Learnings from building Amotions AI - accelerant to upskilling and coaching

1. Gen AI-powered coaching and upskilling is different from using AI to recommend human coaches and courses

What we launched is a digital coach powered by generated AI, informed by the knowledge of world-class psychologists and certified coaches, and function and company specific content and data. It’s conversational AI that users directly interact with. This is not to be confused with other platforms that says AI-powered and they are using AI-powered recommendations and matching users with human coaches and online courses.

2. Have a baseline of what good coaching looks like

Building an AI coaching and upskilling tool is different from building a Q&A chatbot. People who have experienced good coaching know that good coaches also know how to ask good, deep questions, nudge their coachees, and hear the insights underneath the words. We need some “secret sauce” to make the AI tool purpose made for coaching, upskilling, career development, and productivity enhancement. We need to have some background knowledge on what coaching is like, and figure out how to inform the AI technically. There is structure and best learning principles and practices that we need to apply. That’s why we need both AI specialists, engineers, and designers, and psychologists, coaches, and learning and productivity experts on the team.

3. Integrating coaching with upskilling and enablement

Becoming a great coach is very hard even for human beings, and it takes lots of experience and training to become one. AI is not 100% there to replace great human coaches. And we are not set out there to replace great human coaches. We want to scale and democratize coaching and learning and upskilling, to expand 24/7 support to people who might not have otherwise had access to support and left to struggle on their own in the moment of need. That was me 10 years ago as a new product manager, with a bachelor and three masters degrees in liberal arts and social science, but no training and background in the new job that I entered. And there are millions in the world like that, new to their roles like sales and customer support or manager, with no prior background. And upskilling, training, teaching, and learning are beneficial in these cases, besides coaching, to get the basic knowledge and support first.

4. How do we get the AI system to be knowledgeable and capable of upskilling people on particular skills - domain content and data

When it comes to upskilling people on functional skills, we like to partner with organizations that already have some training content and documents in place, especially when these require company, industry, and product specific knowledge. We package and integrate these content and data in a way that the AI can digest and understand.

5. Moving beyond a chatbot - proactive coaching and enablement

I dreamed of having an AI coach that can follow me around and observe me, and give me real-time suggestions like: “Hey, you are arguing for too long with your engineering manager. How about you try taking a break, then asking what are your common goals?” That’s an AI without user interface, proactive, and not just a chatbot waiting for a user to ask a question. We haven’t built that yet. But it’s possible in the future. In the meantime, we keep thinking about how can Amotions AI be more proactive and take actions and give suggestions and recommendations, and we are building in triggers for these.

6. Hallucination is not 100% eliminated, but there are ways to combat this

We are experimenting and talking to people at other organizations building AI products for various use cases, and it seems there’s no way to 100% eliminate hallucination yet. Humans make mistakes too. But there are ways to minimize hallucination, like using RAG and knowledge graphs.

7. Building a great AI product is hard, it takes a great team and a lot of iterations

We are constantly learning and iterating. If you want to partner with us to build the future of enhancing human capabilities leveraging AI, contact us anytime: https://amotionsinc.com/. Message me on Linkedin or email me at pianpian@amotionsinc.com.

Pianpian Xu Guthrie is Founder and CEO of Amotions AI. She led product management and growth at multiple tech companies such as GoDaddy, Priceline, and Ticketmaster, and was head of product at a Series A startup, Winnie, before founding Amotions AI. She received her master’s degrees in sociology from Yale University with a thesis on social mobility and psychological well-being. She got her master’s in social science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, BA in Japanese from Sun Yat-sen University in China and also studied at Kobe University in Japan. She was a teaching and research fellow at Yale and HKUST. Silicon Valley-based Pianpian is originally from rural China.