Here at the start of the new year, we at Membrain are preparing to make it easier for sales managers to coach. Our new product, Elevate, (formerly coaching cockpit) will enable managers to see at a glance everything they need to know to be more effective and targeted in how they manage and coach their people.
But will people be coaching, or will AI take over the coaching role?
Developers at Microshift AI recently created an AI-powered coaching module that promises (or threatens?) to take the humans out of coaching almost entirely. But can coaching actually be done effectively by a non-human “coach”? I caught up with Microshift AI’s founder, Neo Moreton, to get his perspective.
Neo is an athlete, a yoga therapist, an executive coach with a passion for neurobiology, and the author of a book called Being Real for a Change. He hardly seems, based on his credentials, like the type to promote taking humans out of the coaching equation.
So what made him decide to found Microshift AI?
“I was out for a run, and I was wondering why I was doing it,” he says. “I wasn’t enjoying it, I didn’t want to run, and I wasn’t having a good time.”
But as he followed that line of inquiry, the question shifted in his mind to, “why am I suffering?”
“With asking a different question, everything changed,” he says. The new question reconnected him to the purpose of his run and gave him the motivation to keep going.
What was happening at that moment was that running shifted Neo’s brain from the stressed, anxious “reptilian” circuits into the limbic brain. As his body continued to move, his brain shifted into thinking with the neocortex, and then out of the neocortex arose a more helpful question.
“As a master coach myself, I did this naturally,” says Neo. “But I realized that I was following a process, and it’s a process that does not require another human to activate.”
Neo says that when people go to a master coach to help them get unstuck, the neurobiology works in three stages:
“The first two stages, regulation and connection, can be completely automated,” says Neo. “You don’t need a human to help you with that.”
However, until the advent of generative AI, the third stage always required an expert human to assist. And humans need to be paid. Truly masterful coaches need to be paid a lot. Coaching this way is valuable, but not affordable for a lot of people, and not scalable. It’s an inefficient business model.
Additionally, its value is highly dependent on the skill and quality of the coach, and limited by their memory for your situation and ability to track what you need from session to session.
According to Neo, AI makes it possible for excellent coaching to be scaled and affordable, all the way from stage one to stage three. This is thanks to modern AI’s large language models, curated data sets, and advanced sentiment analysis, enabling hyper-personalisation of AI coaching.
Essentially, he says, it’s a data set plus a process: The two things an AI model needs to effectively take over.
“You can put together an algorithm that reads pauses, breath, coherence, voice tonality, and map that to their mental state,” says Neo. “You can train it to respond accordingly, just as a master coach would do. And I think AI can probably coach better than humans.”
One of the challenges of human coaching is that it’s limited by time and money. With AI, a client could feasibly access coaching every day or several times a day where they might otherwise only access it once a week. He theorizes that the “microshifts” attained in these small, frequent interactions might lead to bigger long-term changes than the macroshift from a once a month or once a week coaching session.
I can imagine a world in which salespeople are able to access AI-powered coaching conversations on a regular basis. Working with a platform like Membrain, these interactions could use the same data that’s available through Elevate (formerly coaching cockpit) to generate and sustain meaningful conversations and allow salespeople to attain “microshifts” on a regular basis.
However, there’s a danger when jumping onto new technologies that the technology will be built just because it can. We see sales organizations building Frankenstacks all the time and falling prey to point pollution.
In my opinion, AI coaching should only become part of a sales organization’s approach when it can be integrated with a well-designed process and a platform like Membrain that will ensure the coaching is trained to HOW you sell.
And in my opinion, it can never entirely replace human oversight. But I must admit I’m intrigued by Neo’s technology and excited to see how AI will continue to change the technology landscape.
What do you think? Would you replace coaching with AI?
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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