ChatGPT for professional growth? Practica introduces AI-powered career coaching and mentoring

Can an AI be your mentor? This is what a startup called Practica believes. The company, which evolved from a marketplace for one-on-one executive coaching, has now launched an AI system built on top of an existing knowledge base developed over years spent with a large group of human coaches. The resulting experience from the AI ​​chatbot works as a personalized workplace mentor and coach that can help professionals improve their skills on a dozen different topics, including management, strategy, sales, personal development, growth, success customers, marketing, data, design, finance, etc. and more.

Originally co-founded in January 2020 by former Thinkful product lead Dave Whittemore (who moved on to Chegg) and former Dropbox chief technical officer Andy Scheff, Practica initially addressed the problem of continuously improving skills over the course of career with a traditional executive coaching market.

“We both became executive coaches,” explains Whittemore. “Andy and I both got into it… I trained the product managers and Andy trained the engineers,” he says.

That same year, the site grew to add a marketplace for more executive coaches and today still offers 250 human coaches with industry-specific expertise. 90% of this activity is B2B, i.e. the sale of Practica services to employers. This business is also now profitable on an operational basis.

However, the founders realized that the pricing was preventing people from accessing its services.

“The average hourly rate was $200 an hour, and the hourly rate varied based on the seniority level of the person receiving the coaching and the coach… If you were coached for the entire year, the average person who does a year Coaching spends about $3.000 a year,” Whittemore said. “That price is the barrier, and that's what brought us to AI-based coaching,” he adds.

The idea was to take what they had learned through one-on-one personal coaching and fuse it with AI technology. Over the years, they had learned what makes coaching relationships effective and this helped them understand what kind of constructs to build around and on top of an LLM. Their knowledge base consists of a large number of publicly available educational materials, ranging from blog posts to lectures, videos, podcasts, books and more, which have been hand-selected and curated into hundreds of skills different on a variety of topics.

Of course, many websites today are blocking AI web crawlers because they don't want to be aggregated into AI chatbot experiences. So we asked if there was a fear that some of these sites where the materials were found would do the same. But unlike ChatGPT or other AI-powered chatbots, Practica says its goal is to nudge its users towards the sources where the content comes from, not just provide answers. This results in increased traffic for the publisher or content provider indexing and referencing.

That said, the company has yet to enter into any formal licensing agreements with its educational source providers, some of which could be as simple as a helpful blog post from an engineer or someone writing about how they overcame challenges as a manager .

Furthermore, in terms of the AI ​​models under the hood, the goal is to be vendor-agnostic and focus only on the application layer, which means that Practica is not directly competing with companies like OpenAI or Google, but rather in able to work with them.

To educate its professional users, the company uses a technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to match the best learning resources for the situation a particular student is in, the team tells TechCrunch. The AI ​​coach explains what's in the retrieved sources and why they are useful, just like a human coach would. He cites sources and encourages the user to read them as “homework”.

Practica's use of third-party content, therefore, is more of a curated search engine, rather than machine learning model training. But AI is doing the coaching.

That part of the AI ​​methodology mixes together a number of coaching tools, including instructions, asking questions about context, identifying current challenges in the student's work to use as teaching material, mapping learning progress against career goals of the student and celebration of victories along the way. Find the appropriate material, organize insights from those materials into a list the user can interact with, and add notes you can reference later.

Additionally, unlike today's generalized AI chatbots, Practica's AI remembers the student's history so it can develop their skills as they continue to use the service.

“You can have generalized system instructions, but it doesn't actually store what it needs to know about you from session to session,” Whittemore says, comparing Practica to general-purpose AI chatbots. “We try to be very intentional about it… we remember how you've developed over time so we can continue to coach really well, the same way a human coach would.”

The system has been in private testing since July this year and is now opening up to individual students for between $10 and $20 per month per user. (An Employers “team” version is also in limited testing.)

At this price point, Practica hopes to make executive coaching more accessible.

“We're optimistic that it will actually expand executive coaching,” Whittmore says. “Our hope is that we can get more people to touch this on the AI ​​coaching level and learn how effective executive coaching is and then move up to the premium product,” she says, referring to human coaching services of the company.

Practica raised $1,5 million in external funding in two rounds in 2021 and 2022, before pivoting to AI-powered coaching. Both rounds were led by Script Capital and involved more than 40 individual angel investors, many of whom were leaders in the industries where the firm focuses its coaching.

from www.mitikotech.com, post ChatGPT for professional growth? Practica introduces AI-powered career coaching and mentoring

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