Parker Mitchell: We want to just briefly give folks a peek of some of the things that we are really excited about with Nadia. So as many of you know, we started off with Nadia as a, we were thinking of her as an executive coach. And what we did is, we thought, “Hey, can we program what an executive coach does in Nadia?” And we wanted to put it out into the wild and get a sense of what people's reaction would be. 

And so we talked to a bunch of coaches out there. One of the things that we found interesting was the ICF, one of the suggestions that ICF gives their coaches, one of the principles is a coach should evoke awareness. And so we built Nadia to do that. We put it out there. And one of the things we discovered, and this might not come as a surprise for folks who have worked with a lot of managers, is they don't, on a day-to-day basis, have a deep need to have their awareness evoked. They're pretty busy. They have a million things on their plate, and they basically wanted something that would save them time.

So we evolved from this idea of a pure reflective coach to a coach that is going to try to help them. So we've shared with you before, you know, Nadia, we're building this personalization layer. Nadia knows coaching, knows your company, knows you. And I want to spend one moment on coaching before we talk a little bit about some of the personalization that's going to be really exciting.

So the way Nadia evolved was she quite quickly became a thought partner. A thought partner that could try to handle anything that was on a manager's mind. And that blank canvas starting point was actually important, because it turned out each manager had a different challenge, honestly a different challenge every week, sometimes a different challenge at the beginning or the end of a day. And they wanted Nadia to be able to help them with that.

So we tried to train her as an expert, a coach, but with a bunch of different superpowers. And these superpowers are growing probably literally every two weeks or every month. We're adding a new specialization, a coaching module, a hat that Nadia can wear. So some of them that are out there right now: If you tell Nadia, “Hey, I've got a presentation in front of 200 people in a couple of weeks, and I want to practice executive presence,” Nadia will build a plan, a skill plan to help you do that. We've talked about performance conversations. If you have a performance conversation coming up, Nadia can help you practice it, can help you role model it. 

One of the things that we've heard back from users, one of the things they appreciate the most, is that Nadia isn't just a website that they go visit. But that she will be, in some cases, quite proactive about holding them accountable to a conversation that they had and a commitment that they made. And for some folks, they really appreciate that.

I think there's someone in the room who will appreciate the challenge version of Nadia. So, if you are feeling a little too smug about how you are doing, you know, there's a version of Nadia that says, “I'm gonna put on my challenge hat, and I'm gonna ask you if perhaps this is a pattern that you might have seen in the past few conversations you've had with this person or with other people. And maybe it's something you should reflect on yourself, rather than point the finger outwards.” So we have a range of different Nadia coaches. And the thing that's exciting about that is that we can then also start to tune those coaches for what companies are looking for. 

So just a couple of weeks ago, I was down at the Gartner Reimagine conference. I had the opportunity to have a long conversation on stage, sharing the stories of Prudential. And it was with Robert Gulliver, the Chief Talent Officer of Prudential. He also drew a lot on sports analogies, similar to Anna. He was I think the first CHRO of the NFL, and he believes wholly in coaching. Prudential's been a big adopter of Nadia, and they've been rolling it out in a number of different ways. And he just talked about the increasing pieces of material, of ideas, of approaches that they were bringing into Nadia to help them with everything from their end-of-year conversations, which they call 2+2 conversations, all the way through to their other parts of their talent development life cycle.

But the thing that folks were most excited about is, when we talk to users, they said three things over and over again: They wanted Nadia to learn more about themselves. So how can they provide Nadia as quickly as possible with information about themselves? The second thing, which I think is really fascinating and which we've released and rolled out now, is: Can Nadia know about others on my team, not just through me? And then, finally, people have said: I know that I should gather more feedback. I need a lightweight way to do that. Could Nadia help me with that? 

So we're going to get a quick glimpse of some of these Nadia 2.0 features. We're releasing them January, February, And, again, I just want to emphasize: Every company has control over which features Nadia does or doesn't have. You can control what's turned on or off. Users get control over their own profiles. So it's very much an enterprise-first approach. But I'm going to tell you a little bit about what it will be like to have a Nadia with a profile. 

So, right now, what Nadia does, in layperson's terms, at the end of a conversation, is she takes coach's notes. So she is summarizing what she's learned about me, she's making some hypotheses, she might generate a few questions, almost exactly the same way a coach would. So she's inferring pieces of information, but it still takes time to educate her. 

And so the new version of the profile is going to allow people to very, very quickly upload information to Nadia. So we have been told that people really want Nadia to know a lot about their job. So, if you're a frontline worker at Delta, you're manning a customer service desk, or if you're a knowledge worker, a content marketer at a brand agency, you're going to have a very different reality. And we can quite quickly give you the chance to bring Nadia up to speed on what that might look like.

The second thing that everyone wants their Nadia to know is: Know about my team. Know about who the people are that I work with. Know about the relationships. Know about the power imbalances. Know about the roles that people are playing. And so we've made it easy for Nadia to be able to understand that.

Now, the one thing I would say is, when we talk to people, absolutely zero of them have said that that team structure is contained within their HRIS. So they've said the org chart that we have does not at all convey that complexity. It's like Prasad said, we are forced to flatten the richness of the world that we live in on a day-to-day basis to try to put it into the old software systems. But genAI is able to maintain that. 

Nadia can also have information about your feedback and the feedback that you've gotten, we'll see that in a moment, as well as your skills and your career development aspirations. So, as you've got a fleshed out profile on that, the thing that people are asking about is now: I want my Nadia to know a little bit about other Nadias. And so what people will be able to do is they'll be able to choose, are they going to keep their profile private or are they going to allow Nadia to take their profile and translate it into a public version.

And again, you get to quality control it, you get to see what this looks like. But imagine that your Nadia coach says, “Okay, here's what I know about Parker. I know that he's fast paced. Sometimes he can be forgetful. Sometimes he can look like he's distracted in meetings, but he's really trying to parallel process.

He likes to get information with the big picture first and the details afterwards.” And I'd be very happy if my Nadia sort of created a public profile of mine so that I could be able to allow others to figure out how to work well with me. 

And so we've made that live for us at Valence and a couple of other early pilot organizations. So if you go to the team section of your app, if team members have made their profile public, you will get a chance to be coached specifically on it. 

And it is the most interesting, the most engaging feature that we've released. People just love to know, how can I interact with this particular person a little bit differently than I might with someone else? I think 40 to 45 percent of our conversations in Nadia are either about team and team relationships or about communications. And many of those are becoming much, much richer. Because if you know the two parties involved in that communication or that relationship, the coaching can be incredibly more rich. 

So that's knowing Nadia about yourself, knowing Nadia about others. And then the third piece that we thought was really interesting was, could Nadia be a way to gather feedback for you? And I just really love that one-dimensionality analogy because I think that also applies to feedback. How many people have filled out a feedback survey for a colleague in 2024? Hands up. Can't see. There's a lot of hands that are up. How many people enjoyed that process? Oh, I don't see that many hands up.

It's very hard to translate the richness of the person to trying to answer a seven-point Likert scale on 26 different questions. And so what we want to do here with Nadia is introduce very, very lightweight conversational feedback, focused on growth and development. And so what we will see here is, if I go through my profile and it's turned on, I have an option to collect feedback via a 360 review. And so this is what we think the future of 360s is going to be: conversational and no longer Likert based. 

So Nadia is asking me what I want to check in on. So I'm going to tell her that I want to get started with feedback. 

[To Nadia] “Hi, Nadia. It's the end of the year. I've been reflecting on my leadership. I want to get feedback from my team on how I'm doing.”

So, for those of you who don't know, Nadia can speak as well as text back. About half the people use text, half the people use her voice. And what she's able to do is look through the past conversations that I've had, look through my profile, and highlight that there are two things that have been important to me. One is about celebrating wins, and one is about bringing new people, Valence is rapidly growing, so bringing new people up to speed on the journey. So I think that sounds good to me. 

[To Nadia] “That sounds good. Can you email my team to ask them for the feedback?”

So we've introduced the ability now, if Nadia's hooked up to your systems, to be able to directly take these tiny actions on your behalf. Either she'll write the email for you, you can cut and paste it, or she can do it directly. So we're trying to make your life a little bit easier in some of these tasks to make you more willing and more likely to do them. Trying to take the friction out of it. 

So, what you're going to get a chance to experience, so I, as a crazy CEO, told my team: What I want to do is I want all 200 people to take a picture of the QR code, and then I want them to give me feedback on the phone, and then Nadia, real time, is going to consolidate feedback from 200 people who don't know me or who I am. And then we're going to get to see what my profile is. 

And my team convinced me that was a little chaotic, and we shouldn't do it. But if you would like to experience conversational feedback, it's live. And you can have a conversation with Nadia, and I promise I won't be offended at the feedback that you give me.

But what we're going to do is we're going to bring one of my team members up on stage to see what it's like. 

Alex McMurray: Hi, Parker. I'm excited to give you some public feedback at your AI Summit. Alright, so let me make sure that I'm on the right screen. I am. Okay. 

So Nadia has sent me a note, and she's asking me to reflect on whether or not Parker is celebrating wins and how well he's conveying this to me. All right.

[To Nadia] “Hey, Nadia. I think he's doing great. I feel super appreciated in my role, and I think he knows I'm working hard. He sends Slacks and texts to say thank you. And I know he's really proud of the product team.” 

[Reading Nadia’s response] Hmm, I'm wondering if those wins are being shared with everyone, or just with me.

[To Nadia] “Hmm, that's a good point. Some of these are very much direct messages to me, and we do hear quite a bit about product. So I wonder, I think about, I wish he could celebrate the relationships that the client team is building. I think they're doing hard work and doing an amazing job.” 

[Reading Nadia’s response]So Parker is thinking about this. That's interesting. And it seems like he wants to formalize some of this. Have I seen a difference? 

[To Nadia] “Well, he's definitely positive, but now that you mention it, I think it could be more formal. There were a few all-hands where he did do a bit of celebration, but it’s started to fade. I know he's been thinking about hiring a chief of staff, and I kind of wonder if that will help this a lot.”

[Reading Nadia’s response] Do I have five minutes? Hmm.   

[To Nadia] “I would love to keep chatting, Nadia, but I need to go present at an AI summit.” 

All right. So I'm going to give this back to Parker, and we'll see what all of the feedback he collected might say to him.

Parker Mitchell: So we just wanted to try to illustrate what it's like. This is what an executive coach does. If any of you have had an executive coach that collects feedback, they know a lot about you and your intentions, and they're able to draw out the type of nuances, that multi-dimensional nuance that is going to be truly helpful for you. And we heard from Anna and others that it's the frequency of feedback that is just so important.

And so if there's a world in which we can have our AI coaches go out, gather in really lightweight ways the feedback, probably more specific feedback than what's my end-of-year 360 review, but how did I do on preparing for this particular event, or how did we do on this project that we just launched? That kind of high-feedback world we think is going to feed a lot of the learning and growth that a lot of us aspire to. 

So this is a conversational AI. Obviously Nadia is able to synthesize it. I'm actually going to skip this bit in the interest of time because what I want to do is actually call up a few folks, who are our partners. I want to just share appreciation. We wouldn't be here if we didn't have the opportunity to have partners. Many of them have navigated their own internal processes. They've gotten, you know, a new AI-powered coach through IT reviews and AI councils. And they're getting terrific responses and also very excited to share some of the experiences they've had. So we wanted to just bring them up, introduce them one at a time, thank them, and have them share what is most interesting to them that they would like to be asked about at our cocktail hours. So Lauren, can I invite you up?

Loren Blandon: Hi all, thank you! Hi, I am Loren, I'm from VML. I lead organizational development. I have some of my colleagues in the audience, and essentially I just wanna open myself up during the happy hour and even after on socials, I'm very active on LinkedIn and all over the place, to have conversations about how we're using Valence and how we see Nadia playing a part in our strategy. And really curious to hear what you all are thinking about this.

We are in the beginning phases of implementation. We did a really successful pilot, got some amazing feedback. I can testify that folks did express that Nadia was giving them a lot more psychological safety to open up about things. So that part about it being empathetic, or at least feeling empathetic, is real and it's there. So now we actually just kicked off this week the effort to implement on a wider scale. We are looking at it as more of a super pilot on this next round, over the next year. So we're thinking about things like: How do we deploy through the influencers, or what we like to call learn-fluencers sometimes, across the company to bring people that are more resistant, get them on board and really using this in their everyday? How do we align the use of Nadia to strategic outcomes in where we want to grow the business or shape the business?  And we do have Lindsay Pattinson coming up, she's at WPP, she's our Chief People Officer. AI is very much at the forefront of where we want to head as a company, and so we really see the use of Nadia as maybe a safe, fun, enjoyable introduction to how folks can better themselves and their work through AI.

So really excited about the possibilities, really excited about our partnership with Valence, and looking forward to chatting with all of you. Thank you. 

Parker Mitchell: Thanks so much, Loren.

Next I'll invite Colleen up. Colleen leads leadership development at AGCO and has been a dear partner for six-plus months now. I mean, twelve months as we started kicking off the process, six months live. 

Colleen Sugrue: Yeah, that's about right. So, we actually kicked off Nadia in April. And we took a broad approach to implementation. We started offering it to 28,000 employees globally. And that was intentional, right? We wanted to go with a big bang, get some early adopters, and find out what was going to work. So we are, still feels like, in the beginning of that journey a bit. We have about 26% of our populated target audience who is logged in and using it. And now we're really headed into the stage where we're thinking about, how do we customize it? So if we have this foundation, now how do we really get Nadia embedded into our leadership development? How do we get Nadia leveraging our results from our action surveys, our voices surveys, and doing action planning to help managers figure out where can they target just for their groups? And we're also launching something, actually I feel like it's going out today, around how does Nadia help all of our employees really kind of build those individual development plans so that they can decide what they're going to target on, what they're going to develop in 2025. So we're in that performance management period right now. 

So we have lots to learn. We're still learning, but it's been a great journey. So if you want to talk about any of that, of course, I'm here and I can give you some tips. And we also have a lot of tips around works councils and GDPR and all of that. So if you're on that journey, buckle up. But I have some advice for you there, too. Okay?

Parker Mitchell: Thanks so much, Colleen. And next I'd like to welcome Matt up. Matt has been a core partner since we began conversations. I think it was at SIOP last year. So six months ago. And just done an amazing job, you and the team, shepherding it through and an exciting launch eight weeks ago. So, welcome. 

Matt Dreyer: Thanks Parker. And good to be here and see so many faces that we've been talking about a lot of stuff about AI with lately. So I'm Matt Dreyer, Head of Talent Management at Prudential. And at Prudential we've been thinking about a couple of questions as we went into this year. Chief among them for me was: How do I scale coaching, and how do I provide more democratized access to coaching, which was typically reserved for folks at the top? How could I also provide that coaching at exactly the time that people needed it? And how could I help to power our talent marketplace with more powerful [insight on] what's your next best action in terms of your development? So getting more to that 70/20/10 model, as opposed to always pointing people towards a leadership program.

And, as Parker mentioned, I was at SIOP and we saw this product, and we had heard about this product from some of you at some other places as well. And that was just a short 6 months ago, and we launched 8 weeks ago. We have had over 1,300 people who have used Nadia. The majority of them come back for a second time. We've got an NPS score, that's fresh off the presses, of 91. So people are really engaging with it and enjoying it. But the power in this is that people are coming back to us and telling us that it's answering the question that they need answered when they need it. It is acting like their personal coach or their personal assistant day to day. 

The use cases we've been going with primarily have been around, first off, the population. We launched globally. All of our countries in which we operate, we've launched Nadia. We have launched from the bottom up. So people who wouldn't typically receive coaching have gotten first access to this tool. We've launched, across all of our businesses, all of our functions, to both individual contributors and managers of people. And we've launched through our BRGs to make sure we have a really diverse representation of people who are getting access. 

There are a lot of use cases I'd love to talk about, but I'll wrap things up by saying, if you want to talk to me about things, one is: let's talk about how this has helped us provide tailored development actions at scale in a much more democratized manner. We are using this to support launch of a new leadership program called Leadership DNA and provide personalized coaching around that. As I mentioned, we launched globally, so there have been some really great opportunities and challenges with that. And we are integrating this into our learning programs. 

I can't see them anymore because of the lights, but I'm also going to call out that we have a couple of our HR technology partners here with us today. And if you want to know how we got from deciding to do this to doing this, this quickly, our HR technology partners, Kate and Allison, would be great people to touch base with during the cocktail reception. So, thank you.

Parker Mitchell: Thanks, Matt. And I'll echo that thanks to Kate and Allison. I know it's never easy to bring in a new technology. We really appreciate it. I'd like to now bring Brad up to the stage. Brad has been a stalwart partner. I think we met you at the NYU conference that Anna organized this last year. Explored some team tools, and when we rolled out AI, you were one of the first to say, “Hey, I think this is a really neat initiative.” So thank you for that belief, and welcome.

Brad Haime: Parker, it was a free meal. You gave me a free meal that day, and that's what got me hooked. My name is Brad Haime. I'm part of the team at Experian. And, like the other folks who chatted before me, we, about a year ago, started the journey with Valence, thinking about how we might use Nadia as an executive coach. 

But what I'm excited about, and what I'd be more than happy to chat a little bit about is, like many of you, we have a global leadership development model, right? With core development and with hi-po programs. And we had a gap. And the gap was at our mid-level leader or leader-of-leaders level. We have about 1,000 of these folks in our organization that we really didn't offer much for equally across the organization. And we know leaders like to learn best by doing. We know that leaders interact, and they learn through conversation. And I thought, well, what if we can use Nadia to support this need? 

And what we came up with, in partnership with Valence, is an idea that we're experimenting with right now, with about 300 of our leaders in all of our regions around the world. We have a bespoke 360 model. We have our own leadership characteristics, we call them our characteristics of great leaders. And what we'll do with our leaders is they’ll have an opportunity to complete their 360. Based on the results of the 360, we’ll recommend: these are your top four development areas. And each development area has a module that Nadia sits in the middle of.

The leader will have a conversation with Nadia. What are your development opportunities? What are you already working on? How has your team responded to you? Let's talk about what you learned in your 360. And then Nadia will co-create an experiment with the leader that they'll do in the real world. And about three weeks to a month after that, Nadia will follow up with the leader and say, let's talk about this. How'd it go? Did you have time for it? Did it go well? Do you need a little more time? What did you learn? What might you try differently in the real world? And are you ready to try something else with me? 

So far, it's been going pretty well. We're just rolling out this new type of solution. I'm excited to learn more. And we're going to have a series of focus groups and surveys in order to see what can we tweak as we go before we roll out to the rest of our global population. That's about it. I'm happy to talk more about it. 

Parker Mitchell: Thanks, Brad.