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• Mika Ono- [email protected]

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• Entrepreneurship
• AI

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A new UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI) initiative to test AI-enabled simulations for professional development is bringing one of the institute's earliest startup incubator residents back - this time as a collaborator.

Virbela, launched in 2012, builds AI-powered simulations that let people practice high-stakes professional conversations, like giving difficult feedback or navigating conflict, with realistic AI avatars in a browser-based virtual environment.

"Our mission is to close the gap between knowing what good leadership looks like and actually being able to do it," said organizational psychologist Alex Howland, founder of Virbela. "People learn leadership by practicing it, but most professionals never get a safe place to practice the hardest conversations. We use AI and virtual environments to give them that practice space, and we then measure what they actually do, not just what they say they would do."

When QI research specialist Riley Need heard about Virbela "through the UC San Diego grapevine," Need was brainstorming ways to create a professional development academy for students that was both scalable and accessible. Intrigued by the possibility of creating an online education program that was asynchronous but still deeply engaging, Need reached out to Virbela about creating a VR+AI training module for the project.

The collaboration gelled, and together they are creating a pilot module in which students roleplay as a medical device engineer interacting with AI-generated stakeholders, such as a clinician or a potential device user. Via these "face-to-face" conversations between student and AI avatars, trainees practice communicating design decisions, responding to critical feedback and learning from setbacks across increasingly challenging scenarios.

After each simulation, the AI avatar shifts from playing a stakeholder to acting as a conversational executive coach, walking the learner through what just happened in a live debrief. That coaching conversation covers what the learner did well, where they struggled, and what they might try differently.

The full conversation is then passed to a separate AI system that evaluates learners' behavior independently, scoring how they handled critical moments against standards drawn from industrial/organizational psychology.

This separation is by design: one AI creates a realistic interaction, another evaluates it without bias. The resulting data will not only help refine the simulations, it will also enable new pedagogical studies about which scenarios and feedback approaches create the most significant growth for learners.

Reimagining the Workforce

Virbela's current focus on AI-powered leadership simulation grew out of more than a decade of building virtual environments, and QI has been an important part of that journey.

Virbela initially collaborated with QI researchers such as Sheldon Brown and Erik Hill at the UC San Diego Experimental Game Lab to develop its virtual reality platform, which was intended as a way for MBA students to work in teams in an environment where they could take risks, safely test ideas and learn from their experiences. With its game-like digital interface where users can create avatars and meet and converse with others in a virtual campus environment that includes lecture halls, offices, game rooms, quiet spaces, and outdoor recreation - much like a real-life campus - the platform was both familiar and novel to a generation raised on video games.

In 2015, Virbela chose to move into the QI Innovation Space - not only for the tangible benefits of reasonable rent (QI remains one of the lowest-priced lease options on campus for startup companies) and access to specialized facilities, but also for the intangible benefits that come with being part of the QI ecosystem.

"It was a very affordable space in a highly intellectual community," said Howland. "There was definitely a kind of legitimacy to being in the space, which was helpful."

Qualcomm Institute Director Ramesh Rao also thought the company was a good fit with QI's culture: "Not only were they [members of Virbela's team] one of the first innovation space tenants, they built on things that were happening at QI. They seemed to capture the high-risk, high-payoff mindset."

Signs of Success

As a pioneer for remote collaboration, Virbela saw early success with its digital platform.

Educators looking for new ways to engage students, enhance trainings and broaden access were eager to test the platform. UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, UC San Diego Extension, the UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, UC Irvine and Stanford University were all early users.

In 2016, Virbela landed its first big client, but it wasn't Virbela's ability to enhance the learning experiences that attracted them - it was the platform's ability to recreate the vibrancy of an in-office experience.

"We had a residential real estate company, ironically, say 'We don't want to use your platform for training and development; we want to use it as a supplement to brick and mortar offices,'" explained Howland.

That company was eXp Realty, and Virbela worked with it to create a 24/7 accessible cloud campus for the realty company's fully remote workforce, which included at the time more than 1,000 real estate agents across North America.

New Challenges

In 2018, eXp World Holdings, the holding company for eXp Realty, acquired Virbela. The Virbela brand was added to eXp's innovation and technology division, eXp World Technologies, LLC.

Two years later, COVID-19 hit.

With members of a global workforce obliged to live and work at a distance, Virbela quickly became a go-to technology for hosting virtual events, and the number of active users skyrocketed. By 2021, Virbela virtual event spaces were being used for large-scale conferences, summits, music festivals and even weddings.

While the sudden influx of users helped spike revenue, it also highlighted challenges, such as the need for installation of Virbela software onto a computer (versus being accessible via a web browser).

"We had tremendous success during COVID, supporting online events and collaborations and education," said Howland, "but things kind of fell off the shelf when the world opened back up."

At this juncture, Howland and Virbela Co-founder Erik Hill, a UC San Diego alumnus, had the opportunity to reacquire the assets of the business. They took it.

"Now we're getting back to our initial vision of using simulations to develop leaders," Howland said. "The difference is that AI lets us do it at a scale and cost that wasn't possible before. A learner can practice a difficult conversation with an AI avatar, get immediate feedback on their actual behavior, and do it again. That kind of deliberate practice used to require expensive assessment centers. Now it runs in a browser."

Full Circle

The addition of AI to Virbela's platform, now called Virbela Go, has opened up new applications in leadership development and behavioral assessment that go well beyond chatbots.

In Virbela's latest collaboration with QI, Need says they have been impressed with the Virbela team's collaborative approach and big vision for creating new teaching modalities, leveraging the latest technologies to help make education more accessible and effective.

According to Rao, Virbela deserves kudos as an early mover in the AI-powered simulation space. Perhaps even more important, he says, "they can adapt," which makes Virbela a company to continue to watch in the future.

"Humans will one day be living side-by-side with software agents," said Rao. "You could say we're actually co-evolving. The question isn't 'what if?'; it's 'what will be useful?'"

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence