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The most dangerous person in your practice session is the one being nice to you.

We see this constantly with AI roleplay. Set up a buyer persona that's generous, that fills your silences, that agrees with your framing and helps you towards the close, and the score comes back high. Every time. And it measured absolutely nothing. A generous buyer hides the rep. You cannot see the skill, because the skill was never required.

But this is not an AI problem. We just built AI that can reproduce a very old human one.

It's the manager who nods along through your practice pitch. It's the colleague who says "yeah that was good, mate" because it's 5pm on a Friday and everyone wants to go home. It's the training session where the audience is your own team, who like you, and want the hour to go well.

I spent nine years at one company and by the end I ran a roughly 130 person organisation, customer success and enablement mostly. We built sessions people genuinely loved. Reps said the training was life changing, the feedback was glowing, everyone was buzzing. And then we watched the real call recordings and nobody did a single thing differently. The room was generous, so the room told us nothing. Welcome to enablement.

So here's the pattern underneath all of it. Easy practice feels like progress and produces none. The good feeling is real, the improvement isn't, and the two are almost impossible to tell apart from the inside. Right?

The value is entirely in the friction. The buyer who won't fill your silence, so you have to sit in it. The one who pushes back on your framing, so you have to defend it or drop it. The question you can't answer, asked before it costs you a deal instead of during one.

Which means the test for any practice, human or AI, is brutally simple. Did it ever make you uncomfortable? Did you get stuck? Did anything come back that you didn't want to hear?

If the answer is no, you didn't practise. You rehearsed being agreed with. And you were already brilliant at that.