In Sweden, a start-up company called Furhat Robotics hopes to change the way employees are trained. They’ve developed an employee training robot they hope will fill the niche of an interactive robot for training purposes. “Social simulation is a very interesting category of use cases where a robot can simulate a character in a social interaction to teach humans how to get better at a certain task,” said Samer Al Moubayed, Furhat Robotics’ CEO. “For example, we have a customer in the Netherlands, Rabobank, that is using Furhat to train its employees in being better at giving bad news to customers. You can use the same idea in a number of different scenarios, such as training people to give better customer service or to practice your interviewing technique if you are a job seeker. In each of these examples, the robot [acts] as a tool for humans to rehearse, and get better at whatever task they are trying to accomplish.” In a field where employees have face-to-face interactions with customers, a robot like Furhat's can help by simulating difficult conversations employees might have to have, or by acting like an irate customer and having the employee calm them down.