Sports Coach Inspired: AI Coach in the Work-Verse
📑 Chapters
00:57 - Dr. Alex introduces himself
03:24 - The story behind Virti and its foundation
08:42 - Creating micro-scenarios
11:11 - Staying within the learning objectives
14:31 - Effective coaching inspired by sports
19:04 - Overcoming challenges in Dr. Alex’s life
23:21 - Best skills for coaches to have
27:57 - Developing empathy
31:14 - Role of childlike wonder
33:31 - The landscape for AI one-on-one coaching
36:42 - Benefits of AI-powered avatars
40:14 - Recognizing human voices and AI voices
42:40 - Fighting inaccuracy or AI hallucination
45:25 - Virti impact stories
47:46 - Thought leaders to keep in mind
47:27 - Jiani’s recap of the episode
50:12 - Dr. Alex at 11 years old
51:28 - Particular challenges in Dr. Alex’s life
53:52 - Dr. Alex’s magic
Watch the full episode here.
💕 Story Overview
Welcome to a new episode of the @MAGICademy Podcast! Our guest for S4E10 is Dr. Alexander Young, who is very well-known in the fields of education technology and health. Dr. Alex is mostly recognized as the founder and CEO of Virti, an innovative platform aimed at transforming how individuals learn and perform in professional settings. We talk about AI and coaching, how these two concepts intertwine, and how they can be harnessed to develop talents and form excellent professionals.
Dr. Alex graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Bristol in 2009 and subsequently trained as a trauma and orthopedic surgeon until 2018 when he decided to fully dedicate himself to Virti and focus on enhancing training and performance in business environments by leveraging advanced technologies. In this episode, he also shares some insights about AI-powered avatars, recognizing AI from real people, and some stories on how AI + coaching have improved talent development.
🌼 Magical Insights
Creating Micro Scenarios: These scenarios serve as controlled environments where professionals can enhance their skills, improve communication, and better manage challenging interactions. By implementing this, companies can help talents refine their communication strategies and learn to articulate their thoughts clearly and effectively in high-pressure situations. They also provide and receive unique feedback, which can lead to improved interpersonal skills and greater confidence in handling sensitive discussions.
Effective Coaching: When talking about developing a talent’s soft skills, 1-on-1 coaching is necessary due to the customizable aspect of the practice, as there’s the possibility to tailor the coaching to the specific needs of each talent. The other extremely important aspect is to prioritize the coaching and follow up with it. Workers get busy, and people have less and less time to dedicate to practicing these types of scenarios, but this practice is vital and organizations should prioritize it above other things.
Approaching Things with Childlike Wonder: As adult learners we often get frustrated, don't have enough time, get fed up, label something as too hard, consider we're stupid, or think that we're too old or that we're too young to learn something effectively. But by humbly approaching something with the inquisitive nature of a child, and opening ourselves to understanding and figuring out the subject in a fun way, it’s way easier to break down most problems and get to a resolution or solution in a really quick timeframe.
AI-Powered Avatars: These avatars are revolutionizing 1-on-1 coaching by enhancing personalization, engagement, and scalability in the learning process. AI avatars can tailor coaching sessions to individual learning styles and preferences, while also providing customized feedback and adapting their teaching methods accordingly based on the information received and processed.
⭐ What’s Dr. Alexander’s Magic?
His ability to learn things quickly, look for new ways to figure out things, and wonder if something is or isn’t possible. Overall, a very active curiosity that has helped him in his career and to build Virtti and Shiken
Conclusion
In conclusion, Dr. Alex shared his journey from a trauma and orthopedic surgeon to an innovator in educational technology, emphasizing the need for scalable, engaging training solutions that can address the shortcomings of traditional methods.
By leveraging AI and immersive technologies, Virti not only enhances learning experiences but also prepares talents across various sectors to perform effectively under pressure, fostering essential soft skills that are increasingly vital in today's dynamic work environment.
If you would like to stay tuned with our future guests and their magical stories. Welcome to join us.
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Liao, C., Hwang, D., Wu, E., & Koike, H. (2023). AI Coach: A Motor Skill Training System using Motion Discrepancy Detection. Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2023.
Sarugaku, T., Lee, J.W., Matsumoto, Y., & Yamada, M. (2020). Examination of a Skill Sampling Method of an Athlete Using the Athlete’s Movement and Eye Movement for the Development of an AI Coach. Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal, 5, 1204-1213.
Zhou, N., Doerner, M., Ryan, L., & Pierse, C.A. (2021). AI Coach for Battle Royale Games. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play.
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Dr. Alexander Young is a well-known figure in the fields of education technology and health, and the founder and CEO of Virti, an innovative platform aimed at transforming how individuals learn and perform in professional settings. He also co-founded Shiken, focusing on enhancing educational experiences through technology.
Dr. Young's journey reflects a commitment to blending clinical practice with innovative educational methodologies, and to find new ways to keep developing talents.
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Jiani (00:03)
Welcome to MAGICademy Podcast Today with us is Dr. Alex. He is the founder of Virti and Shatane, a AI powered, avatar powered, micro learning powered, coaching, one -on -one coaching and virtual reality space for high performing talent. And he used to be a surgeon and he constantly share insights and updates about AI and.
coaching in social media. So great to have you Dr. Alex with us today.
Alex (00:37)
Thanks so much, super excited to be here and talk about everything to do with learning productivity and how people can perform in the workplace.
Jiani (00:44)
Wonderful, wonderful. So if we were to, people probably have read about you, people probably follow you on YouTube and across social media. They probably know maybe like a good chunk about like you and your background. If you were to introduce yourself in a kind of brand-new way, how would you introduce yourself in a way that nobody has heard about? Yes.
Alex (01:08)
Yeah, for sure. So my background's a little bit weird. So I used to be a doctor. I trained in the UK's national health service and I trained in orthopaedic surgery. So I practiced there for around about seven years. And during that time, I also got a degree in education, but I've always been very entrepreneurial. So when I was at medical school, I set up a company in the ed tech space that helped doctors and nurses pass exams because I think when I was training as a surgeon, I must've sat over 10 exams.
throughout my postgraduate training. And that's super stressful and super difficult to prepare for around your job. And then in 2017 and 2018, I made the difficult decision to leave clinical practice because I had an idea for a company that could really change how people learn, train and perform in the workplace. And that was a company called Verti and that utilizes AI.
as well as some deep tech like AR and VR to really recreate human conversations in a safe environment. So we use AI powered digital avatars that people can speak to on their Mac, on their phone, or in virtual reality and practice difficult conversations like performance reviews, hiring and firing, interviews, you name it, it can be created in that platform. And...
The fun thing there is that anyone can create those scenarios. So if you're an L and D professional, if you're learning yourself, you can actually go in, utilize some of our AI authoring tools and create that super, super quickly. And then because I'm just a massive learning nerd, I also set up a second company more recently called Shaken and that does micro learning again with an AI focus. And it's also got some writing and productivity tools in there really to help anybody.
in a professional or knowledge working job, get the most out of their time. So that's kind of me. And then I talk about things like productivity, AI and the future of work across YouTube, LinkedIn predominantly, and other social media platforms.
Jiani (03:09)
I love it. I love it. I think that would be very curious. You are like, yeah, so a kind of a surgeon and then an entrepreneur and building learning tools. And I think when we, the, the practice of being like a surgeon require a lot of study and memorization and application and like ability to empathize. So it's like a whole kind of package of like human to human skills.
And I would be very interesting like when you were kind of building Verdi to start with what was the what was the kind of the founding stories like you mentioned about like trying to help people to learn faster and but you were leveraging like a virtual reality and avatars and
sometimes we think about, we wanted to help people pass exams and learn fast. We, the first thing that we can usually think about is like, yeah, do the test multiple times and until you got higher accuration rates and pass like to the next round, that's usually how people prep. But how would you, why would you think about like avatar and, and leveraging like visuals, like virtual reality and yeah, I'm just.
I hope our audience are curious about that as well. Very interesting pivot.
Alex (04:35)
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, I mean, I think for me, my interests outside of medicine were always around learning and then technology and probably in that order. So I kind of saw firsthand when I was training in what is the seventh biggest employer on the planet, the UK's national health service, how people really struggle to balance that kind of day -to -day jobs or service provision. So doing the tasks that jobs required them to do.
with self -development, getting paid, career advancement and things like that. And certainly for me in surgery, one of the big issues was not necessarily practicing and completing exams, as you quite rightly say, doing active recall questions, which is evidence proven way of learning and retaining knowledge more effectively than just reading. That was not an issue. The big issue was, were...
the soft skill side of things came into play. So in healthcare, if you are not a good communicator, you can have lots of complaints against you, whether that's internally with your team or whether it's externally with patients whom you're speaking with. And obviously in surgery and healthcare, you've got to have a lot of very high stakes conversations, things like breaking bad news, explaining a diagnosis, deescalating angry relatives, lots and lots of other scenarios. And the way that we trained in
medicine was we often used actors who were perhaps not that good. And that was often in one off training sessions where, you know, you and I might be observed having a conversation. One of us is an actor. Somebody else is observing that and gives us some pretty subjective feedback based on their own experiences. And that might happen, you know, once every kind of six months or something like that. And the problem there is that they that that type of training or actually learning from real world experience is.
very effective, but it's also very scary and it's not particularly scalable. So what you would often see is people who weren't engaging with that type of what's called scenario -based learning and they just wouldn't do it at all. Or you'd have people who were very, then kind of scared to actually utilize some of the skills they learned in real life. So I really wanted to create something regardless of the tech that allowed us to scale those difficult to handle conversations, which are pretty infrequent.
And that's kind of where the idea for Verti came from. How can we replicate at scale things like difficult conversations or difficult scenario based learning exercises as realistically as possible. And when I'm talking about realism, I'm not talking about something like a branched decision role play, which some of the listeners might experience were a little bit like a choose your own adventure book. You sort of select an option based on a scenario.
Jiani (07:27)
Prescribed
Alex (07:29)
Exactly. That's quite good for training very kind of junior members of a team or early-stage learners, but actually to maximize learning transfer into the world that we work in, where you don't necessarily just have one to four options. What I wanted to create was something that produced a freeform role play and really tricked people into thinking it was a real conversation. And that's where all of the AI tools come in.
like being able to generate conversation in response to a learner's audio and then reproduce that in a realistic voice to mimic something in the real world. So that's kind of where everything came from. And I think for me, it very much started with what is the learning problem we're trying to solve? And then the technology came afterwards. And we've seen that kind of technology evolve over the past five years since Verti was started.
Jiani (08:24)
I love it. There's just like a lot of things that I wanted to like unpack so
So simulations, yes, a lot of times when I think according to research, obviously when we learn something, something that, you know, usually what we think is happening is our mind, our cognitive, like cognitive ability is the kind of the underlining kind of controller to help us navigate through knowledge and content. Even multimedia, we treat that as a kind of information source.
And a lot of times we don't really or we don't even have time to think about yeah, actually learning is not just cognitive. It's a whole-body kind of learning because sometimes we know we move our hands or we see someone it's very kind of bodily visceral kind of experience and it's also very social so
getting ourselves in a particular situation that gives us a lot of context that our brain is able to kind of register. And later on, even if we recall it, it will be much easier than we just like read a test and then try to like remember that because the connections are much more in depth and more salient across like different neural networks. If we were able to kind of envision that.
And when you were designing that virtual reality space where assuming that, you know, a practice, a practicing searching is dealing with a difficult conversation with a patient's relative, before the operation, how would you, when you were designing that, like,
Would you be try to be as realistic as possible? Were you trying to just capture the core part of the context? How do you go about like designing like just a micro scenario like that?
Alex (10:30)
Yeah, good question. And I think if we consider soft skills in general, and we think about having difficult conversations, they are inherently very scary. And a lot of that has to do with the actual tone of voice, as well as the content that is being discussed in some of those high stakes conversations. And so the number one thing we were looking to replicate above the actual content of the conversation was things like the tone.
the sound, is the AI able to generate a human -like voice? Is it able to show emotion appropriately? Certainly when I've practiced soft skills, the, I guess, you know, uncanny valley is more often bridged with audio than with visuals. I think a lot of the time, you know, especially if we're watching a video, we almost kind of zone out and forget that we're, you know, watching a moving image. And even if you're speaking with an actor or actress, often,
It's the actual conversation that our brains are focused on and how to actually navigate that to get to a resolution or get to what we want. And so with Verti, we've put a lot of focus on that audio side of things. And our platform kind of works off mobile, off desktop and in virtual reality. In virtual reality, you have the benefit of complete immersion. So you haven't got anything outside to kind of distract you. And you can also look at some of these avatars, but the avatars that we use,
in order to optimize for interactivity, they are computer generated. So a little bit like a high -end video game or something like that, you know that it's not completely real. You know, it's not a real person you're speaking with, but it suspends that disbelief and allows you to engage and actually fall into that game of how do I conduct a performance review? How do I hit the learning objectives for this conversation? How do I close a sales deal? And that's when things become really, really fun for the learners.
as they progress through those conversations and progressively get better.
Jiani (12:31)
I like that. So the voice plays number one kind of important to create that sense of fidelity or reality. And when you, when we have like AI generated the conversations, I was actually trying, maybe the version that I tried is maybe GPT three, maybe four. Sometimes they,
create conversations that's a little bit like above or beyond kind of the knowledge or the learning objectives. And how do you keep the kind of the countless possibilities of conversation, the free flow conversations within sort of like the learning objectives, because after all the learning needs to hit the outcome and.
How do you keep that in the frames?
Alex (13:36)
Yeah, really great question. And I think if we, if we kind of remove the technology for a second and we think about scenario-based learning or role play in general, it is an exceptionally effective way of teaching people how to perform in the real world. That's that simulation and immersive type training, but it's got to align and be relevant to the learner who you are teaching at that moment. So someone, for example, who is very junior, they might just want to focus on some simple steps.
and some understanding of how to structure a conversation or how to navigate something in a role play. Whereas someone who might be somebody like a much more seasoned sales executive might want to be tested more at the negotiation end of things where the avatar is giving them a really hard time and there's perhaps no real way to win. And then it's a question of how do they navigate that? How do they manage their own emotions and how do they come to an agreement and close things out in the timeframe?
So you've got a huge variety of learning outcomes and rubrics as well to kind of score people against. And I think that's one of the things that we're really proud of, Virti, that we have optimized for. So when you actually create your avatar and we've got some off the shelf scenarios that are common to most different professions, but we also really encourage the L &D professionals that we work with to create their own role plays through our authoring suite. And...
You can actually do that very quickly with some of our newer AI authoring tools. So when you actually go to our platform, and you can try this out for free actually just by signing up on the Verti website, you can upload a document or you can just add in some basic information like the name of the character, the scenario objectives, the background, the type of learner that you're training, and anything in particular that you want to happen in that scenario.
just with a couple of lines of text or a document upload of a previous script you might be using for in -person training. And then with the click of a button, the AI will actually generate that entire role play for you. And then you can kind of tweak that in the editor afterwards, saving a huge amount of time. And so you can actually allow the AI to customize to the needs of a specific learner, just by providing some learner demographics and your own learning objectives and outcomes.
Jiani (15:47)
you
Alex (15:49)
when you're actually generating that scenario. And I always encourage people to think, okay, what are you really truly trying to emphasize here for the learner? And I try and get people to use bite -sized training. So rather than running an entire sales conversation or an entire performance review, we think about, okay, is it just the building rapport phase you're trying to train for? Is it just the negotiation phase or the deal and demo display phase?
try and just build the role play around those kind of micro learning pieces first, because it will allow the learner to jump in and focus on those within that single scenario. And that often proves really, really effective for people.
Jiani (16:30)
that and that gets me thinking because in our previous conversation we were talking about we're drawing an analogy of one -on -one coaching to sports coaching and that just got me thinking in your experience how do you define first how do you define like effective coaching and what kind of dig deeper into the sports coaching but I wanted to kind of hear you like the ideal version of
of coaching, one -on -one coaching, what does that look like?
Alex (17:03)
Yeah. So I think for things like soft skills training or anything where we're learning a skill in work that one -to -one coaching with someone who's been through it before, who's an experienced manager or senior trainer or something like that is absolutely essential. And similarly to doing things like role plays and simulation training, scaling one -to -one coaching is super, super difficult. Everyone is stretched for time. You want to make sure that you're giving everyone, you know, the best coaching possible based on their own needs and.
Often that gets lost a little bit as an organization scales and gets, you know, particularly large. And so one of the things that we have done at Verti is whenever you go through any of these role plays, the learner immediately gets a coaching assessment and some feedback at the end of the scenario, which they can then work on. And you can actually work with a one -to -one AI coach.
within the platform to understand how you can improve and go away and work on that. And that feedback from all of the learners who go through the platform can then be reviewed by a single person who can then optimize their coaching and make that kind of more accessible, more personalized at scale to then jump into one -to -one coaching when they do have that time. So, you know, I think it's incredibly important. And my background as well as being basically a learning and tech nerd,
I also played a lot of sport when I was younger. So, I played soccer in the UK. I played rugby, did a lot of, of running, run a couple of marathons. And I think once you get to a certain level of performance, it really is about that coaching element, whether it is visualizing, your victory or visualizing your performance, overcoming nerves before you go into a particularly high stakes game. That really is what makes the difference between individuals and teams who are successful.
and those who, you know, perhaps don't win those big games or don't perform as well as they could have done. And if we translate that into a work environment, and my personal belief is that we should be treating all of our employees and team members like they are high -performance athletes. So how are we getting the best out of them at any time? So if someone is going into a high -stakes sales negotiation, or if they're going up for a job interview or...
If they're going into do a particularly fierce HR feedback session, you want to make sure that they've got coaching before that happens, as well as being able to immediately reflect on that and learn from it. And I think that's where AI in general is really, really helpful because a lot of what we can now do with AI tools is we can actually connect up things like our HR systems or our sales systems or learning platforms like Verti into a knowledge assistant. And then.
the learner can actually get on -demand coaching before they go into a real -world environment. So kind of just -in -time training, which has been shown to be very, very effective because it's relevant and it's accurate and aligned to what it is they're doing in that time. And then they've also got that post -event feedback and coaching as well. And that's part of what my other company, Shaken does, where there's a knowledge assistant and you can hook that up to all of your systems internally.
And then provide all of your employees with, with on -demand validated relevant coaching to your business. And I think that's going to be the future of how we kind of scale a lot of the, the HR and the learning side of employee development. Because again, a lot of times I can speak from personal experience, both in the NHS, as well as, as an entrepreneur and, and founder and coach, there's loads of times where I've just gone into situations without a huge amount of preparation.
kind of winged it done okay off some training I've had like six months ago, but I definitely could have been better. And then when you come out of that, unless you directly reflect on that yourself and write that down, which you know, Hey, we'd all love to do and we know we should be doing, but again, time is the main constraint with this. You might forget that and forget exactly what happened. And so if you've got access to those on -demand tools in the heat of the moment, you're likely to perform better and you're likely to then learn more effectively after.
to and that's something that I'm super super passionate about.
Jiani (21:24)
I love that and I think I love how your your passion of like learning and technology like the way that you express it is like kind of like integrating them together Let's kind of let's put technologies aside first and let's kind of dig deeper into the sports coaching the one -on -one or one too many sports coaching. Can you Share with us some stories where?
when you were playing sports with the team and something that the coach did really kind of stayed with you or how a situation where the coach really helped you or the team to kind of overcome a maybe high -stake games or high -stake challenge. Can you share with us a little bit more on just on the learning perspective or the coaching perspective?
Alex (22:16)
Yeah, for sure. So I'll, I'll, I'll give one from, from sports and then I'll give one from surgery as well, because there's, there's two that kind of come to mind and they're quite similar. So the one from sports, you know, I remember playing a football game back in the UK. It was pretty high stakes. There was a penalty shootout. I think it's the, final of a cup final when I was playing kind of under 18, semiprofessional football. And we were kind of down, we were losing by a goal and then one of the team.
missed a penalty and obviously everyone's kind of focus and all of that energy is suddenly deflated because of what's happened in the game. And the coach kind of rounded everybody up together. And, you know, his soft skills are really good in this situation because it'd be very easy to, you know, criticize a person that missed the penalty and put a lot of pressure on the rest of the team and make that person feel even worse than they did in that moment. But.
All he focused on really was what we should be doing going forward and how we could still win it and how there was still time left and time remaining and what we could do. And we ended up actually going on and then equalizing and eventually winning that game. And I think it was a really good example of just how bad things happen, you know, within work, within sport. But if you manage your emotions, you apply, you know, not just good soft skills, but excellent soft skills in that example.
to an entire team and show that you're leading by example, then you can actually impact real, real, you know, significant change. And I think the other one, not too dissimilar actually, was when I was operating as a junior surgeon and I was operating with my consultant and another surgeon. And it was a particularly difficult case. It was late at night. It was a trauma case where someone would have been involved in a road traffic accident. And the...
patient had effectively fractured their leg, you know, very, very badly. And it was proving really difficult to reconstruct with the usual things that we would do, which were kind of plates and screws in orthopaedics. and everyone was very tired and they were sort of struggling and we weren't really sure if what we were doing in that moment was, was really going to work. And, I'll always remember the senior surgeon just saying, okay, look, we just need to stop. We need to take a break. We need to pause.
Jiani (24:24)
Mm.
Alex (24:44)
nothing bad is going to happen by stopping. And then we need to come back to this, like we've just walked into the room fresh and new and look at it from this moment and look at what we need to be doing. And that for me was pretty transformational. That's something that I now approach in work as well. because often in the heat of the moment, especially in things like medicine and surgery where everything is very high stakes, there's lots of pressure, there's lots of time constraints.
We don't think that actually, yes, you know, we should just step back. We should take a break and then look at things with, with new eyes. And, you know, that, that patient eventually did really, really well, but on the flip side, there are lots of times where people try and, you know, focus too much or they get stuck really in the weeds of trying to solve a problem without taking their foot off the gas and stepping back and thinking about how they could solve it more effectively. And.
I think both of those are really good examples were that the high stakes, but someone with experience and with excellent soft skills has really impacted strong outcomes. And again, that's something that we can translate into our work environment. And if you're a leader listening to this, I would advocate that soft skills as well as understanding how to use AI are probably two of the most in demand skills this year and in the next few years.
Jiani (26:05)
I love that. I think just by hearing your stories, I was like visualizing the situation and I was visualizing how that consultant and the coach is able to de -escalate the situation and put things back to a space where the emotions are being protected and redirected.
What do you think then in this, in both cases, I mean, they're just kind of a part of a reflection of part of reflection of like what good coaching can look like. What do you think are some good soft skill or power skill? of.
good coaches, whether if it's a sports coach or whether it's a medical coach or whether it's a talent coach in the workspace. What do you think are some key qualities of excellent coaches?
Alex (27:08)
Yeah, I think often when we think about coaching and we think about soft skills, often we just kind of assume that people are innately good at coaching or they've innately got good communication or soft skills. And that's definitely not true. I think soft skills can a hundred percent be not only learned, but they can be mastered with sufficient practice and understanding. And for things like coaching, and I'll kind of include leadership here because leaders are coaches, whether it's...
on mass to a whole organization or whether it's one -to -one to their direct reports. It's really important firstly to actually understand that. And that's my number one soft skill, which is you need to know that being able to learn and meta learning and understanding how we learn is probably the most important soft skill that you can figure out to begin with. Because if you understand that, you know, we're not just born smart, we're not born with knowledge or
a topic isn't too difficult or you're not stupid if you can't figure something out. And there's a process around how you can learn any skill quite quickly. Then you can learn pretty much anything else and any other soft skill or technical skill, you know, within your capabilities and timeframe. So that, that I think is number one, as a coach, you can always learn and you can always get better. And then I think the second one is empathy. And that's something that I learned when I was practicing as a doctor and as a surgeon.
that we need to be able to put ourselves into the position of the person that we are coaching or that we are offering feedback to or just communicating with in general. And if we can do that and we can really think about how we would want to feel if we were receiving some coaching on something that we're trying to improve, then that just allows us to much better tailor the information that we're giving. And I think certainly when we're talking about leadership and coaching people at scale,
leading empathetically and leading with trust and, you know, not being afraid to tell people that you as a leader are not sure the best course of action, but you're kind of open to hearing what other people's viewpoints are is, is tremendously empowering. And I think that the final kind of, you know, coaching soft skill that I will touch on it. And there are lots and lots that I could kind of go through, but these are sort of my top three.
I think the last one really is just being able to manage your own emotions and knowing when to offer information and thoughts and when to actually just actively listen and allow space and time to breathe in a coaching session. Because we can all tell people what we think they should do, but that's not necessarily the thing that people need to hear at a particular moment to get them to improve. And I think just allowing that space and allowing
that kind of understanding is so, so powerful, you know, if you're coaching anybody. And again, I think that's where coaches can really, you know, benefit from not just technology, but from understanding how people learn and how they themselves learn and how to manage your own emotions.
Jiani (30:18)
beautiful. I think that's managing our own emotions and being able to empathize with others really takes a lot of practice and training. And when we are kind of, there were some like, that's where that's like the technology can kind of come back to the conversation is.
I was talking with another guest and he said VR would be actually the most ideal technologies to help people develop the ability to empathize because a lot of times...
we go through life and it's just so it's a default mode is to go through life through our own kind of framework our own perceptions our own body and our own experience and when he had this experience where he took a perspective of an eagle and then the birds kind of fly around among the mountains and the forest and the water and all of a sudden he feels like I'm a bird like I'm like flying
like the frame of reference immediately shifted. What do you think of the ability for virtual reality in terms of developing deep, sustainable empathy for different humans or different animals? What do you think is the potentials there?
Alex (31:58)
Yeah, I think when we talk about empathy and obviously, I had a lot of training on this when I was working as a doctor, as a surgeon, I think empathy specifically is a really interesting one because a lot of the time people get it wrong. And I think empathy at its heart is all around perspective and understanding where your perspective sits and your own possible inherent biases and really doing some inward looking and understanding yourself a little bit before then trying to put yourself.
into the shoes of somebody else that you are communicating with. And I think, you know, virtual reality, we use virtual reality at Verti. We use lots of other mediums as well. It's really interesting. And I think from an immersive learning point of view, it's got lots and lots of fantastic potential. And I can see the benefit of sort of switching roles with somebody in that kind of virtual environment. However, I think the one thing that,
you know, it's probably left out of that is actually understanding people's motives and just speaking with people to get their perspective and empathize with them. So for example, if you're looking to build empathy with somebody, sure, you can go into like a VR environment, but that's almost like just skipping the very easy option of just asking somebody some open questions, getting to understand them, getting to know them.
actually again, just spending time with them in a work environment. And then, you know, if you do that correctly and you communicate in a way that allows them to safely kind of share their experiences, their concerns, then I think you will just naturally understand people better. And that really is what empathy is. It's about thinking, okay, I can see that person's point of view. I understand their background. I understand the scenario that they're going through at the moment.
And I can understand why that's a problem and what they're facing. And I think if you can get to that in any conversation, whether it's a sales conversation, whether it's a coaching conversation and HR conversation, me breaking bad news to a patient, it's, you know, you're going to get a lot better reaction and outcome to whatever that conversation might be. And I think that that's where I would always start, which is just making sure that you.
You fact find, you get to know people, you spend time with people before you jump into any of these kind of training scenarios.
Jiani (34:28)
I appreciate that. I think a lot of times you bring a really great point. A lot of times when we think about empathy, it's immediately jumping into whether I can or cannot look through the situation from the other person's perspective. And one step that usually we kind of easily forget is actually before we go into the other person's perspective, like you mentioned, we need to like sit in our own perspective and do deep reflection and identity.
what some potential biases that we have because after all we are the living and breathing body on our own kind of reference so it will be much more impactful if we first identify kind of the scope of the limitations and strengths of our own perspective before we jump into the others even though we really think we can empathize with the other persons but we've never lived fully within the other person's perspective so there must be a lot of
of things that we're missing. So I appreciate that perspective. And what role in that kind of empathy or learning about learning, emotional management, what do you think the role childlike wonder play in that whole process, especially as it relates to performance and coaching? Do you think it's even a relevant topic?
Alex (35:54)
For sure. And I think, you know, anyone who's heard me kind of speak or talk about anything like this before knows that I'm a massive fan of, Carol Dweck's book, growth mindset. And I'm also, a huge fan of, of Zen mind, beginner's mind that we should approach everything from the perspective of a child. And, and I think just, you know, stepping back, if we think about, you know, if anyone listening, or you yourself think about the last time you really struggled with something. So you encountered a problem, whether that was.
You were trying to learn something; you were trying to understand something new. It might be AI for a lot of people at the moment, but often, you know, as adults, as adult learners, we get frustrated. We don't have enough time. We get fed up. We, we, we label something that it's hard or that we're stupid or that we're too old or that we're too young to actually learn something effectively. But actually if you approach something in a, in a humble way with the inquisitive nature of a child and you think about actually.
understanding and figuring out that in a, in a fun way. And you know, that you're able to do that, then you're going to be able to break down most problems and get to a resolution or solution, in, in a really quick timeframe. And that's something that I'm super passionate about. I think so many people kind of limit their own performance because they think, you know, I'm not smart enough to do this, or I can't do this for whatever reason. And then they also secondarily think, you know, I just don't have enough time.
I'm doing all these other things. I'm an adult. I've got responsibilities. I can't prioritize whatever it is I'm looking to learn, whether it's my job, whether it's, you know, playing a musical instrument, whether it's going to the gym and then they just never do it. And I think that that's such a sad thing. And yeah, I mean, I think if you can make whatever you're doing fun and engaging, you're much more likely to then, you know, get the most out of it and adopt it from a learning point of view.
That's something that I've been hugely passionate about. So for anyone who's kind of seen any of my companies that I build, they're always very gamified. So with Verti, it's super easy because actually communicating with an avatar and trying to hit learning objectives or role play objectives within a conversation itself is pretty fun. So, you know, not too dissimilar from like a, a murder mystery or something like that. We are trying to find that information from somebody.
when you're communicating in a role play with an avatar, that's part of the fun is trying to build rapport, figure out what their current issues are. If it's a sales conversation, do they have budget? Is there a need for my solution? How can I emphasize their pain points? How can I then make that sound like it's immediately relevant in order to advance the conversation? And...
I think with other platforms, like Shecan, which has got a sort of a knowledge assistant, lots of micro learning, just that kind of fun playfulness of learning where it's not a sort of a boring learning management system where it's compliance training and you just got to click through something like I used to have to do in the NHS makes it so much better and so much more impactful.
Jiani (39:06)
I have so much to say about the current learning management system across industry, whether it's industry or higher ed or you name it. It's very, it treats learning as this knowledge transfer and everything is about transferring knowledge and information, but it's not.
Alex (39:13)
Hahaha.
Jiani (39:37)
That could be a different topic.
So when we are using virtual realities and AI -powered avatars to facilitate this sort of learning, especially one -on -one coaching, will there any kind of be some potential challenges?
because technologies are always developing very fast. So, so far what we have is the virtual reality AI and then in the future, the future is already here, like web three and brand machine interactions. How do you see kind of the landscape of AI powered avatar one -on -one coaching can potentially benefit or evolve?
facing those kind of fastly developed technologies and what kind of challenges and risks or guardrails that we need to put together.
Alex (40:40)
Yeah, I think, I think it's a, it's a super interesting question. And I think because of sort of the explosion of AI tools like chat GPT and open AI and the kind of battle across kind of Google, Microsoft, open AI and, and, you know, independent LML providers, there's been a huge kind of, I guess, direct to consumer adoption of eight AI tools and people seeing the benefit of them, you know, for their own productivity and optimizing their own lives. And there's a,
Very interesting report published quite recently by Microsoft and LinkedIn that surveyed around 31 ,000 knowledge workers looking at how kind of AI has been adopted into the workplace. And super interestingly, around 60 % of people were utilizing AI already. And of those around 40 % were actually bringing in and utilizing their own AI tools that they had personally paid for.
were their companies had not integrated AI tools already. So I think from the kind of employee, the personal, the consumer, whatever you want to call it level, lots of people completely innately understand the benefits of AI and their jobs, even if they have not mastered every single component of AI yet. And then there's this little lag where organizations, not all organizations, but certainly some are a little bit slow moving, a little bit apprehensive. And often that's because of quite simple things like,
fear around security and data, fear around how an AI solution is gonna be rolled out and actually adopted by the workforce, fear of cost potentially, as well as fear that if they integrate an AI tool, is it actually gonna impact their business and give them return on investment? And I think we're seeing lots more case studies where different industries were adopting AI around key specific.
you know, needs of a business, whether it is trying to reduce the time it takes to create documents in a law firm, whether it is time of creating training materials for L and D professionals, whether it is just providing people with kind of one -to -one coaching and improving sales and actually looking at real world impact after the adoption of these tools. I think we're getting more and more of those coming through. So my kind of thing with all of these,
these tools at the moment is, you know, people know about them. They, they are coming in, you know, even two or three years time, the AI landscape is going to look scarily different. I think the models are going to be much more advanced than they are even now. And if people are not upskilling themselves in AI, both on a personal level, but also if you're a business owner, team manager across your entire company, you are going to fall behind and you're going to be displaced.
by those people who are adopting them as quickly as possible.
Jiani (43:35)
And how would AI, so currently the virtual avatar are powered by AI. What are some strengths that you've observed and what's some potential rooms for improvement and will the future development of AI actually help enhance the virtual coach that we're going to have and would that potentially...
expedite our skill development, our ability to empathize and our ability to learn how to learn what's kind of the state of art per se, like in this space, AI -powered avatars.
Alex (44:18)
Yeah, it's funny because basically at Verti, three of the things that we really kind of focused on were how can we most accurately recreate a conversation as near to fidelity as possible, as near to real life as possible. And one of those three things was really getting the actual voice. So getting the voice that's generated by the AI to not sound like a robot, to sound like a real person.
and to trick people's brains. And even over the last 18 months, we've seen lots of advances in text to speech algorithms. So now, you know, OpenAI released their whisper model, which itself is fantastic. There's lots of other great models out there. I can, you know, just about still tell that it's an AI voice, but because I work with them all the time, but I think most people actually can't with some of the new ones. And then I think the secondary bit for that is the actual...
time it takes to interact with an AI character. So if you say something, your response goes off to the AI before it then replies with its own AI voice. And with a real conversation like we're having now, I will say something you'll immediately interpret it and respond back. Whereas there is still a little bit of latency with some of both the text to speech models and just the language models themselves, which means occasionally there can be a delay.
particularly if some of these services are at peak capacity. So that's another big area that we have sort of focused on. That's number two. And then the third and final one is simply the creation and the creation time for making these advanced role plays and scenario -based learning exercises. Because when I worked in the NHS and I did something called Advanced Trauma and Life Support where we had to create scenarios or when I would...
construct sales scenarios for coaching my sales team, it would take me a long time even to create kind of a branch scenario. So I'd have to figure out my learning objectives, write in all the text, map that out. And it would just take ages and certainly doing a free form conversation is almost impossible unless you've got a long period of time in a large team. With some of the AI tools as I alluded to earlier in our conversation,
you can actually just kind of give it a little bit of information, press a button, and then that entire freeform conversation is generated. So those are kind of the three roadblocks, the actual content and sound, the latency, and then the actual creation of the scenarios. And over the last 18 months, certainly at Verti, we've pretty much solved for most of those, and it's gonna only get better and better over the next few months and years. So I think that's really, really exciting. And I think we are on the way.
to completely recreating and making it believable that you're communicating with a real person.
Jiani (47:15)
I love that. I like how you kind of like focus on the three one. And I wanted to like dig a little bit deeper on the first one. Like you said, people are, most people can't hear the difference between AI voice and human voice. And you have obviously worked with that. What's, how can we, can you coach us? How can we differentiate as, as of the technology now, how can we differentiate the AI voice versus the human voice?
Alex (47:46)
Yeah, so I think there's a bunch of ways and I think the easiest way to check this out is just to go in and look at as many text to speech tools as possible. So I mentioned OpenAI's whisper algorithm. You can hop on their website and check that out. The other one that's very realistic is 11 Labs that a lot of people might've used. And then you've got things like Amazon Polly, Microsoft's voice services from those kind of big cloud service providers.
And then you've got lots of sort of smaller independents who've started things out like Murph .ai is another really good voice replicator. But I think when you actually listen to some of those compared to a human conversation, there's a couple of things. So the pronunciation of words, so specific words is one of them. So if you've got a particularly technical word, the intonation and pronunciation of that might be off compared to a real human. The other important one is then just emotion.
So if you're having a high stakes conversation where someone's getting angry or they're getting sad, often it's quite difficult for some of these speech models to actually simulate that. And you can hear that it just doesn't sound quite right. And then the other one is really just the kind of, I guess, sort of tone and sound of the voice. So if you think back to, you know, the worst maybe like 1990s or 2000s, you know, kind of...
voice recording program that you've used. They sound quite robotic. They sound like robots. They're just pronouncing a word and then another word and there's no connection. And that's what a lot of the older models sound like, whereas the new ones have that cadence and are able to kind of clone real human voices much more quickly.
Jiani (49:31)
I like that. Yeah, because maybe if we kind of see that probably a regular kind of interval or the tone, it's kind of repetitive and versus in a human it's like and it frustrates with our emotions and it's unpredictable in a little bit. I see less predictable, less regular. That's very helpful because that will help our audience to develop a little bit like AI literacy in terms of like sound. And that's very important.
Alex (49:43)
Exactly.
Jiani (50:01)
And I would also, so out of the three, so it's the kind of the voice and then the latency and then the scenarios. I wanted to kind of jump into the scenario one. When we use AI to power the kind of open kind of conversations, when we rely, is there a situation where if we rely too much, too heavily on AI to generate.
all sorts of conversations, they may hallucinate or they may go off paths and a potential misalignment with the learning outcome may take place and if so, how do we keep that under control or be more out -controden.
Alex (50:50)
Yeah, so I think a lot of the, for anyone who's used services like ChatGPT, you are always gonna be concerned about things like inaccuracies or as you correctly say, hallucinations, or it just making something up based on the instructions that you have given it when you're prompting an AI tool. The quickest way around that is kind of twofold. So firstly, I would say that with a lot of the newer large language models,
you can basically do what's called kind of train them on your own data. So whether that's connecting up your own internal documentation, whether it's connecting it up to your systems or just training it on the responses to conversations within your organization over time, you can actually optimize that accuracy quite quickly to make sure that the large language model is only talking from validated sources and is not giving out inaccurate information.
I think that there's always a concern that that will kind of come through. And so then the second point is you always need to be kind of monitoring your conversations for inaccuracies. And I think when the learners are actually interacting with AIs, obviously they know that they're interacting with an AI, if they're speaking with a chat bot or with a virtual human. And we kind of encourage people to feed back in real time. So you've probably seen on chat GBT, the little thumbs up or thumbs down button.
We very much encourage everyone to kind of score and rate the conversation. And then that is fed back into the system. Our engineering team can then improve things as well as the actual administrators of an organization using the system can see whether something is accurate or is inaccurate. So we're super, super kind of transparent about that. And I think the, you know, the last piece there is just ensuring that.
whatever you are training for or whatever you're creating with AI tools that you're prompting accurately. So if you just give a basic, you know, one line prompt to any AI tool like, you know, write me a blog post, it could potentially, you know, hallucinate and make that up. If you're very specific with your prompt and your instructions and you give it a resource and you upload a document, you're giving it a much more narrow context window for it to actually produce that information from, therefore increasing its accuracy.
Jiani (53:10)
I love that. I just love how here you speak because every time you speak, it's very so structured and so easy to understand. So good. So the next question would be with the kind of the power of Verdi and then the AI avatar, can you share with us some like impact stories with some sort of organizations that...
you know, with this like virtual scalable one -on -one AI driven, AI avatar driven coaching, people are able to transform whether skills or perceptions or yeah, ability, knowledge.
Alex (53:57)
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I think, I mean, we've got lots and lots of case studies on the Verti website. One of our biggest customers is Amazon where we do lots of what's called middle manager training. So lots of leadership training, lots of performance feedback and things like that. And, you know, previously that type of training with either sort of in -person role -play or doing it kind of via e -learning was either ineffective or was just very time consuming and.
you know, very sort of not scalable and pretty expensive for folks. So when you digitize anything like this, you're pretty much automatically reducing the cost and you're reducing the time it takes to deliver training. So for things like onboarding, where you're trying to, you know, upskill people in elements of your, maybe it's your company culture, or whether it's how you do certain things or how you communicate within that company, we can reduce.
the time it takes to onboard people and get them to, you know, their maximum performance or ramped if they're a sales professional, but by about 40%, which is a significant saving. And, you know, this type of technology, because it is so much more engaging than just a PowerPoint presentation or just a 2D video or, you know, even just some narrated audio, it's really kind of making people feel that they are looked after and,
that that organization is going to get the best out of that people. And one of the reasons that's important is because within that first kind of, you know, 30 to 90 days, there was a big study done by Gallup, which basically showed that that's probably the peak time where people will actually quit or just completely zone out from an organization. So that new hire period, you've only really got one shot at it to make a good impression and, and educate people because if you give them a bad experience,
then that's going to stay with them until they leave your organization. So yeah, I think those are sort of two of my favorite ones, that kind of upskilling of middle level managers, making them feel more confident and reducing training time or just reducing and improving onboarding time as well.
Jiani (56:07)
I love that. And is there any particular thought leaders that you follow that you would recommend our audience to kind of continuously study after this podcast?
Alex (56:18)
Yeah. So I think as anyone listening to probably gather, I'm a huge fan of scenario based learning role plays, you know, learning by doing whatever you want to call it. And I think someone who, you know, I've got her book on my bookshelf kind of behind me. it's Christie Tucker, who I'd recommend kind of following on LinkedIn. she's probably the voice in the L and D community around scenario based learning. and, and she always and consistently posts, you know, sensible information around how you can, really kind of upskill your people in the most effective way possible.
Jiani (56:48)
I love it. So let's kind of do a recap of what we've talked about and then we'll move into the magic part of the conversation. So, so far we've talked about Dr. Alex background and how he founded Virti and what's, you know, how Virti leverages AI powered avatar to help people upscale through one -on -one embodied or super experienced way of upscale and develop.
people's ability to not only think, do and practice, but also learn about how to learn and how to develop more empathy among each other and with the team. And we also talked about how the what
a good coach could look like. There's three characters that you can kind of dial back to kind of review that. And we also talked about how we use potential AI avatars to help people develop empathy. And there's like three different important things when we develop empathies. And we also talked about the future of AI powered avatars and how that can potentially benefit or with certain management with technologies like virtual reality, gen AI, and even web 3D.
and brand machine interactions. And we also talked about the ability for us to kind of catch what is human voice and what is AI voice and what are some rooms for improvement such as the latencies and also the abilities to generate real scenarios without hallucination.
And we also talked about how Verdi is best to help in terms of onboarding and also the abilities for people to develop a particular skill in a much shorter time frame. And now let's move into the magic piece of the conversation. So Alex, what did you enjoy doing when you were around 11 years old? That time just disappeared for you.
Alex (58:58)
Well, great question. I think I've already mentioned it, but I, I was absolutely obsessed with sports. So I loved, you know, team sports. I love getting outside, exercising, but then also slightly in contrast, I'm also a massive and still am a video game nerd. So I love kind of playing. I loved, all the kind of Nintendo and PlayStation titles. And I think that's kind of sort of stuck with me based on those things, either from the sports side or from the video game side around.
you know, just making things fun, overcoming challenges and just, you know, making things as playful as possible.
Jiani (59:33)
I love that. So it's like, you do talk about like GIMP and I think GIMP is this way, they're able to put us in a brand-new situation and resonate with what you said, the beginner's mind. So it's very easy for us to kind of just like extract from our daily surroundings and or situations and put us in a brand-new place so we can exercise that childlike wonder, the beginner's mind and start enjoying a brand-new experience. And I...
I like to watch movies, so that for me is a kind of experience life, different sort of lives through the heroes, the heroine's journey. So that's kind of very similar. Then the second question is, were there any particular challenges that you have to overcome that helped shape who you are as of now, 2024, moving to 2025?
Alex (1:00:27)
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think a lot. you know, I think if, you know, for, for anyone who's kind of set up their own business, they'll know that it's continuous challenge. I think, going through kind of medical training is also super challenging. I mean, I think the one that I would probably touch on was, and this is probably very relevant for a lot of listeners is. I, you know, I trained for around about 11 years, in the UK's NHS and, was in a very kind of privileged position being an orthopedic surgeon.
Jiani (1:00:30)
Hahaha.
Alex (1:00:57)
But then I decided and made this huge decision to actually quit my job and leave and go and pursue something else, which was very, very risky. And I think for a lot of people, particularly my parents who were from quite, you know, non-entrepreneurial, non-business backgrounds, it just didn't make any sense. And it can be very scary, very daunting. and for me, that was, you know, a huge kind of shift and, and one that I, you know, weighed up over a long period of time before finally making the leap. And.
I think the thing that I would say to anybody is if you, and I think just to kind of pretext this, I absolutely loved my role working as a surgeon. I love working in a team. So actually leaving and getting, doing something that's very risky that I'd not really done before was very, very scary. And I think just that process of understanding that, you know, yes, although you are leaving something or moving on to something new, it doesn't have to be terrifying.
nothing is really going to kill you in terms of swapping jobs or changing career path or trying to do something outside your comfort zone. And for me, it was very much a, if I stay here, I'm probably going to have more regret than if I make that jump and try the risky thing. And I think that was probably the big one for me that's probably relevant to a lot of people who might be thinking about either changing jobs or starting something themselves or learning a new skill. It often is quite daunting, but once you're...
You know, there you've been doing it for six months. You, you will look back and think, gosh, like, why didn't I jump sooner?
Jiani (1:02:34)
I like that. Yeah, it's always an adventure and hearing the calling and make the scary decisions. And I like how you're saying, you know, it's not it's more about like, would you regret, you know, and or would you be just open to give it a try and complete all the risks and how you are able to tolerate and manage those risks and then let the
heart and mind guide you. The way that we talk about it feels like it's so easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of, but I bet like in the moment where you really have to make that decision, it must be so hard. So I appreciate you for sharing that with us.
And as we conclude this conversation, what do you think overall is your magic? And our magic evolve as we evolve, so the magic that you have as of now.
Alex (1:03:40)
For sure. So I think it's a good one to wrap up on and kind of reflects back on the conversations. I think for me, it's always been just my ability to learn things quickly. So whatever it is I'm trying to do or trying to figure out, I always look at things and think this is if this is physically possible, if I know that this is not kind of outside the laws of physics or impossibility, I'm sure I can find a way to kind of overcome it. And I've got a process of how I will actually learn things. If
I'm not quite there yet. So I think that for me is my kind of big kind of, I guess, magic, which I kind of utilize all the time.
Jiani (1:04:19)
I love that learning how to learn. And I think that's the kind of the foundation of how we evolve is to kind of learn quickly learn. That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Alex for showing up here in our show and sharing your experiences, perspectives, adventures and magic with us. And for anybody who wanted to learn more about Alex and his adventures and ventures,
All the information is in the show note below so we encourage you to get connected and start your own adventure together. Thank you very much Alex.
Alex (1:05:01)
Amazing. Thanks so much.
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