structured sessions or directly in the flow of work.
NILES is trained on 26 years of research on the neuroscience of leadership and nearly three decades of client work within Fortune 500 companies. As a result, NILES has a robust layer of “neurointelligence”: Observing a leader’s speech in real time, it understands how the leader thinks, the dilemmas they face, and then hypothesizes what the person’s brain is doing moment to moment, to help improve the person’s thinking.
In other words, NILES doesn’t just respond with a seemingly helpful answer, as is the case with generic chatbots. It generates a level of metacognition, analyzing users’ speech patterns and content from their sessions together to make high-level determinations about underlying assumptions and hidden biases, and it can offer feedback to lead the person to insights they may have never reached on their own.
In that way, NILES becomes a generalized learning accelerator. Simply by engaging with NILES for one-time advice or feedback, or more involved coaching or role play, learners go through the necessary pathway to get unstuck — moving from impasse, to insight, to action, and eventually to habit. NILES is designed to help any learner, facing any problem, make these critical four steps toward richer clarity, deeper motivation, and stronger performance. It’s especially effective for developing leaders at scale, but can be applied to any kind of human-centric issue.
Lastly, NILES can be used as a standalone thought partner, or it can be woven throughout your existing learning program to enhance the systems already in place. This represents a new kind of AI innovation for facilitating culture change: While some organizations may want a standalone platform that employees can access as needed, NILES can also become a core part of the learning operating system, enhancing any training solution it’s embedded within.
Let’s now see how NILES can deliver the three core benefits of AI-supported learning — speed, personalization, and scalability — across a mix of scenarios.
Accelerate Everyone’s Learning
Imagine a leader who wants to improve their presentation skills. Minutes before their next meeting, the leader asks NILES on their phone to “sit in” on the meeting and listen as the leader gives their presentation. Thirty minutes later, back at their desk, the leader asks NILES for feedback on how they did. NILES shares what seemed to go well, where the leader could improve, and concrete actions to practice and strategies to incorporate in their next presentation. Learning happened directly in the flow of work, without any disruptions to the other managers who have large teams to oversee.
Or imagine a leader who’s nervous about giving a negative performance review to an employee they consider a friend. The day before the review, the leader begins a role-playing session with NILES to rehearse various strategies for delivering the tough news. The leader begins shakily, but with NILES’ encouragement they begin to find their voice, calmly but assertively sharing what’s been going well and where things need to improve. Using a coaching style, NILES also asks the leader how they might structure the meeting, prompting the leader to have their own insights. For instance, the leader says they’ll try asking the employee at the start of the meeting to share what they’re proud of, which provides a buffer to their sense of status before being given constructive feedback.
We can also imagine a version of the scenario we saw at the very beginning: A high-performing leader is going through a training program that otherwise feels like a grinding waste of time. With NILES, however, the leader has multiple chances to interact over the material and relate it to their specific tasks and experiences. The training is no longer one-size-fits-nobody; it’s highly customized because it’s learner-led, plus it functions as a tool for deeply embedding the learning between sessions. Whether it takes them 10 minutes or an hour to feel comfortable and confident, the leader can now feel strong, positive emotions about problems that have kept them stuck. Suddenly, dry and dull material becomes fresh and engaging, which boosts effectiveness. Top performers will go through the learning super fast and apply it well; slower learners will get things at the speed they need; and poor performers will be weeded out faster.
Think about the exponential decrease in costs a partner like NILES provides, in terms of time, money, and overall productivity. A typical organization might have 200 managers go through a one day in person training that costs $500 apiece, for a total investment of $100,000 but creating an untold number of lost working hours that see no tangible return on investment. But take just some of that same investment and put it toward short virtual sessions over time, backed by unlimited access to NILES, and that same organization could drive far more real change, at far less cost, that scales much wider and faster too.
How much more could an organization accomplish if the entire culture were centered on learning the most essential skills as quickly as possible?
Nearly every organization wants to prioritize learning as a way to keep pace in a rapidly changing world. The challenge is delivering the learning effectively. With the right AI capabilities, executives can feel true confidence that their investments are generating the right outcomes — that is, turning newfound knowledge into stronger business results. NILES makes that possibility a reality.
Click here for more information and a free trial of NILES.
