Pathlight debuts ‘AI manager’ for enterprise teams

Pathlight, a California-based company providing enterprises with an intelligence platform to analyze and optimize team performance, has announced a generative AI manager to help companies give their employees automated “in-the-moment” feedback and coaching.

The state-of-the-art intelligence solution leverages large language models (LLMs) and performance data points to provide employees with nudges and their managers with timely alerts to drive better outcomes.

It marks the latest application of generative AI to improve team workflows and performance within the enterprise. 

How does Pathlight’s AI manager work?

The AI manager is designed to be a natural extension of the core Pathlight platform. It sits as a conversational chatbox within the Pathlight application and looks at performance metrics — from calls, emails and chats with customers to KPIs, benchmarks and goals — in real time.

Then, as and when the bot notices a performance trend worth addressing, it proactively nudges the employee about the matter in a conversational tone. The employee can then interact with it to figure out what went wrong and what can be done to address it.

For instance, if a customer call didn’t go well, the bot could give a few ideas on what could be done to handle a call like that in the future. It could also give appreciative feedback when the employee’s performance is up to the mark or better.

“We already sit on a massive trove of performance data. With the use of large language models, we can now deliver a more comprehensive — and automated — way of giving employees in-the-moment feedback and coaching,” Alex Kvamme, CEO of Pathlight, told VentureBeat. 

“Our platform is analyzing millions of data points every day,” he added.

Managers can ask for performance reports

Along with automated nudges, the AI manager also features direct question-answering capabilities. This way, employees can directly ask the bot about recent customer conversations or how they are moving towards their individual goals, among other things.

Meanwhile, managers can simply ask how the team is performing and who needs the most attention to direct the manager’s mentoring efforts accordingly.

“By harnessing the power of large language models, AI Manager can handle the analytical side of management, enabling human managers to focus on their most important function — to lead and support their teams. The result is employees get the best of both worlds: an always-available, always-objective AI manager to help them understand how they are doing today, and a human manager with the time and experience to help them achieve their career goals tomorrow,” Kvamme said.

Broader availability in coming months

As of now, the AI manager is only available to employees of select Pathlight customers in closed beta. The company said it will make it more broadly available in the coming months.

Notably, Pathlight is also experimenting with other generative AI use cases to improve the time-consuming workflows of enterprise teams. Kvamme did not share the exact plans to this end but noted the company will provide more details in months to come. 

Just yesterday, Salesforce also announced a plan to streamline workflows for enterprises with the integration of its generative AI assistant and data cloud with Flow.