AI: A Game Changer for Coaches with David Evans (Encore) | Ep #118

Wendy (00:01):

Welcome to Building Better Managers. I am your host, Wendy Hanson, and I am delighted to have you with me today to learn from some wonderful guests who are going to share their information and their brilliance and their experiences around management and leadership, and building great teams in organizations. I am also the co-founder of New Level Work, so check us out https://www.newlevelwork.com/. Thanks for tuning in.

Announcer (00:30):

Welcome to Building Better Managers. We're thrilled to bring you an encore presentation of one of our most impactful episodes. This conversation remains especially relevant today, and we're excited to share it with you. Again, whether it's your first time tuning in or you're revisiting this standout episode, we're sure it will spark new insights to help you grow as a leader. Let's get started.

Wendy (00:51):

Welcome everybody. It is so good to have you here today. I think this is going to be an extraordinary episode. You're with Building Better Managers, and we're going to talk about artificial intelligence today. I recently heard somebody say, AI is not going to replace you in your job, but if you don't know about or use ai, there's a person who knows that that could replace you in your job. So for anybody who's not paying attention, you're going to learn some things today and I think it's going to be really helpful for your future and really getting grounded in what's happening in AI and some of the new products. Because I am talking with David Evans, our VP of Product at New Level work about artificial intelligence. He's going to share his wisdom and he's going to share about products and things he sees coming in the future.

(01:46):

So let me tell you about David. David Evans is Vice President of Product at New Level Work, formerly Better Manager. In this role, David is responsible for overseeing the product vision and strategy for the company, helping it to achieve its mission of making thriving at work the norm for developing leaders prior to New Level Work as VP product, David led talent success at Amplitude where he supported the growth of managers and their teams scaling company culture as the business scaled. David has coached tech leaders and their teams for over 15 years, from baby startups to fortune one hundreds through capital raisings m and a transactions and public listings. David was previously technical director@adoptape.com and founder and CEO of two tech companies, which resulted in one exit and nine figure acquisition deal that went south. I love his attitude. Life is an adventure, but his biggest adventure and challenge so far is co-parenting two young kids. Welcome David.

David (02:57):

Thanks, Wendy. It's great to be here with Always a pleasure.

Wendy (03:00):

Well, tell us a little bit about your background in ai, David, that would help us get started.

David (03:06):

Great. So as you let the audience know, I did have a couple of tech startups. This was back in the 90s, and we were working in the music technology space in one of those startups, and we used AI to listen to and judge musical performances. So at the time that was super cutting edge. We used neural nets and a bunch of other common AI tools of the time to judge musical performances.

Wendy (03:41):

Wow. That was ahead of its time. And what happened with that experiment?

David (03:45):

Well, I swore like working with children and animals never to work with ai. Again, it’s interesting because AI really, it can be such a black box, so you can make so much progress in such a short amount of time, and it seems like you're just about to smash through that ceiling, or AI is just about to achieve general intelligence or something like that, but it always seems like it's almost there, but never quite. And because of its black box nature, it's hard to understand why or why not. So yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting game for sure.

Wendy (04:31):

Well, you are brave and you have jumped back in the AI ring, so even though you swore off ago, you're back again. So I was recently at a conference and it was with a lot of HR and L and D leaders, and I realized that there was not a lot of strong knowledge base about things in ai. So I'm kind of directing this so that we can educate this audience too. So how would you define artificial intelligence AI in the context of product development, for instance?

David (05:03):

Great question. So in general, AI is just using machines to mimic human intelligence or part of human intelligence, and it's interesting that it's defined as human intelligence and not other intelligences. But anyway, we won't go down that rabbit hole. And then as far as specifically product development goes, as you said, I lead product strategy and vision here. So there's a few perspectives we could take on this. At a high level, product development is all about creating a value exchange between the company and its customers and stakeholders. And so really from this high level viewpoint, AI and product development is simply about leveraging machine intelligence to create value for our customers. So in our case, specifically leveraging machine intelligence to help leaders grow and develop. And when leaders thrive, the people in their organizations thrive and the companies they work for thrive. So it's about using artificial intelligence, machine intelligence to help people and companies thrive.

Wendy (06:16):

Yeah. Oh, I love that because I know everything we do here at New Level Work is aimed toward that. So to have some more tools to be able to help and to partner with companies, I think we make great partners in this area. I had an AI question though. Can you explain the difference between narrow AI and general ai? I don't want to take us down a rabbit hole, but people might hear this and I just want them to know.

David (06:43):

Yeah, I was going to say we're going back down the rabbit hole, and I think it's important to think about and understand. So really narrow AI as all the specific applications of machine intelligence that we see every day today. And to contrast it with artificial general intelligence, artificial general intelligence is really this goal of creating human-like intelligence. And there's this whole idea that in order to do that, the AI also needs to be conscious. And so we could go down a rabbit hole and we don't even know what consciousness is, we don't know how to measure it. So it's actually a I, it's a really interesting and hard to codify or concretize concept.

Wendy (07:33):

Yeah, wow. Consciousness in AI that is interesting as we're still trying to figure out human consciousness. Yes. So we need that. It's just like when I hear people talking about AI and hallucinating hallucinations.

David (07:47):

Yes.

Wendy (07:47):

That was a very confusing topic that came up at the HR conference.

David (07:52):

That's a little bit like, so LLMs are the large language models are the specific AI technology that has just accelerated that this whole space and accelerated the use cases for AI in products. And the thing about LLMs is all they're doing is guessing what the next word should be. And again, if we go back to artificial general intelligence and we think about how human speech and even human thought works, I mean, it's kind of how we learn to talk and think verbally as well. So even though there's no evidence that LLMs are aware that they exist, how do we tell the difference again? But they're an example of I think AI appearing like a GI anyway, that's really transforming products and transforming the whole AI space right now.

Wendy (08:58):

So we don't have a full baseline here, but hopefully people have gotten from that so that we can move on to what are some of the examples of how AI has successfully been integrated into products in our industry leadership and development, because that's what we're very curious about.

David (09:19):

Yeah, that's a great question, Wendy. So I mean, the word successfully is interesting as well. The couple of examples that come to mind that I would say yes, very successful one is recommendations. So AI has been used for a long time for recommendations. So you go onto Netflix and you get recommendations, you go onto Amazon, you get recommendations. And AI is used a lot in our space for recommending things to people. So it'll ingest someone's profile, maybe their demographics or what they've said they're interested in or the way they've used the product. And then based on patent matching, so what other people like this person have used before, the AI will recommend something to the user. And so that's used in recommending new learning to people. It's used in recommending products to people. It's also used in recommending coaches to people. So that's an area that AI has been successfully used in our space and in many other spaces.

(10:38):

And then a newer area where AI is being successfully used in our space in learning and development is content creation. So again, going back to these LLMs or generative ai, AI is such a great partner to create new content with. So I use it all the time. It makes me way more efficient. So whenever I'm creating product fact sheets, I'm terrible at marketing, but I have my AI marketing expert sitting next to me and I can have this conversation with it and I can tell it what I want to say from a product perspective and it can help me make it better from a product marketing perspective. So that's a specific example of content creation. LLMs are also being used to create visuals for learning, create translations for learning, create the learning design itself. So lots of use cases there for ai.

Wendy (11:42):

And I think everybody should really go on like chat, GPT, and try it out, play with it and see what it is and put that in there. It takes a while to learn the prompts that are going to get you the right thing, but you now have your marketing prompts all set up so they can take things. And it really does make life so much easier, and that's what we need to do. And I know you've talked about even with coaching, being able to make coaching easier by taking the notes and things, the administrative work so that people can use their strength and their brilliance and AI can help back it up.

David (12:18):

Yes, absolutely. I mean, as you said, it's not necessarily going to take your job, but if you don't know how to use ai, then the people who do know how to use AI probably will take your job. Or at least for example, as a coach using AI for all of that administrative work to surface content recommendations to your clients, there's a ton of applications for AI to help you schedule, et cetera. Note take during your sessions. If you're not already looking at that, then it's going to make your business much more expensive and time consuming than other coaches. So you may not even lose your job to those coaches who know ai, but they're going to be sitting on a beach relaxing while you are doing all your admin. And so yeah, learn, play. It's fun.

Wendy (13:14):

Yeah, yeah, get on and do anything. Do it on the weekend and put some things that you need to work on personally if you want to try it out and then really get down to business because it'll help you. David, can you think of any specific cases like use cases where you believe AI could significantly enhance our products?

David (13:33):

Great question. Leadership development. There are so many use cases for ai. So we already talked about the administrative piece. So the relationship between a coach and their coachee and the participant in a program, it's a very special relationship. And as you said in my bio, I'm also an experienced coach. And for me, the admin gets in the way of that intimacy. And I'm so excited about having a little bot hanging out in the relationship, a little assistant for our relationship to take care of all of those little things that get in the way of that sort of human to human relationship focused relationship and have the bot take care of all the task focused stuff in the relationship. So I think in that case, that's an example of AI creating stronger relationships between humans. And that's really how I think about using AI at New Level Work.

(14:44):

It's not about AI replacing humans, it's about how can AI bring the humans closer together and leverage those relationships because we believe in product at New Level Work that humans grow in relationship with one another. Leadership is about leading other humans. You're not going to learn everything you need to know about leadership from a machine. And so for example, AI can be used to match people who can thrive in peer-to-peer learning situations with one another. So it might be two peers, cross-functional peers who have different strengths and different opportunities for growth who can help one another grow and learn. It could be used again in our products for faster coach matching, giving our participants in our programs the opportunity to choose their coach. We're experimenting with things like that. So again, that's kind of the bringing the humans together. Another application is for L and D leaders.

(15:54):

So helping L and D leaders right at the very start of designing the learning journeys, the leaders in their companies are going through AI can help them understand how to solve their problems with the solutions we provide. So really listening to the learning leader, almost like a salesperson, but with infinite knowledge of all of our products and potentially infinite knowledge of the problem. So AI can ingest data from our customers. HRIS for example, look at what the opportunities for growing and developing leaders are, what are the highest ROI opportunities for growing and developing leaders? And then make personalized recommendations for individuals, for cohorts of learners, for the whole organization to maximize. We've all got such limited budgets in learning and development, and AI can help maximize the deployment of those limited budgets. And then on the other end, AI can help measure that impact. So again, AI can ingest the data that's being produced by our learning platform.

(17:13):

It can ingest the data that's being produced again by our customers, HRIS, and it could look at the participants in the programs and compare the data that they're producing in the organization to the data that people who aren't going through the program, similar people, the data that they're producing and make judgments about the impact of the programs. And really zero in on that return on investment, which we know is so important now that really l and D is working so closely with the C-suite, with the CFO, with the CEO, we really need to be demonstrating our ROI and AI can help us to do that.

Wendy (18:00):

And that's a really good use case because there are so many needs to be able to explain beyond stories what's happening and why leadership development is the humans are the most important thing we have in companies. And to free up other things so that we can really, I love how you speak about connecting the humans and having them do peer groups, all kinds of things we can do if we don't have all this administrative work. So David, as our product visionary, you develop our roadmap of which way we're going. What do you see as most exciting or one of the exciting things that you have coming up on the roadmap that you want to share with folks?

David (18:42):

So we have a ton of exciting AI applications coming up and one that's out right now called the leadership Oracle. It's kind of a more obvious use of an LLM, so it's kind of like GPT in a way, so you can ask it anything you want. The great thing about our leadership Oracle is that it has a constrained information space. So essentially we just train it on the right answers. So leadership best practices, so literally the thousands of years of experience that all of our experienced coaches have, that's all the information that this leadership Oracle has. So instead of going out to the internet in general and coming up with answers for managers, answers for leaders on leadership questions, that might be not the best way to go about something maybe from the 48 laws of power or something like that. Instead of, so power over leadership instead of power with leadership, it'll just take answers from our best practices. And our customers can also customize the Oracle with their own content. So not only is the Oracle giving answers from our content, it can also give specific answers about our customer's, say performance process or hiring process so that leaders and managers in those organizations can get on demand answers 24 hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere in the world. That's cool. There's a ton of other stuff. Do you want me to keep going or

Wendy (20:32):

Well say a little bit more about leadership Oracle. Can people, the way that you're talking, it sounds like maybe the l and d leaders can begin to access that a little bit.

David (20:43):

Absolutely. So we have a free version. So we are big believers at New Level Work that whatever we can give away for free, we should give away for free. I mean, ultimately our mission is to help leaders thrive. And so we're giving away a free version of the leadership Oracle. You can go to our website and access it. I'm sure we'll leave the link in the notes on this podcast. And so really the paid version is about getting access to our content and being able to share our content from the Oracle. And then we also have the customized version that I was talking about where companies can also include their own content in the knowledge base of the leadership Oracle

Wendy (21:29):

That will make a real difference. And I love the fact that it's not going to go out on the web and pull stuff out. As you said, it's going to go from our thousands of coaching sessions that we have had since 2017. And our very high NPS, we have an amazing group of coaches. So when you can tie into their wisdom and the library that they use to send out to clients to be able to update information, that's a real gift. Wow. That's going to be wonderful for people to try out.

David (21:58):

Yeah, we're excited to see how people use it and how people learn and grow from it.

Wendy (22:03):

And what else is on your roadmap that you want to share with us that would be helpful?

David (22:08):

So another product that we are just releasing is our AI 360 report and development plan bot. So this is super cool. It analyzes 360 data. And so what we've never done at New Level Work or better manager before us is given someone a 360 without having a coach with them to debrief the data. Because if someone gets all this data from their 360, it's super confusing. It can trigger them. They can go off in a direction that's not constructive for them or their teams or their organization. And so what we've done is we've leveraged ai, and again, we've taught it very closely to follow our best practices to analyze that 360 data and then provide to the individual going through the 360 an anonymized synthesized report on what are their strengths, what are their opportunities for growth, and then how can they leverage their strengths to grow and develop in those areas of opportunity.

(23:21):

So it's really a wonderful roadmap for growth and it can just stop there. And in that case as well, for L and D leaders, they're getting this aggregated data about their organization. They can see the strengths and opportunities for growth for individual teams of leaders or the whole leadership organization specific leadership levels. So it really is a wonderful tool that creates value for both the individual leader going through the 360 and the L and D leader, and not least of all the fact that they no longer have to pay for a human coach to debrief. Now, of course, what this means is the L and D leader can more accurately target their limited l and D funds at the highest need, highest ROI individuals and cohorts of leaders. So instead of deciding without the data who to give coaches to, once you have that 360 data, you can target the right coach at the right individual at the right time. And so it's a really powerful tool from that perspective as well.

Wendy (24:35):

And the fact that you'll be able to have that for individuals and then a company can look at all of that data that will be possible, that is great.

David (24:45):

And so that the individual's data stays completely private and the l and d leader can look at the data in aggregate similar to an engagement survey.

Wendy (24:55):

So that would still be confidential. Okay, good. And then the L and d leaders will see really what they see now, the themes that came out of it, those types of things.

David (25:08):

Exactly, exactly. And we're also with one of our large customers, 10,000 plus employee customers we're rolling out next week or the week after an AI coach. And so this is interesting. They have folks in retail on the floor, managers in retail on the floor, and then also managers in factories. They use our human coaches with their white collar workers in the offices, but they haven't had a lot of success with the folks in the factory and on the retail floor being able to schedule and keep a coaching session. So we really wanted to start experimenting with ways to give these folks access to at least some form of coaching. So we're testing our first sort of more general AI coach with them. So that's an exciting experiment that's going on as well. And we really hope to leverage ai, again, not to replace humans, but to fill the gaps where humans can't go. And so that's, I think, a really good example of doing that in the retail and in the manufacturing space.

Wendy (26:30):

Oh, absolutely. Because anybody in those groups to be able to learn basic coaching skills, listening skills, the types of things, especially in retail out on the floor, they probably just hire you, throw you out on the floor, and to get some skills on how to connect with people would be really useful. And same in factories. We work with a couple of companies now that we work with, certainly the managers and the leaders, but they're really making a difference inside factories so that if people could have access to that, that would be great. And it has to be, I love how we've looked at it so it's cost effective so that people can do those things, and everybody can have what I call a thought partner. Sometimes we learn so much from speaking out loud, it's like, oh, yeah, I did know the answer to that. And to be able to have a bot to be able to work with you, that would be great.

David (27:27):

And Wendy, I think you really hit the nail on the head when you talked about really those foundational management skills. And so a lot of people end up managing without those foundational skills. A bot is actually coaching is not necessarily teaching, and the bot is actually a reasonably good teacher. Again, it's good at understanding, okay, what are the gaps in this person's management skills? And then helping them to learn those foundational skills that are really going to help them thrive as managers and help their teams thrive and help their organizations thrive.

Wendy (28:11):

And we always get feedback from our coaches that they hear from clients that not only has it helped them in business, but it's helped their personal life if they know coaching skills, good thing to use with your kids listening skills. So it really helps you in your whole life. And to be able to get some of that basic teaching from the bot would be wonderful. So I'm very excited that you're moving this ahead, David.

David (28:36):

Great. Yeah, me too. Super excited to see the outcomes. And we're all still learning. This is all very new applications of LLMs like this in our space are very, very new. And we just don't know at this point what's going to work, where it's going to work and what the impact's going to be. And so we really have to be experimenting and learning all the time so we can, again, maximize our impact, maximize the value that we're creating for our stakeholders and maximizing the growth and development of leaders.

Wendy (29:13):

Wonderful. Now, David, is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you or any points you want to underline as we begin to close our chat?

David (29:24):

I guess maybe the one thing that hasn't really come up is I guess privacy and maybe ethics. That's super important to us. We are founded really as a coaching company. We're coaching first, and that's such a special relationship and a confidential relationship, and we are really bringing that thinking into the way we're designing our LLM based products. So making sure we're doing things like stripping PI personally identifiable information out of what's getting sent to cloud-based LLMs and really ensuring the privacy for the folks who are interacting with the bots. That's primary for us.

Wendy (30:16):

Because that's usually everybody's big worry. So thank you. And the ethics behind this is still something, as we look at this being a global issue of using ai, I hope everybody is going to be thinking about the ethics.

David (30:31):

And again, if this is helping, if this is bringing humans together, we're leveraging AI to bring humans together and we're leveraging AI to help leaders grow and develop and be better leaders for the humans who they're leading, then as long as we can stay with that as our north star, then that's really the ethical framework through which we look at developing products with ai.

Wendy (31:01):

So David, if people want to get in touch with you, if they want more information about what you're up to or maybe try some things, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

David (31:11):

Yeah, please. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or email me directly, davidEvans@newlevelwork.com. I love to have conversations about this stuff. So if you're an L and D leader or on a people team, then please get in touch with me. I'd love to have a conversation with you about this, whether it's specifically about how we're leveraging AI at New Level Work or how you might in general leverage AI and technology to help people grow and develop in your organizations.

Wendy (31:49):

So we'll have that all in the show notes. But davidEvans@newlevelwork.com. Yes, he would love to have a conversation with you, and you never know what happens with these conversations, right? It's one of those things that one never knows and many partnerships and ideas get developed. Thank you, David, so much for sharing all this with us today. And for everybody listening, please go on https://www.newlevelwork.com/, see what we're up to. Sign up for newsletters. We've really, in leadership development, we have so many areas that we're helping and we consider ourself to be partners with companies. We can augment things that you're already doing in your company through our executive coaching, our training opportunities, which are amazing and our group coaching. So check us out, go online and see https://www.newlevelwork.com/. And thank you all for listening and being with us. And thank you again, David, for a wonderful really boy. My curiosity is up about all these things now, and I can't wait to see how our products are developing and the impact they make in the world.

David (32:59):

Me too. Wendy, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Wendy (33:02):

Take care everybody. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for joining us today. For more information show notes and any downloads from today's podcast, please visit https://www.newlevelwork.com/. We would also be so appreciative if you'd write a review, go on to https://www.newlevelwork.com/review and you can write a review on your favorite podcast app. It makes a big difference because we want to really grow managers and leaders around the world, and we need your help. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.