Using AI to Teach the Most Human Skill: Sowon Kim on Difficult Conversations

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Dr Sowon Kim, Associate Professor at EHL and founder of its Women in Leadership programme. Kim's work sits on an intriguing paradox. She uses artificial intelligence to teach the most human skills there are, the difficult conversations that decide how people work together. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Teaching difficult conversations with AI

With a technology partner, Kim has built AI avatars that let people rehearse high-stakes conversations at their own pace, in a space where it is safe to get it wrong. The point is that they walk into the real conversation with more confidence.

The scenarios are pointed. One avatar is an executive chef. Another is a property owner who wants AI brought into the hotel, is pushy about it and keeps intervening, and the player has to steer that exchange toward something constructive and collaborative. At the end the player gets feedback, and afterwards Kim brings the group together to debrief and draw out what they learned. The tool handles the practice, and the people do the work of making sense of it.

When 'robotic' service is really emptiness

Simone raised a framing he returns to often, the reverse uncanny valley. The usual unease is about robots that look too human. The reverse is the human who behaves like a robot, the receptionist typing into the system who barely registers the guest. Kim agreed that this can be simple disconnection or a bad day, but she went somewhere deeper.

Sometimes, she said, that flatness is the expression of being empty, a quiet signal of someone in pain. The research on loneliness, worry, anxiety and disengagement is substantial, and disconnection feeds on itself. People who feel cut off reach for connection through social media, which tips into a kind of hyperconnectivity that leaves them less present and less empathetic, and emptier still. When a person is empty, she pointed out, there is very little left to give, and hospitality is built on giving, and on the reciprocity of giving and receiving.

She tied it to the things that happen in any life. Research points to five major stressors, she said: separation, the death of someone you love, illness, moving home and changing job. Each one disrupts something at the core, identity, love, health, a sense of home, and recovering from it takes emotional and other resources. Until those are replenished, giving is hard.

Women in Leadership

Kim founded Women in Leadership at EHL in 2018, and the origin was almost accidental. Walking the corridors, she noticed the portraits of successful alumni were all men, while half the students were women. She did not want young women to feel they had to become someone else to succeed. They needed to see female leaders who looked like them.

The programme now runs on a team of around fifteen volunteers and several projects. A flagship event each year, around International Women's Day, brings female leaders together with students, male and female, for cross-generational dialogue. A mentoring programme called WIL Horizon pairs juniors and seniors who learn from each other and rotate through a small community rather than a single fixed pair. A sexual harassment prevention strand trains students to protect themselves and to speak up for others before they go into internships, with clear processes for when something happens. And a twice-monthly gathering gives female staff a small, regular space to share and belong.

There is no single skill

Simone asked for the one human skill the next generation of leaders will need most. Kim cheerfully refused the premise. There is no single skill, she said, and offered her research instead. Her team examined some forty years of hospitality research, identified around fifteen hundred skills, and clustered them down to thirty, grouped into four families: self-leadership, human connection, hospitality business and future-ready skills.

Self-leadership is the foundation. Personal awareness, ethical grounding, learning agility, personal responsibility and adaptive resilience will not by themselves make a great leader, but without them you will never get far, and they are what let you connect with anyone else, since you have to know how you come across before you can read how others see you. The four families are interconnected and depend on context. As Simone put it, and she agreed, it is a toolbox, and you reach for different skills at different moments.

Technology is one more culture

On the HumanX theme of technology and humanity working together, Kim was wholehearted. She is not a techie, she said, but she loves learning something new, and she has spent her life doing exactly that. She is from South Korea, and Switzerland is the eighth country she has lived in, with a career across several industries before academia. Navigating different cultures, corporate, national and regional, has been the constant, and technology is simply the latest new culture to learn.

For her it is always a tool, and the question is how it amplifies what she already does. The AI avatars are her own answer. They push her to work differently and better, so that she can connect more and have more impact, with the technology in service of the human work rather than the other way round. As Simone noted, her avatars are the idea in miniature, using AI to help people do the thing only people can do well.