Train An AI Twin to Practice Difficult Human Conversations

For the last ~2 years, I’ve been playing an unexpected role for my students: relationship sherpa.

More specifically, I’ve been helping folks enlist the assistance of AI to prepare for difficult conversations. One of the many strengths of GenAI is its power of imitation. With a little thoughtful preparation, you can create a “digital twin” of a conversation-mate and practice the conversation you’re dreading. It’s like a flight simulator in your pocket. (I made the video linked above to help a friend, and have since developed custom GPTs to help both create a “character profile” that will train your digital twin, as well as a “feedback expert” to help folks identify opportunities to improve.)

Legendary Stanford GSB strategy professor Charles O’Reilly spent 10 years studying scores of GSB alumni as early career managers, and identified a handful of the most career-trajectory shifting interpersonal dilemmas they consistently faced. I’m beyond thrilled to be teaming up with Charles to develop a new course — at the intersection of his research and my relationship sherpa-ing — for Stanford, a learning experience that would have been impossible prior to the advent of Generative AI. We even got to break in Stanford’s brand new filming studio last week!

More on that course as the development process unfolds…

Screens on screens on screens

Speaking of incredible collaborators, Kian Gohar is a legendary futurist, author and thought leader with whom I’ve been fortunate to conduct some pioneering research. Our work has appeared in NPR, HBR, and recently, The Best of HBR: AI edition (find it at your local grocery checkout line!). We wrote the following article to break the AI-as-role-play-partner paradigm down for folks. It originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal May 4, 2024, print edition as 'For Conversations You Dread, Try a Chatbot,' and it’s been on my mind a lot as Charles and I have been developing our course. If you watch the video demo, or use the custom GPTs linked above, I’d love to hear how it goes for you.

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“Many people worry about the outsize role that AI may eventually play in our lives. But what if employing an AI program could actually help us with issues that cause fear and anxiety? We’ve found that it can be a surprisingly effective tool for figuring out how to approach emotionally charged conversations—despite, or perhaps because of, having no emotions itself.

Take the experience of a friend we’ll call Brad, who is 75. He had been dreading a conversation with his older sister for months. Brad felt that she needed to move her 80-something husband into an assisted living facility and was afraid she would object and even feel hurt by the suggestion. He was determined to approach the matter delicately and with the utmost respect for his sister, but he had been at a loss for how to begin the conversation.

We’ve been researching potential roles and interactions for generative AI and suggested that Brad turn to ChatGPT to rehearse the conversation out loud. We also gave him some basic coaching on how to get useful responses and recorded the ensuing exchange for our research. To help AI believably play the part of his sister, we had Brad ask AI to interview him about her, so that it could create a psychological profile of their relationship. He conversed with AI by voice, not text, to better mimic a conversational dynamic.

After the first attempt, Brad felt that his AI avatar for his sister might have been too nice, making things unrealistically easy. So he asked the AI to be a little more aggressive, imagining a more confrontational exchange. By pushing the boundaries, Brad was able to practice responding to truly unpredictable directions the conversation might take. After a couple more rounds of role-playing, he asked the AI for feedback in a few ways: ‘Can I make this conversation more enjoyable for my sister?’ Or: ‘How would Dale Carnegie—the master of interpersonal influence—critique my approach?’

Most important, at one point the technology asked Brad a pair of paradigm-shifting questions about his sister: ‘Has she considered her own health needs as the primary caregiver, given that she’s 80-something as well? How will her capacity to help change in the next few years?’ This was something Brad hadn’t considered, and the insight opened up a new approach. He felt the interaction gave him a way to introduce the sensitive topic without guilt, shame or blame. And he realized that the role-playing with AI had made his dread of the conversation disappear.

We all face conversations that we dread: summoning the courage to ask your boss for a raise, talking to your partner about prioritizing you over work, asking aging parents if they’ve saved enough for retirement. Using AI in this way for personal dilemmas can strengthen our arguments, illuminate our blind spots and turn tension into transformation.

One associate of ours decided to try using AI to help prepare for a very tense meeting: terminating an employee. First, he spent the weekend rehearsing, with the help of an instructional video we made for him about role-playing with the program and then asking it for feedback on what he could have done better. His HR leader later complimented him for what she called the smoothest meeting of this type that she had witnessed. ‘Which of our training materials did you use to prepare?’ she asked. He told us: ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell her ChatGPT prepared me! But it saved me so much heartache!’

How did you approach your last conversation with your child’s soccer coach? Or a delicate conversation with the neighbors about handling a shared repair? Or with a good friend about a perceived slight?

Maybe you stewed unproductively, knots tightening in your stomach. These conversations have one common thread: fear of the unknown. We can’t predict how they’ll unfold, so we put them off, until sometimes it’s too late.

That is where a generative AI app in your pocket could help. Surveys show that a majority of U.S. workers fear that AI will cause job loss, but research has also demonstrated that AI can be an aid in some complex communication, such as helping train healthcare professionals to present recovery plans to patients. Though its business applications have been widely studied, its potential for personal communication remains a relatively unexplored frontier. It’s a technology that can intersect with our most human experience: talking to one another.

One executive we know had an epiphany about one advantage to using AI to role-play a conversation with their spouse about having children. The person hadn’t felt comfortable talking to any friend or relative about the subject because it was so intimate and needed to stay private. Then they realized that talking with an AI didn’t count as sharing it with another person.

Another friend used our AI approach to prepare for a tense salary negotiation. He had the AI role-play both his side of the conversation and his boss’s side, with his “boss” set at different levels of openness versus hostility to a raise. He found the program was able to remind him when he failed to highlight what could be mutually beneficial about a salary increase and when he failed to outline next steps. After all the practice, he reported that he was no longer nervous in carrying out the conversation.

How can you use AI chatbots to role-play difficult conversations before having them with real, live humans? You can simply open an AI application like ChatGPT and start the ‘Conversational Chat’ mode with one of its conversational prompts. They include:

• I have a dilemma, and I’m wondering if you can help.

• I need advice on a conversation I’m dreading. Can you help me prepare for it by asking me a few questions, and then role-play it with me?

• I’m thinking about _____. Can you poke a few holes in my thought process?

• I don’t know why someone said _____. Can you help me understand their perspective?

You speak to the chatbot like you would with a friend. Feel free to politely redirect it, or interrupt, or give it more context. You can ask it to interview you to get the context it needs: ‘Ask me a few questions about this situation if you need more info before you give any advice.’ The more you push and pull and probe, as you would with a human friend, the better outcome you’ll achieve.

The era of human-AI collaboration has only just begun. Business optimization is just the tip of the AI iceberg. Possibilities for human transformation lie beneath the surface. What if AI proves to be a key to unlocking deeper human connections? Nobody would dread that.

Jeremy Utley is an adjunct professor at Stanford University and co-author of ‘Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters.’ Kian Gohar is CEO of Geolab, a leadership development firm, and co-author of ‘Competing in the New World of Work.’”

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Appeared in the May 4, 2024, print edition as 'For Conversations You Dread, Try a Chatbot'.

Related: The $200 Creativity Test
Related: It’s Not An AI Problem. It’s A You Problem.

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