Barry's hair has long gone gray, his face lined with deep signs of age. Sitting across from me in his pressed blue shirt, he looks like an uncle, maybe even a grandfather. But Barry's employment file is … not a fun read. He told a coworker she was a "whiner," and his colleagues have filed complaints about his inappropriate remarks six times this year. So as avuncular as he seems, I don't really have any options. I have to fire the guy.

"We've addressed the disruptions you've caused with coworkers before," I say, "and this last one is strike three."

He immediately becomes flustered, defensive. "Everyone is so—oh, come on," he says, stammering a little. "Everyone is so sensitive. It wasn't like this 10 years ago."

A screen appears floating above and to the side of his head, containing three possible things I could say. In each choice, a word or two is bolded, so that the VR software I'm using can identify what I'm saying and trigger Barry's response accordingly. The second sounds wishy-washy ("You know I've always liked you, but I have to follow the rules. I'm really sorry."), the third sounds bloodless ("As discussed, your actions are disruptive to coworkers. This is the final offense. We are letting you go."), so I opt for the first. "Times are different now," I say, wincing a little inwardly at how I sound. "We're going to have to let you go."

Barry twists in his chair, motioning at the other desks and people outside the door of my office. "I have 20 more years' experience than anyone in there!" he says. "Have you looked at my sales numbers? How do you justify this based on those numbers?" There's nothing I can say that won't make things worse, so I choose neutral compassion: "I understand if you need a moment to process this."

His face crumples. He looks down at his hands, then back at me. Is he going to yell? I think. Cry? How do I deal with that? "Y-y-y-ou...Do you…" His voice breaks. He looks around, composes himself.

"Take this time to process this," I say again. "I'll go over the next steps when you're ready."

Yet, after a few more seconds, Barry seems to turn the corner into acceptance. "Well, I didn't see this coming," he says. "I really thought I was going to finish my career here. Look, I appreciate the opportunity. It was a pleasure working with you."

Whew.

"Nice work," Kyle Jackson says as I take my headset off. It doesn't always go so smoothly: The first time Jackson demonstrated the process for a roomful of Oculus executives, Barry wound up yelling and cursing at the person in the headset. "But everybody thought it was funny because it was the colleague that kinda needed that feedback," he says, "so it was a really honest moment for the room." (And for anyone hearing the anecdote, presumably.)

Awkward moments aside, VR's role in the corporate world has far outpaced its consumer impact. But while its applications have largely been clustered around design, collaboration, and even job training simulations, virtual reality has in the past year seen a flurry of activity around so-called soft skills: leadership, communications, HR applications, and other people-focused business fields. Now, Talespin, a company Jackson cofounded, hopes that virtual humans like Barry will allow companies to leverage VR's unique social mojo to make their employees smarter—faster.

When Jackson and his cofounder, Stephen Fromkin, started Talespin in 2015, they didn't know exactly where VR was going—they just knew it wouldn't be a consumer technology in the beginning. Both of them had come out of virtual production in the entertainment industry, so were well acquainted with what real-time engines like Unreal and Unity could accomplish. They wound up using that familiarity in 2016 to build a training simulation for Farmers Insurance in which claims adjusters hone their eye for details by walking through a VR house.