2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As engineers enter the workforce, they will be required to engage with diverse individuals from different functional departments to execute their projects. Because of the curricular requirements for technical degrees, there are potentially limited opportunities for students to practice and grow their soft skills, which can yield some communication challenges for new engineers. In this paper and presentation, a no-code AI-powered chatbot platform (character.ai) will be presented with general instructions on how to build an executive chatbot for students to practice executive interactions. Common issues and dynamics will be discussed as well as our experience using chatbots to enable students to reflect upon their communication style. Current limitations and classroom deployment dynamics will also be addressed.