Christophe Mallet, Bodyswaps: “VR quickly became the next frontier, the thing you couldn’t do on Zoom, especially when practising soft skills.”

Combining AI, VR and Behaviour Science to develop soft skills.

Christophe Mallet, Co-Founder & CEO

The world of work is moving fast but can jobseekers keep up with the growing demands for soft skills? The World Economic Forum predicts that 7 out of the 10 most in-demand skills by 2030 will be soft skills, leaving over 1.5 billion people in need for upskilling or reskilling to be ready for work. Traditional methods for soft skills training are not scalable and risk leaving behind nearly 20% of the world’s population. Face-to-face workshops are usually expensive and get booked up quickly at universities, whilst PowerPoints and videos are easy to distribute but lack practical elements to actually practise and develop soft skills.

It wasn’t until experienced VR professionals, Christophe Mallet and Julien Denoel, had their lightbulb moment and realised an opportunity existed to scale soft skills training using VR and AI. This week we sat down with Christophe to learn more about his journey into VR and how Bodyswaps was able to navigate its first few years to become a successful business.

1. Describe your startup in two sentences

Bodyswaps is an award-winning learning platform that brings realistic VR simulations and AI-enabled feedback to automate soft skills training. Learners can practise and fail safely without repercussions while building the communication, teamwork and leadership skills needed for successful careers.

2. What gave you the inspiration?

In 2007, I did my first ever 6-months internship at a prestigious consultancy firm in Paris. In my final review, I was told I would get a job offer but shouldn’t hope to “go too far” due to my shyness and stutter. With my confidence crushed, I spent the best part of a year reading and watching videos trying to improve, to no avail. I then found myself enrolled in a workshop at Uni called Managing Crisis which turned out to be a 2-day improvisation theatre session. It changed everything. I realised that what was needed was transferable practice to build skills, and confidence.

Bodyswaps VR headset in action.

Years later, as my co-founder Julien and I were running our VR marketing agency, we read up extensively on a new field of research around embodiment in VR and subsequent real-life behavioural change. That’s when it hit us: by using a combination of VR and AI to create what is essentially a flight simulator for soft skills, we could make the benefits of what I felt in that workshop available at scale.

3. How did you meet?

In 2015, VR started to appear on the mainstream’s tech radar. I looked up people working in the sector on LinkedIn and found Julien. We met in a Pub in in East London and Julien had come with his huge gaming laptop and cumbersome VR setup. He showed me ‘The Night Café’ , a VR experience that allowed you to walk in a tri-dimensional recreation of Van Gogh’s famous painting. I picked my jaw up from the floor, soon resigned from the comfortable job I had been in for 5 years, and created a VR marketing agency with Julien.

4. What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?

Our greatest success to date is called Dean. Dean is a student at Sandwell College who prepared for a Job Interview with Bodyswaps and reported the same life-changing confidence boost I felt all those years ago. We had under 500 VR sessions on the platform in 2020, over 7,000 last year and on our way to do 50,000+ this year. And based on the data, the vast majority of learners are experiencing the same benefits as Dean. That’s why one of our objectives for 2024 is to get “1 million Deans”.

Our main challenge is to help clients who fall in love with the product so much they believe it will essentially deploy itself. From an adoption point-of-view, VR is still in its infancy and we need to make sure that clients allocate the necessary resources, especially human, to make change happen.

Bodyswaps job interview simulation in action.

5. How has Covid affected your business?

Covid slowed us down in the short term but massively accelerated (read: forced) the long-term wide-scale adoption of education technologies. 

We were initially lucky in the sense that Lockdown #1 hit as we were busy building our MVP. Subsequent lockdowns did however significantly stall some projects: it’s difficult to sell VR if you can’t go to an office or campus to put people in headsets. Our March 2020 kick-off with Orange happened in….November 2021.

But the bigger picture is that VR quickly became the next frontier, the thing you couldn’t do on Zoom, especially when it came to bringing in the practice element necessary to build soft skills.

6. What kind of impact is your business having and how do you measure it?

VR learning automatically generates an unprecedented amount of data: decision-making patterns, semantics, elocution, speech, body language...etc. So the first way we measure impact is on the learner, in terms of their performance in the simulation as well as their levels of understanding, confidence and recommendations. Over 80% of Bodyswaps learners declare preferring it to whatever modality they are currently offered for learning the same skills.

Moreover, in the context of job interview training, we have demonstrated in a randomised control trial that real-world performance improvement is greater after training with Bodyswaps than with mock interviews. We’re now expanding that research longitudinally to put a number being the costs saved by accelerating the accession to jobs.

Bodyswaps VR headset.

7. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A fighter jet pilot

8. If you weren’t doing this, what would be your plan B?

I don’t have a plan B but in an ideal world it would involve adapting Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff into a TV series.

9. What would you save in a fire?

Whatever is the closest to the door!

10. Who is your role model/ greatest influence? And why?

My grandfather. He was a record-breaking test pilot and later admiral in the French Navy. I admire his combination of fearlessness and kindness and he’s my North Star whenever a decision is tough to navigate.

11. What is your happy track?

The Alessi Brothers - Seabird

12. What’s your motto?

Don’t be an ***hole.

13. What are you most looking forward to in 2022?

A normal Christmas holiday with my family.

BODYSWAPS

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