The Future of Workplace Conversations

Regardless of what role you are in or how long you’ve worked somewhere, everyone has had to have difficult conversations with their boss, peer, or vendor. These workplace stressors can negatively impact your quality of work and, most of all, your enjoyment with your role/company. As we are moving into a more digital world, companies have been out to solve a wide range of issues with AI integration. A segment of this work has been in AI integrating with work, whether it’s to help streamline your work, prepare for interviews, or aid in strategy. But a topic that hasn’t quite been explored nearly to the same extent as others is a training module that will allow you to train/practice having difficult conversations with your boss, peers, or vendors. 

This new tool is called conversation AI and if you peruse Google trends the way I do, you will have noticed that over the past six months it has exploded in Google search popularity. Various companies have rolled out enterprise tools for conversation AI (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Mind Tools). Multiple articles have come out from companies who have implemented these tools to test groups within their organization and their post-pilot surveys have shown that on both the manager and employee side, they have seen vast improvements in communication effectiveness, which in turn has increased employee performance as well as enjoyment with their job/company. 

The primary difference between a conversation AI tool versus ChatGPT is that with a conversation tool, you are adding parameters and information which helps the tool create conversation examples. Say you feel like you are ready and qualified for a promotion. You will fill out a series of prompts (tenure, job level, accomplishments). There is even a way to upload previous performance reviews to give the AI full context. The AI tool will then give you tips to help you reshape your communication style, suggest ways to think more broadly about your approach, provide guidance on what to say and what to avoid, and ultimately enhance the effectiveness of your conversation. Naturally, this isn’t a perfect replacement for human interaction, but used as a thought partner, it can be a useful tool to help you get out of your own head and think about the challenge in front of you differently. Because successful feedback centers around context and language; positioning your message and choosing the right words to convey your thoughts effectively. 

The future of this tool will continue to get more and more realistic. At the latest IBM product showcase, they showed a virtual persona they are hoping to unveil at the end of 2024. This persona will integrate with Zoom and a couple of other virtual meeting platforms and this persona will be a real-time conversation with AI centered around workplace conversation training. This premium product will incur a predicted high cost to implement at the enterprise level but will be exciting to see how it will change the landscape of the inevitable difficult conversations in the workplace.