The way people work is changing faster than traditional training and enablement can keep up. Hybrid and frontline teams need coaching in real time, talent teams need better ways to screen for skills, and everyone is under pressure to do more with fewer live instructors and less travel. Cicero is evolving from a leader in AI roleplay into a unified platform for practice, coaching, and performance support that lives wherever work happens.
As Amy Loomis, PhD, Research Vice President, Future of Work at IDC, puts it:
“Organizations are at a critical inflection point in workforce transformation, where human skills are no longer so-called soft skills but the real differentiator in an AI‑enabled world. What’s compelling about Cicero is its end‑to‑end approach: by connecting hiring, assessment, continuous coaching, and immersive practice in one platform, it gives enterprises a closed loop for developing these capabilities at scale and linking them directly to retention, performance, and readiness for new roles.”
In 2026, several new capabilities will make it easier to turn critical conversations, field visits, and hiring processes into repeatable, measurable moments of performance improvement—while helping organizations build more humane, future‑ready workplaces.
Why this moment matters
Human skills are becoming the true differentiator in an AI‑enabled world. Leaders increasingly agree that communication, empathy, and problem-solving are as important as technical skills, especially as AI automates routine tasks and reshapes roles. At the same time, organizations are under pressure to prove that their AI investments support people instead of sidelining them.
This creates a strategic choice: use AI to push people harder or use AI to amplify human potential by giving them safer ways to practice, fairer ways to be evaluated, and smarter support in the moments that matter. Cicero’s 2026 roadmap is intentionally aligned with the second path—the closed‑loop approach Amy Loomis describes, connecting hiring, assessment, continuous coaching, and immersive practice in one platform.
Replay: where AI roleplay training becomes hyper‑personalized coaching
Replay transforms every roleplay into a coachable asset you can revisit, not just a one‑off exercise.
Cicero already lets people rehearse high‑stakes conversations with AI avatars—angry customers, skeptical buyers, tough internal stakeholders. In 2026, Cicero Replay takes the next step by turning each session into an interactive coaching environment.
An avatar panel shows the other party’s role, personality, emotional state, and how trust and satisfaction changed over the conversation.
A conversation log lets learners scroll and click any of their own messages to see how that moment landed and why.
Multiple coaching modes—Ask Cicero, Message Analysis, Roleplay Insights—offer different lenses on what worked, what didn’t, and what to try next.
Cicero Replay connects its insights directly to the goals and milestones of each scenario and adds nuance such as filler‑word counts and words per minute, helping people refine both what they say and how they say it. The result is scalable, personalized coaching that supports not only higher scores but more confident, empathetic communicators in roles where every conversation shapes trust and outcomes.
Interview: where screening becomes evidence‑based, human‑centric hiring
Interview brings Cicero’s conversational intelligence into the top of the funnel so you can hire for real capability, not just keywords.
As roles evolve, organizations need to identify people who can navigate ambiguity, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively—not just pass a keyword scan. Recent employer surveys find that nearly three‑quarters of employers say it is harder to find candidates with the right human skills than with the right technical skills, underscoring the need for deeper, capability‑based screening.
At the same time, candidates and regulators expect AI‑assisted hiring to be transparent, fair, and explainable.
Cicero Interview reimagines the screening experience:
Candidates join a secure, AI‑led interview with a lifelike avatar.
The system reads both the job description and the candidate’s resume, then asks resume‑aware questions that probe real competencies and experiences instead of sticking to a generic script.
As candidates respond, Cicero analyzes sentiment, tone, eye contact, and liveness, helping reduce fraud and teleprompter‑style interviews while focusing on authentic behavior.
Hiring teams receive ranked candidates with detailed insights on technical and personality fit, and every score links back to specific video clips that justify it. This creates the kind of closed loop Amy Loomis highlights: observable behaviors feeding into hiring, assessment, and ongoing coaching, rather than relying on gut feel or static resumes alone.
XR: where field work meets real‑time expert support
Cicero XR turns every field task into guided work that gets done right the first time—and becomes training for the next person.
Frontline workers keep critical operations running but often face complex problems with limited real‑time support. When AI guidance and coaching are delivered through XR in the worker’s actual environment—on the shop floor, in the store, or at the job site—it turns every task into a coached moment instead of a best guess. Cicero XR provides hands‑on, flight‑simulator‑like practice and in‑context guidance that outperforms outdated training, building better retention, readiness, and measurable business ROI.
In 2026, Cicero XR brings that support directly into the flow of work:
Workers use new smart glasses that look like everyday eyewear to connect directly to Cicero while on the job.
They capture images and video; Cicero uses scene understanding and object recognition to identify equipment such as a Toshiba POS and infer context.
The platform delivers step-by-step guidance, can deploy a digital twin for hands-on practice, and escalates to an AI mentor or human expert when needed—so the immediate task is completed, not just simulated.
Each interaction can be stored as a learning object, feeding back into the organization’s training content so real field challenges become future-ready learning for everyone. Over time, that kind of visible skill growth has a direct people impact: employees with measurable skill growth are twice as likely to stay and excel in their roles. For operations leaders, that translates into fewer escalations, faster time to resolution, and more consistent performance across every site and shift.
Journeys in the Room: where real‑world meetings and tough group moments get rehearsed
Journeys in the Room lets teams rehearse the complex, high‑stakes group conversations where real decisions are made—and where conflict often appears.
Most transformation decisions play out in rooms—not in single, neat one‑on‑one conversations. Buying committees, leadership forums, cross‑functional war rooms, and town‑hall style sessions all involve multiple voices, competing priorities, and messy dynamics that can derail even strong communicators. The same is true for conflict resolution: the hardest situations are often one‑to‑many or group settings where tension, history, and power dynamics all show up at once.
Cicero’s Journeys already link a sequence of 1:1 conversations with shared context and memory, letting people build capability across multi‑step, real‑world scenarios. In 2026, Journeys in the Room takes that a level deeper:
Multiple AI “combatants” and human participants share a single simulated meeting, so you can model everything from collaborative problem‑solving to escalated conflict.
Each avatar can be configured as a distinct stakeholder—supportive sponsor, skeptical IT lead, cost‑focused procurement, risk‑averse executive, or even an openly frustrated or resistant participant—with unique goals, triggers, and behaviors.
Cicero orchestrates the session, tracks how participants manage interruptions, non‑verbal cues, emotional signals, and competing agendas, and provides debriefs at both group and individual levels, including how conflict was surfaced, acknowledged, and addressed.
This makes it possible to rehearse an enterprise pitch, a critical incident briefing, a policy or change‑impact discussion, or a structured conflict‑resolution session with realistic stakes and personalities. Over time, organizations build leaders and teams who are ready for the actual rooms where strategy, safety, culture, and societal impact are shaped—and where tough conversations and conflict must be handled well, not avoided.
A unified, responsible platform for the future of work
Cicero platform’s power comes from connecting hiring, assessment, coaching, and immersive practice in a single, governed platform. Cicero delivers immersive roleplay, smart assessments, analytics, and more in one scalable, integrated environment so organizations can drive KPIs like revenue, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Under the hood, Cicero is designed as a unified experience with:
Shared navigation, ingestion, reporting, and security across Roleplay, Assessment, Interview, XR, Coach, Kiosk, and the new Replay and Journeys enhancements.
Cicero Kiosk, which extends the same AI capabilities to in‑store and on‑site experiences—delivering seamless, context‑aware support for employees and customers, boosting CSAT, and driving sales at the edge of the business.
A trust foundation that includes ISO 27001 and SOC 2, with work underway toward ISO 42001 for AI governance and enhanced GDPR/PII controls to meet global expectations.
Support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing Cicero to tap into systems like NetSuite and Salesforce and to surface experiences inside collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
This is the end‑to‑end approach Amy Loomis highlights: a closed loop that links talent decisions, development investments, and real performance outcomes, rather than a collection of point solutions.
For organizations navigating AI disruption, talent shortages, and rising expectations from employees and stakeholders, the question is shifting from “What can AI do?” to “What kind of work—and world—are we building with it?” Cicero’s 2026 roadmap is designed to help answer that question with a clear point of view: keep humans at the center, and use AI to help them practice, perform, and thrive.