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Human beings and leaders change their behavior when they have to, when there is a problem that they care about addressing and their default way of behaving will be insufficient to addressing that problem.
And so what we’re going to do with this AI platform that we call EL-AI, Expert-led artificial intelligence, it’s our AI copilot, is we’re going to have leaders bring their real conversational challenges to the platform. So you want to have a conversation with someone on your team, with your manager, up the chain, with a colleague in a matrix environment with the customer, and you feel like it’s going to be just beyond the reach of your conversational leadership capabilities progress, that’s where the platform comes in.
Our vision is you can bring any conversation that you care about that you think is going to be hard for you to have and get advice from the platform that will prepare you be successful in that conversation, but the way it will help you will make you stronger at having every conversation in your life, regardless of your context. So people leaders are going to bring their real conversations to the platform.
The other condition for behavior change is when action is imminent, right? If I have to worry about it nine months from now, I’m probably not going to make any fundamental changes. But if I’m feeling some productive anxiety about the situation and you could help me recognize there’s a gap between how I need to have the conversation and how I tend to have conversations, that’s going to motivate me. And the great thing about artificial intelligence is it will always be there for you. It never sleeps. It’s always on. And this EL-AI will be there for you and your leaders anytime they need them, anytime of day. I think that’s a remarkable thing because this way, instead of touching a few thousand people, like most leadership development providers do every single year, we could actually touch millions for the better. And through them, the kind of impact, the positive impact we can have on our people, our organizations and the world.
The third thing is that the AI entity we’re going to develop is going to be able to get access to how people really behave in real life. That’s critical, because if you don’t know how someone behaves actually in real life, then how could you help them change their behavior? And the thing is, if you ask people how they behave, they often can’t tell you. They think they know, okay? But what is it the saying from, I think it’s Caesar, Shakespeare Caesar, is “The eye cannot see itself.” There’s another saying from Southern Folk Wisdom in America, “It’s very hard to see the label from inside the jar.” So all leaders have blind spots.
We are going to program this artificial intelligence entity with a unique methodology that’s foolproof for understanding how leaders actually behave. So we’re not going to get how they think they’re behaved. We going to know exactly how they tend to behave in their real conversations. And then, this AI entity is going to be programmed with the insights that we have generated across nearly 30 years now with nearly 50,000 leaders across the world about what good conversations actually look like across context. It turns out that there is a seemingly universal pattern of success that all effective conversations follow. It’s something that my firm has discovered. And this will be the only artificial intelligence entity that will have access to it. And that’s critical because if you don’t have a valid and reliable model of what effective conversations look like up, down, and across and outside your organization, then the machine will end up giving you faulty feedback about what you’re doing that’s working, what’s not and what’s missing.
A couple of more here. The machine will also role model for the leader how they should have the actual conversation. Well, they’ll give them examples about how they would actually handle it so that the leader can see what good looks like. And then they’re going to do not some fake role plays, but actually real plays where the machine then will play the person or people that the leader is going to interact with in a future conversation. And the minute that leader falls into some trap, the artificial intelligence entity is going to call it out and nudge them to correct it. So this way the person is actually getting real time training and the person is becoming much more confident in their ability to handle the conversations that matter to them.
And then the last thing here, I’ll say, it becomes very personalized. Because like a great coach, the AI copilot will get to know you will get to know your strengths, will get to know your weaknesses, will be able to predict the errors that you may make in an upcoming conversation and help you correct for those errors before you make them. And to me, that’s incredibly promising.
It’ll be continuous. So after you have the conversation on Monday morning that EL-AI prepared you for, it’ll hit you up and say, “Hey, Dima, how’d the conversation go?” And you’ll be like, “Awesome.” Or, it’ll have a bit of a conversation with you and maybe it’ll help you plan your next conversation with that same individual or group of people. But also, if you’ve had a success story, then it will capture that success story and make it available to the degree that you want to your organization so that finally, as HR executives and people who care about the development of leaders, we could demonstrate behavior change and business impact.
And then imagine what the possibilities are. If this artificial intelligence entity, it’s coaching tens of thousands of people, it can bring to you the lessons from the successes and failures of others and bring to you the most recent developments around effective conversations so that you and your leaders are always at the cutting edge. I think if we can finally leverage AI to develop their leaders, it’s not only the 0.1% who will get quality leadership development. It means now we can democratize the development of leaders. We can actually bring leadership development to the masses. And we need it because we need people to be able to exercise leadership at all levels in all directions, given how challenging and increasingly complex our world is.
