S3E5 - The Future of Leadership Coaching Through AI With Kirsty Bathgate

What happens when a professional executive coach looks at the leadership development gap and decides to do something about it at scale?

In this episode, Ewan is joined by Kirsty Bathgate, founder of Gearing for Growth and co-founder of Bravyn, an AI-powered coaching platform designed to bring meaningful leadership development to the people who need it most — early and mid-stage leaders who rarely get access to coaching at all.

Kirsty makes a compelling case: 80% of new leaders receive no formal leadership training. 70% of people who leave jobs leave their manager, not their company. And disengaged teams are costing the global economy close to a trillion dollars a year. Bravyn was built to tackle that problem head on.

But this isn't a story about replacing coaches with chatbots. Kirsty is an accredited executive coach of 15 years, and she's built Bravyn to coach — properly coach — using accredited competencies, rigorous ethics standards, and technology that asks the questions rather than hands out the answers.

In this conversation, Ewan and Kirsty cover:

• Why AI coaching done badly is making people worse at thinking for themselves
• How Bravyn personalises every coaching conversation to the individual's goals, role, and employer
• The trust and data privacy considerations that matter to HR leaders
• How organisations can measure real ROI from coaching at scale
• Kirsty's three must-ask questions before adopting any AI coaching tool
• If you're in HR, lead a growing team, or just want to understand where AI fits in the future of leadership — this one is well worth your time.

Connect with Kirsty on LinkedIn or visit bravyn.ai to find out more.

Follow our social channels where we continue these conversations!

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Beyond HR LinkedIn 

Transcript

Ewan (00:07):

Hi, welcome back to Recruitment and Beyond podcast. We're joined today by Kirsty Bathgate, the co-founder of Bravyn, and the founder of Gearing for Growth. Kirsty, great to have you with us.

Kirsty (00:18):

Thanks very much for inviting me on you and looking forward to it

Ewan (00:20):

Forward. I am actually really looking forward to this because I'm quite passionate about ai, but I'm quite passionate about leading and leadership and learning and development and so on, and this crosses over all those aspects. So I'm really interested just to find out a bit about Bravyn and a bit about gearing for growth and how they've combined and where we are today. So I guess mean a big part of this is that AI is taking over every industry and HR and coaching is no different. So do you reckon that we're right at the start of this progression in terms of AI infiltrating and helping and supporting HR and coaching?

Kirsty (00:58):

Yeah, I think we're probably in the early stages of it being adopted and I think people are starting to get more comfortable with it and understanding where it can be useful. But yeah, I would say we're probably in the early stages of it at the moment.

Ewan (01:14):

Do you think, so a big part of what you've done in the past, obviously gearing for growth and then taking this on to Bravyn, has that been a natural progression for you and is that where you saw the market going and you thought, you know what, there's a real opportunity here to broaden out the opportunities for learning and leadership development?

Kirsty (01:32):

Well actually we started doing this before generative AI certainly came about. So we run a program through gearing for growth for scaling companies and they're early leaders and managers in those businesses. And it really struck me, I love working on that program so enthusiastic and it has such an impact getting that early development and the impact that coaching at that stage in your career is significant. And it also struck me that when I work in human coaching with senior leaders, often you spend a fair bit of time almost like peeling back the layers of the onion to find out what's brought them to where they are today.

(02:22):

And it struck me that when we were working with these leaders much earlier in their leadership journeys, it's not that they won't still benefit from executive coaching as senior people, but you'll probably be able to work on different things because the shape of their journey will be slightly different, have learned about themselves and leadership and things much earlier. So I started to think about how could we scale that and bring coaching out to people much earlier in their leadership and management journey. And so five years ago now roughly, I get a bit lost with time we started developing a programmatic, almost like an expert learning system, and this was before generative AI and it became a bit like spaghetti Junction. I was trying to anticipate every which way a coaching conversation could go. And then we layered on that AI in the form of NLP machine learning so that we could start to spot behavioral patterns and different insights for people that were using this programmatic version. And so that's when we started this journey and at that point we were doing it as given for growth and then we realized the size of the problem globally in terms of some statistics state that 80 T percent of new leaders do not get any leadership training. The stats vary from 60 to 82%. Only 18% of employees want to become managers now,

(04:07):

And there is something like 23% more profit from teams who are engaged and led well. And something like 70% of people who leave jobs leave their manager, not their company. So when you look at that rounded piece of stats, you start to think about how big the problem is. And I think it was Gallup that in their last state of the workplace report said that lack of productivity was costing the global economy 0.9 trillion. So we were already starting to think about how do we scale early leadership. Then as we were doing more investigation and research, we found out how big the problem was. And so we spun breathing out of gearing for growth. So to allow it to be able to become a company in its own right and to be able to scale globally. So then generative AI came along and instead of being somebody who found generative AI and then tried to find a use case, we actually already had a really good use case for it. We just didn't have it. And it took us a wee while to work out what is this generative AI and how does it work and is it the plumbing and

(05:18):

How's the infrastructure layer going to work and all of that.

(05:21):

And

(05:21):

So we have now developed a full platform. So we still use traditional AI techniques as well. So we've got a blend of core tech stack, traditional machine learning and NLP and other techniques that we use and generative ai. And so we've built that whole platform to enable us to make sure Bravyn safe, make sure that IT coaches and to allow us to scale globally

Ewan (05:55):

I suppose as part, I mean coaching has always been very personal, it's always been very engaging, the personal engagement, that sort of side of things. So I suppose how do you see this technology complimenting that as well as supporting people on their leadership journey? Because I guess there's a bit of trust element here and there's the human element to coaching that's always been there. Do you see it complimenting it? Is that how it'll work together?

Kirsty (06:19):

We're definitely not trying to replace human coaches. I still actually coach myself and still absolutely love it. It's my happy place. I think it can be used in a blended and a standalone way. So in one space it can be used as a blended solution between coaching sessions and to offer coaching to everybody on leadership programs. And it's accessible, it's available all the time. And it can also be used as a standalone because what we're actually doing is filling a gap that exists. So I think as a standalone coach for those early in their leadership journeys, it works really well. But I do think it's a blended approach and we're definitely not trying to replace human coaches for those really in depth, highly nuanced coaching development work that we do with senior leaders.

Ewan (07:17):

Absolutely. I totally understand that there's no kind of replacement here. It's not trying to replace, it's there to combine I suppose both elements of that. But is there a trust issue with this in terms of people just believe in what they're hearing from the app? Is there an issue there or do you see the app being able to overtake that?

Kirsty (07:37):

Well, I think that's a really interesting question because we have, one of the hardest things to do is train Bravyn to properly coach and does properly coach, but what other LLMs do, so if somebody, and we are seeing youngsters coming out early in their career and engaging with some of the LLMs directly for advice and coaching in inverter commas, and what that does is it gives them a series of answers and it also is quite sycophant and tells them how wonderful they are, whether they're or they aren't. So it does nothing to embed behavior change. And I think that is going to be challenging because it's going to challenge people's ability to think analytically, to think critically, to have real self-awareness, which is what coaching is all about. So from that perspective, Bravyn does not tell you what to do. Bravyn coaches you and asks you questions to think about how you might tackle different situations differently to bring out your strengths. So in terms of trust, you are really trusting yourself and your trusting a process.

Ewan (08:46):

Yes. Okay. And that's a really important point to get over here because I think a lot of people, as you touched on there, really take it as sometimes a feta complete what they get back from chat GBT or whatever it is. Okay, that's the answer. And actually this is really interesting. It's important that people understand this is not giving you the answer, it's coaching you to find the answer yourself, isn't it? And the same way you would do coaching, but I think the minute somebody here, here's ai, they assume I'll get the answer, which is not the point is it?

Kirsty (09:14):

Absolutely. And we found that in some of our pilots, and interestingly we do human onboarding for Bravyn. So we run either online or in person workshops with companies as they onboard onto Bravyn. And one of the things that we've learned is to share with people very early, if they are, like you say a chat GT user, they are going to be frustrated by Bravyn initially because it is not going to give them the answers and it is not going to tell them what they want to hear. It's going to challenge their thinking. And the whole point of being coached is, and growth is you need to be a little bit uncomfortable and lean into that because that's a sign that you're growing,

(09:54):

Whereas a pat in the back is easy to get but leaning into it. And we've actually had a really interesting case study where one of our users and one of our customers has set was quite vocal about, I want an answer, I want an answer, asked me too many questions when we did the onboarding and we worked with her on it and then she's come back as a complete convert and she says it's completely changed her mindset. It's completely changed how she thinks about approaching meetings with her team and senior development meetings. And like she said in one of our quotes, she was actually saying, I was going into a meeting thinking, what would Broin be asking me right now?

Ewan (10:32):

That's perfect. That's exactly where you want it to be. Oh, that's brilliant. So I guess mean part of that is trusting, but I think the other element to this is that if you're using an ai it, it's looking for the best solution, but it's not always relevant to yourself. So how is Bravyn doing that, personalizing this sort of coaching? Because coaching is all, people have different reasons for going to coaching. So how does Bravyn get over that?

Kirsty (10:57):

Well, that's really interesting as well. So we have a personal profile for everybody that joins the app. You go through a process which is very going through a human process. You do coaching, contracting, we explain to you what to expect from it. We explain to the nature of the confidentiality, how Bravyn will work. And then we gather a personal profile which tells us lots of information about whether you've been coached before, the type of training you've had, your role, how long you've been a manager, how many people report to you, what your communication style is, what your key challenges are, what your key ambitions are. And we store that and use that. Brave even uses that and refers to that in each of its coaching conversations.

(11:45):

And we also get users to set goals and they can be in line with company goals or personal goals that people want to work on or a combination of both. And Bravyn also refers to your goals and any coaching sessions that you have as well as having regular goal check-ins with you. And then the other thing that we can do is we can teach Bravyn about any organization's values, leadership philosophy, policies, approach to leadership. We can use their own leadership programs if they want us to. And so we can build all that into Bravyn as well. And it refers to it when it needs to because the conversation lends itself to that. So it personalizes it to your profile, to your environment and the company that you work within and to your own goals. And then Bravyn learns about you the more that you use it. So it then starts to provide you with insights of things like repeating challenges, successes you might not be identifying behaviors that you've changed, blockers that you might have that you might not see yourself. So it holds up a bit of a mirror to you. The more that you use it, the more insights that it can give you about yourself.

Ewan (13:03):

And this is just an extension of that question really, but helping HR teams and leadership teams to really buy into this, to take this on, how do you build that trust for them? I guess it's that helping them to understand, look, this is a useful kit, it's not a shiny tool. This could be a useful tool. How do you help the leadership teams and the HR teams that you work with to understand the value of technology I guess in this space?

Kirsty (13:33):

So I think we've learned quite a lot about that as well. And we have a process where we make sure that we, first of all your security and IT due diligence with anybody we're going to work with, we then give the HR teams or the leadership teams demos and access to test it out for themselves and we run pilots with them as we onboard them so that they get to see the value of it. And it is really interesting because we've got one pilot customer that we've just speaking to last night who was telling me that the significant difference they can see in how their team is working, having used Bravyn and the mindset shift that it's given them, which is amazing to hear.

Ewan (14:20):

And

Kirsty (14:21):

Equally, I've had an HR director say to me, this must be really hard. I don't really want to like this, but I do. So we're in that sort of change curve of a bit of denial in some places and a bit of resistance in other places. But I think the fact that we've built it to the global standard of ethics, we've used accredited competencies. I'm a professional accredited executive coach, I would not put something into the market that in any way was not safe and secure and didn't work to those standards. So I think that gives assurance that I've been doing that for 15 years and kept that level of accreditation. I think the fact that we speak to people about not trying to replace human coaches and we genuinely mean that, and I still coach. So I think that all helps to build trust that it's not just some random bit of tech they're buying online and the fact that we work with 'em really specifically to think, we find out what are their biggest challenges, where's their pain points? Is it that they're leading a big change project? Is it that they've got a cohort of new managers coming up and being promoted, but they can't afford to give them coaching, but they would love to because they know the benefit it brings to the execs.

(15:36):

So we get to know the organization as people well and understand where they're going to get the biggest win from Bravyn in the first place. We work with 'EM on that. We've even built specific models for people because they've got a specific challenge and we want to help Bravyn to help them in a different way. So we work very much in partnerships with the organizations. It's not a quick fix, here's a bit of tech, try it out. It's very much a part the same way as I would if I was designing a program or going in to work with a team. We'd do all of that work and then we just deliver it via Bravyn.

Ewan (16:15):

Yeah, and again, sorry, just an extension on that because it's just quite interesting the mindset of people adopting this. For me, it's the same if I'm getting coaching from yourself or whoever you can see face-to face and I'm going to take that on, but you have to be in that one place at that time, whereas this is going to be helping people. And I suppose it's just trying to, part of this and part of relationships, we want to know about using technology in a different way to get those leadership opportunities or that leadership support. So have you had much feedback from people who have been able to adopt that in their day-to-day work and the users, not the HR directors and so on, but the people who are actually using it to say, I am taking this on. I actually quite enjoy using this. It is a different approach, but I trust in what I'm getting back.

Kirsty (17:05):

Yeah, the lowest percentage of recommendation for any of our users when we ask them if they would recommend it to a friend or colleague is 92%. Okay. And we've had lots of really insightful feedback which has helped us to improve Bravyn up to date and we're

(17:29):

A hundred percent grateful for everybody that's helped us on that journey. We see four ways for people to users to really engage with Bravyn, and we've learned as much of this from the users. One is in the moment, so when people want to choose to respond rather than React or a situation that they've not come across before is presented to them and they want to sound it out, they can take five, 10 minutes, jump on Bravyn, sound out the challenge. There is a particular model in Bravyn to help them to do that. It takes minutes. They can do it by text, so they can do it sitting on at their desk and on their phone on the app. And the reason we've kept it on the phone at the moment is people have told us they prefer it being on their phone because they trust it more and they trust that it's private.

(18:17):

And actually that's quite significant. I'll come back to that. So they use it to sound it a challenge in the moment and Bravyn records that for them. So if they have that challenge again, they can go back and just look at what they did last time, if they don't want to go through a whole conversation again and it will tell them the actions that they were going to do and what they've done and what they've not done. The second way is the goals. So you can set your personal goals and professional goals and Bravyn, Annette will do a regular check-in with you and it will integrate those check-ins into your calendar so that you've got your coaching set up weekly or fortnightly, whichever you prefer. The third way you can use it is to prepare in advance for things like a one-to-one, a difficult conversation, a meeting with a client or a meeting with one of your team.

(19:07):

And again, Bravyn will help you to schedule time in your calendar to actually do the preparation and then it will coach you through that scenario in terms of depending what you want the outcome to be. And then the fourth way that you can use Bravyn is to role play, to actually role play a scenario. So when you're prepping for a meeting or an event, it's coaching you. If you actually want to role play a scenario with it, Bravyn will role play with you and you can do that by voice or by text. So you could be sitting, texting, typing, or you could take it for a walk and it drowns out the background noise so you can take it for a walk and chat it and have a conversation with it.

Ewan (19:50):

Brilliant. I guess part of that is having people who are bought into that process elements there where you have to commit to this process, but it's the same as you would commit to any kind of leadership coaching. It's you saying, look, I want to develop, I want to grow these small moments. I'm preparing for a meeting, I'm preparing for a difficult conversation. You have to be in that mindset. And I suppose there's an element of whether it's HR teams or it's your own team, just ensuring you're working with the people who are taking the app on to say, look, this is the process, this is how you become a better leader. It's not a one and done. Here's your coaching session and you're off. Or I've read Bravyn once or I've listened to Bravyn once I'm off.

Kirsty (20:28):

Yeah, exactly. And Bravyn doesn't push any information. It entirely pulls you through your coaching. It doesn't push any information at you. And the other thing about that very good point that you make about people having to buy into it is with everybody we've worked with, we've said, please don't make this mandatory.

(20:47):

Yeah,

(20:47):

Please make this optional and get volunteers to use it and people that want to step up. Now, not everybody will want to learn in the same way. Not everybody will be comfortable with an ai. Some people are more comfortable with an ai, they don't really speak to people or they can share something they might not want to be as vulnerable about at work. But we absolutely do not want Bravyn to be a mandatory adoption would not work. And we all know impose change is not effective so it wouldn't work and people would trust it less because we've been really particular in how we've built Bravyn so that none of the PI information is on the same tech stack as the conversational and coaching data. One's actually in London and one's in Dublin.

Ewan (21:37):

Okay. So

Kirsty (21:40):

That, because one of the key things when we built that programmatic version and took it out to get tested is people kept saying to us, can anybody see this? Are you sure nobody can see this? So we very deliberately when we built the AI platform built security and data security and how to build trust in users from the start. And also confidentiality is a core part of coaching. So

Ewan (22:07):

The confidentiality part I would imagine is so important because you've got to build that trust. And I guess that leads us slightly on to the return on investment. I guess everybody is under pressure time-wise as well as everything else. And it's just to really understand how people can look at this and whether they use this sort of approach to help their learning development systems at work or whether they're looking to just implement new technology like ai. How do you help people with that ROI? How do you help people to see this is having a real impact? Because again, thinking about trust, if people aren't seen progress, they're just going to stop and they're just going to give up, aren't they?

Kirsty (22:48):

Yeah, absolutely. So some of the ROI in terms of retaining people and increased productivity take longer to measure and we have to do some of those in conjunction with our clients, but we can prove some ROI really quickly. So we provide anonymous, aggregated information on usage types of coaching conversations people are having, types of challenges they're dealing with, types of skills they're developing. So we know at an anonymous aggregated level that users are working. So one of the biggest things people use Bravyn for at the moment is difficult conversations.

(23:31):

They want to prep for a difficult conversation that wouldn't be surprising to anybody, I don't imagine. But things like what are the top skills your people are working on and does that align with what you need them to be developing? So you would find that out really quickly. And the customer portal that we're building means that our customers will have real time live access to all of this. And again, it's on an anonymous aggregated basis. And we do inform users that we share this information upfront so that they know what they're committing to and they can see what the customers, we show them that as well. So we're completely transparent about what information we share with who and when. You can also see, we can measure across the conversations, we can tell you the number of conversations that have reduced anxiety and worry and improve time to action.

Ewan (24:23):

Wow, okay.

Kirsty (24:24):

We can show you the number of conversations where people have worked on developing a new skill. We can show you the number of conversations where somebody is embedding behavior, change the number of conversations, somebody set a goal and is working to it. And the number of conversations where somebody has improved their emotional intelligence because they've been able to take a different perspective and approach to dealing with a colleague or client. And we measure that all constantly for, as I say, an aggregated anonymous level. And so people can see that and that is what their people are working on. I think that's fascinating. Can some ROI from that?

Ewan (25:12):

Yeah, no, that's fascinating to see the changes in terms of well, people changing the behavior because that's one of the key things of this is being able to analyze the change in behavior across your organization. But it's interesting, it takes us on that wee bit just about personalizing your leadership growth across your company. And this, I suppose is a route towards doing that. I think that's the worry sometimes is there can be a generic one size fits all approach that sometimes people bring into organizations, but this is a real fascinating way to be able to make sure that there's a personal growth for each individual member of the team.

Kirsty (25:50):

Absolutely. And by being able to embed a company's values, leadership philosophies, we can embed their own programs and learning and we can coach in between their own program modules so that they embed the learning. And that's why we work so closely with all our customers to set them up to make sure they get something that delivers the outcome that they're looking for. And we're really clear about what that outcome they're looking for is to start with. It's not just a generic QS AI coach off you go see what happens.

Ewan (26:25):

I mean the usual, not the usual. That's unfair. There's a fear aspect to ai, there's a fear aspect to adopting this sort of stuff. Do you come across that a bit? How do you help people understand that you're not trying to take away jobs and so on? It's support, isn't it?

Kirsty (26:42):

Yeah, I think, well there's a couple of things in that we have had some people who just do not want to use AI and that's absolutely fine. Probably, I dunno, maybe about 2% so far. And I think there's, we're learning interesting generational facts, but I think we don't know enough and we haven't got enough data yet to be able to work out if that's how true that is yet. But I think we are very clear on how we use data, how we store data, how we've privately trained our ai. So nobody else is able to use this for training data. We're very clear on how we've taken environmental considerations into play. So our voice, for example, has been built into the phone. So there is nothing going out to the cloud and there is no data transfer with our voice, whereas any other voice solution is in the cloud. So you're sending data all the time. So we've significantly reduced our data both for security, privacy and environmental reasons.

(28:04):

We've

(28:04):

Deliberately built our tech stack using trusted, secure players who are taking environmental consideration seriously. So in terms of being able to mitigate what we know are some concerns for people in terms of data privacy, environmental load and trust and security in terms of what is this actually going to do and how have you trained it,

(28:40):

We can be

(28:41):

Really transparent with all of that. And we have taken all of that into consideration. Some people will not want to use some forms of technology and that's okay. We're not trying to force this on anybody. It's there to support people who want to use it. And then I'm old enough to have been through the last industrial revolution with the internet coming in and building a tourism tech business back in the days. So I remember the adoption rates of that and trust of actually buying online. So somehow I think this is bigger and faster, but having been through such a significant change or nearly such a significant change once, I think it makes you better prepared for thinking about at this time

Ewan (29:27):

And

Kirsty (29:28):

More. I'm enjoying the journey more this time I would say.

Ewan (29:31):

Yeah, it's a bit different, isn't it? I think the speed of change is huge. And I guess one of the things, you've touched on a few there, but one of the fears that might be there is around bias, is around potential bias from coaching and so on. And I guess it's just to understand, and I guess part of this might come down to the fact it's individual coaching, but it'd be interesting just to know people who might have a fear around, there's bias from the answers that are coming through, how you've avoided that or how you counterbalance that

Kirsty (30:00):

Partly in our training, but also brave, it's not telling you to do anything. So we are not pushing anything at you. We are pulling you on a journey that is your journey where you choose your actions and you decide what you're taking from the conversation.

(30:20):

So Bravyness shaped, and I guess, so one of the things that personalizes it and helps it is we have, so we've got really good guardrails and evaluators to make sure it properly coaches. And I've been part of the human evaluation of it since the beginning, but we've also built evaluators based on that guardrails. And depending on your style and what Bravyn picks up from you at a point in time, it can judge whether to be more or less challenging with you as well. So it adapts within a conversation. It's not like, here's Bravyn. This is the only monotone approach you can have. So in that sense, it is not pushing you to do anything, it's pulling you through an experience to learn from yourself, if that helps.

Ewan (31:24):

No, absolutely. And I think that's a really important point. I guess this is about us and the listeners and so on starting to understand how best to use ai. And it's really an important point to get over the Bravyn or any tool you use in terms of coaching, and it's the same as coaching. It pulls the answers from you, so that bias isn't there because it's asking you what you think. It's not telling you what you think. And that's really, I mean, for anybody potentially using any tool, it's something to be aware of and something to think about when you're adopting any of this technology.

Kirsty (31:58):

I guess it's something anybody human has to be aware of as well. All got inherent bias that from our background or upbringing, our experiences in life. So as a human coach, I have to remember to set that aside in any judgment when I'm in a coaching conversation, but I'm still a human, so some of that will infiltrate, I'm sure. Well, I know it does. I reflect on my coaching regularly and I go to coaching supervision. So I work on all of those things. And I think that's an interesting point. I think there's something interesting going on at the moment where people think AI has got to be a hundred percent accurate, but actually the human alternative that they had before was never a hundred percent accurate anyway. The human form of it might have been 80% accurate, the AI is 98% accurate, but they don't want to take that 2% risk. So I'm finding that in the whole, but that's about adoption and change and human behaviors and all of that kind of thing. So yeah, it's fascinating,

Ewan (32:55):

But it is interesting. And I guess that leads us on to just that final question around adoption and how people should find that balance. How do you find that balance between, because obviously as you mentioned, you're still doing one-to-one coaching or face-to-face coaching if you like, and then using tools like AI to support that. So how do we find that balance, I guess is still a requirement for human coaching, still a requirement for human interaction?

Kirsty (33:23):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing that I would think about is to be clear, we're filling a gap where people don't get coaching at the moment. The majority of managers do not get coaching. They might get a very small amount on a management program if they get a management program to be developed to step up. And most of our customers, they already have leadership development, they already understand the benefits of coaching and they embrace it and they want to democratize it across their whole organization. They want to make it accessible to everybody. They understand and they measure the benefits already. So those are the people that are our early adopters, they're ready leaders, they're ready, innovators in their space. The other thing that if you think about, so it is part of a blended approach for them, but it is filling a gap where somebody's not getting it at the moment. The other thing that Bravyn does is it does encourage better human interaction.

(34:15):

So

(34:16):

It encourages better connection with colleagues and teams and staff getting you to think about how you approach people, how you converse with people, how you get the best out of them. So we're coaching people to improve their human

(34:32):

Connections.

(34:34):

That's

(34:35):

Interesting.

(34:36):

And Bravyn will say, who could you reach out to who could support you with this? How will you engage with people on this? Who holds you to account on this? Well, it's not trying to say stay in Bravyn, stay in Bravyn. Only speak to me. It's absolutely encouraging people to think about how they engage with their team, how they engage with their manager, how do they manage up, how do they find their voice? And Bravyn is there to encourage people to step up to leadership. So we've got loads of people in the world who would be amazing leaders, generally bit quieter, maybe hold themselves back, potentially don't like what they see as leadership in the world today. I mean, who can blame them? Something like, as I said earlier, 18% of people want to lead in the future. Our vision is to make the future of leadership emotionally intelligent, competent, and diverse so that people who wouldn't otherwise consider leadership understand they've got those skills and qualities and step up and step forward. So we want to change globally the future of leadership.

Ewan (35:40):

Brilliant. I guess we tend to leave our listeners with three top tips, and I suppose it would be three things that they could, from your point of view, three things that they could learn in terms of bringing on technology to help their leadership journey. Have you got three things that people should look out for if they're looking for leadership coaching apps or AI support?

Kirsty (36:00):

I think make sure it's built well and to accredited standards and global code of ethics and that it actually properly coaches. There's a lot just like humans out there saying that a lot of AI is out there saying they coach and they don't just like humans. So that would be my number one, make sure you're actually getting what you think you're getting and that it's been built well, and that somebody can tell you how it's been built. So number two, how's it been built? What considerations have been taken into account? How secure is it? How do they deal with data? How are they evaluating whether it works and what are their guardrails and systems to prove that? And three would be how does this solve a real problem for you?

Ewan (36:58):

Yeah, yeah.

Kirsty (36:59):

Are you trying to adopt AI because you're adopting AI or are you adopting it because it's the best solution to a problem that you have?

Ewan (37:10):

Yes.

Kirsty (37:10):

So what's why?

Ewan (37:12):

That's a really good point, and that's a great way of finish. I know that it's absolutely spot on. I really appreciate your time today, Kristy. That was excellent. If people are looking to find out more, well obviously put the details in the show notes, but where's the best place to catch up with you?

Kirsty (37:28):

So the best place to catch up with Bravyn and get an overview is Bravyn AI is our website. Forgive us. It's early doors, but it will be getting better. So that's the first place to look out for Bravyn. And probably the best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn Christian Gate.

Ewan (37:47):

I'll do that. I will pop that in the show notes. But thank you again for your time and look forward to catching up soon.

Kirsty (37:53):

Thanks so much for having me, you and thoroughly enjoyed that chat. Thank you. No worries. Okay.

Ewan (38:09):

Thanks for listening to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. Hopefully there was plenty of insight for you to take back to your teams, so don't forget to subscribe and never miss an episode. And if you can leave us a review, we really appreciate all the feedback and support we get. It makes a massive difference.