The Robots That Manage the Managers

Illustration: Isabel Espanol By Sue Shellenbarger April 15, 2019 10:01 a.m. ET Raquel Collings often has morning coffee with her management coach. She reviews her goals in her new job as a corporate manager and ponders whether she’s spending her time wisely.Ms. Collings’ coach is a bot—a manager-training app powered by the artificial intelligence of IBM ’s Watson. The app, Coach Amanda, serves up tips on her phone in five- to 10-minute videos and texts that Ms.

Newsletter Sign-up Grounded in research showing periodic repetition and reminders are good ways to learn new material, the platforms suit a generation of digital natives who prefer checking an app over sitting through a PowerPoint class. The apps’ text and email nudges are easy to ignore, however. And it can be jarring or downright weird when a bot gets too personal.

“She came back with, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ It’s weird to me when a chatbot has kind of fake emotions. I was like, ‘That’s creepy. That’s weird.’ ” says Mr. Ryzner, a 49-year-old instructional designer at Red Nucleus, a Yardley, Pa., provider of custom learning applications. Another coaching app, Butterfly, was born of the pain its three co-founders felt after they were thrust into management jobs in their 20s without any training. The app tracks feedback from users’ employees and uses machine learning to serve up curated tips and articles, says David Mendlewicz, co-founder and CEO of the New York-based company. Among its users is Social.Lab, a social media agency with offices in New York.

All reflect a trend toward injecting training into the workday as needed—a pattern experts describe as microlearning, learning snacks or learning in the flow of work. Some 49% of employees prefer taking their training on the job, right when they need it, rather than in formal classes, according to a 2018 LinkedIn survey of more than 4,000 participants.

If Humu identifies a morale problem, such as a feeling among employees that their boss is making questionable decisions or being too secretive, the platform might nudge the manager to explain his decisions more clearly, Mr. Bock says. Employees might get nudges at the same time aimed at restoring trust in the manager, by suggesting he or she has good intentions and is just really busy, or wants to avoid distracting them.

yeah so the robot can take over

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