Lance T. Wilhelm

2025

1. 

   How Managers Perceive AI-Assisted Conversational Training for Workplace Communication

   Lance T Wilhelm, Xiaohan Ding, Kirk McInnis Knutsen, and 2 more authors

   In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 2025

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   Effective workplace communication is essential for managerial success, yet many managers lack access to tailored and sustained training. Although AI-assisted communication systems may offer scalable training solutions, little is known about how managers envision the role of AI in helping them improve their communication skills. To investigate this, we designed a conversational role-play system, CommCoach, as a functional probe to understand how managers anticipate using AI to practice their communication skills. Through semi-structured interviews, participants emphasized the value of adaptive, low-risk simulations for practicing difficult workplace conversations. They also highlighted opportunities, including human-AI teaming, transparent and context-aware feedback, and greater control over AI-generated personas. AI-assisted communication training should balance personalization, structured learning objectives, and adaptability to different user styles and contexts. However, achieving this requires carefully navigating tensions between adaptive and consistent AI feedback, realism and potential bias, and the open-ended nature of AI conversations versus structured workplace discourse.

2. 

   Conversate: Supporting Reflective Learning in Interview Practice Through Interactive Simulation and Dialogic Feedback

   Taufiq Daryanto, Xiaohan Ding, Lance T. Wilhelm, and 3 more authors

   Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Jan 2025

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   Job interviews play a critical role in shaping one’s career, yet practicing interview skills can be challenging, especially without access to human coaches or peers for feedback. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance the interview practice experience. Yet, little research has explored the effectiveness and user perceptions of such systems or the benefits and challenges of using LLMs for interview practice. Furthermore, while prior work and recent commercial tools have demonstrated the potential of AI to assist with interview practice, they often deliver one-way feedback, where users only receive information about their performance. By contrast, dialogic feedback, a concept developed in learning sciences, is a two-way interaction feedback process that allows users to further engage with and learn from the provided feedback through interactive dialogue. This paper introduces Conversate, a web-based application that supports reflective learning in job interview practice by leveraging large language models (LLMs) for interactive interview simulations and dialogic feedback. To start the interview session, the user provides the title of a job position (e.g., entry-level software engineer) in the system. Then, our system will initialize the LLM agent to start the interview simulation by asking the user an opening interview question and following up with questions carefully adapted to subsequent user responses. After the interview session, our back-end LLM framework will then analyze the user’s responses and highlight areas for improvement. Users can then annotate the transcript by selecting specific sections and writing self-reflections. Finally, the user can interact with the system for dialogic feedback, conversing with the LLM agent to learn from and iteratively refine their answers based on the agent’s guidance. To evaluate Conversate, we conducted a user study with 19 participants to understand their perceptions of using LLM-supported interview simulation and dialogic feedback. Our findings show that participants valued the adaptive follow-up questions from LLMs, as they enhanced the realism of interview simulations and encouraged deeper thinking. Participants also appreciated the AI-assisted annotation, as it reduced their cognitive burden and mitigated excessive self-criticism in their own evaluation of their interview performance. Moreover, participants found the LLM-supported dialogic feedback to be beneficial, as it promoted personalized and continuous learning, reduced feelings of judgment, and allowed them to express disagreement.