Work-Bench Perspective: AI for Next Gen People Managers

Photo by Aleksi Tappura on Unsplash

The other day I received an email from a CEO within our Work-Bench community:

“Even though we are still tiny, as we evolve our team and employees begin to grow into management roles for their first time, I’ve started to think a lot about management training. As a first time CEO, this is definitely new territory for me as well.”

This is one of the most common painpoints I hear, across the fastest growing VC-backed enterprise startups we work with and the globally distributed Fortune 1000 corporations in our corporate network: managing people is hard.

And yet there are still surprisingly few technology products that have served this people manager and leadership development training space, estimated to hit $13.8B in 2020 (here), which to date still revolves largely around in-person trainings and workshops.

Given the rise of AI across a range of verticals: financial services, life sciences, healthcare, energy, transportation, heavy industry, agriculture, and materials — we have yet to see AI broadly applied to the people manager training space (though there are some early startups tackling this space, as detailed in my slides below).

A few predictions:

• We predict seeing a much-needed shift from in-person manager training to a technology-enabled solution, especially given the rise of millennials as managers.
• The key for successful people manager tools will be collecting data: the more data you have, and the more proprietary it is, the more insights you can generate for people managers.
• Furthermore, whoever is going to be the biggest player in this space will be able to take that data, deliver predictive actionable insights down to the line manager (vs. HR / C-Suite), and combine it with frictionless user experience on the front-end to help you be a more effective manager.

Given this opportunity, we’re excited to follow how the much-needed application of AI to management and training space will support and enable the next generation of people managers.

Are you a startup building in this manager training, employee engagement, and #futureofteams space? We’d love to talk.