Don’t tell your favorite grade school teacher, but bots are infinitely more patient instructors that are willing to offer assistance and information for as long and as often as they’re needed.
That’s one reason big-time education advocates such as Bill Gates are so excited by the possibilities of AI, but it has major implications in the workplace, too.
Talla, a Boston-area startup, has created a bot that can do many of the routine tasks normally performed by an HR department, such as distributing surveys, gathering data, and even training employees. Sound far-fetched? Such bots are actually more common than many people might realize: 80 percent of companies currently rely on bot-enabled communication tools like Slack and HipChat.
Sure, bots can assume busywork and enable better interoffice communication, but a bot’s true power lies in its educational capabilities.
For many, this vision of the future might seem like a nightmare in which reliable humans are replaced by annoying chatbots that cause more problems than they solve. However, this pessimism is caught up in antiquated notions of what a bot can be, which are not helped by the chatbots encountered in apps such as Facebook Messenger.
In reality, a well-designed, well-implemented bot won’t replace employees, but it can empower them. Last spring, Georgia Tech hired a teaching assistant named Jill Watson. Jill helped the professor by answering any questions students had outside of class, and the students loved her, even if she was only available online.
There was a reason for that: Jill was actually an advanced chatbot. When students found out at the end of the semester, they were blown away. While an ordinary chatbot won’t necessarily pass the Turing test, this example shows just how far chatbots have come and how useful they can be as teachers.
Here are three ways messaging bots can improve employee training and development.
1. Act like a favorite teacher
Good teachers do more than answer questions. They also know how to ask students the right questions, framing those questions in ways designed to pique curiosity about a subject and rewarding students when they excel. A good bot can do the same.
When employees enter…
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