Emma Strong

January 2024 - TD Magazine

A change in courtreporting methods required a training initiative to upskill employees on the updated process.

Shifting With the Times

“Learning initiatives are like smartphones. They can accomplish great things, but they don’t work for long without a charger.” That’s according to Marie Daniels and Emma Weber, who piloted an artificial intelligence–based chatbot to support learning transfer for a sales manager training program at Bayer, one of the world’s largest and most successful pharmaceutical companies.Daniels, the commercial learning lead for Australia/New Zealand at Bayer, supports a busy sales team. In addition to spending time in the field, the team’s managers must also maintain processes and ensure compliance.In her role, Daniels has always recognized that even with exceptional training sessions and workshops, the managers’ different responsibilities make it challenging to sustain the effort of transferring learning into behavior. That’s why Bayer was working with a supplier, ever–Transfer of Learning, to provide phone-based learning transfer coaching in support of leadership programs across Bayer Australia.Daniels had a strong relationship with Lever CEO and founder Emma Weber. So, when Weber shared her prototype for a coaching chatbot with Daniels in 2017, the latter saw it as an opportunity to incorporate a “charger” into Bayer’s sales manager training and development program. It would serve a similar purpose to the phone-based coaches in the leadership program while staying within budget. With the support of an influential senior leader already in hand, she proposed launching a pilot of the chatbot in a matter of weeks.