Key Takeaways

• 2026 is the inflection year for enterprise AI adoption: The gap between AI's frontier capabilities and frontline adoption is closing. Leaders who invest now in bringing personalized AI to their employees will define the performance trajectories of their organizations.
• AI coaching shifts from reactive to proactive: Rather than waiting for employees to seek guidance, the next generation of AI coaching proactively surfaces insights — flagging burnout risks, friction points, and onboarding gaps before they become problems.
• Personalization is the key differentiator in AI coaching: Effective AI coaching requires deep knowledge of the individual: their work style, communication preferences, personality profile, and calendar context. Generic AI tools cannot replicate this level of personalized support.
• Calendar data reveals the real organizational chart: Traditional HR systems often fail to reflect how people actually work. Nadia uses calendar and meeting data to identify real team structures and surface relevant coaching at the right moments.
• AI coaching accelerates manager effectiveness from day one: New managers typically spend months building the context they need to lead well. AI coaching compresses this learning curve by surfacing team dynamics, personality insights, and burnout signals immediately — not after quarters of observation.
• AI coaching complements human connection — it doesn't replace it: The goal of AI coaching at Valence is to augment the human manager, giving them the awareness and tools to have better conversations — not to automate relationships or remove the human element from leadership development.

Full Transcript

Why 2026 Is the Defining Year for Workforce AI Adoption

Parker Mitchell, CEO, Valence

[00:00:03]

Parker Mitchell: It is such an honor to welcome everyone here today, to look out over the sea of faces. I have been torn this morning between wanting to welcome so many people who I know and I've had a chance to work with and partner with, and I wanted to spend the time doing that. And, we'll see in a moment how our AI coach, Nadia, has foreseen my behavior this morning, the morning of Summit. I've spent the last few minutes doing the final edits to slides, to make sure that this presentation is going to go well.

Everyone here is busy. Everyone here has a million things that you could be doing today. So, why did you take the time to spend a day wrestling with this question? We think that the question that is most important — the question that five years from now we will look back and say we wish we spent even more time exploring and trying to answer — is: how well did we help our workforce transition to this new human-plus-AI era?

We think that's probably the defining question of 2026, and 2026 is the year in which the trajectories will start to get hardened. When we first held this summit — this is our third annual AI & the Workforce Summit — it was a very different AI world. We were still in early days. We were still experimenting. People would tell their friends that they had ChatGPT write a sonnet for their partner's birthday, and that was the big, exciting thing.

Fast-forward two years, I think we all know that AI is going to change work, it is going to change jobs, it is going to change the companies that succeed and fail. And we are all wrestling with how do we bring our workforces along in this transition?

Bridging the Frontier and the Front Line of AI

Parker Mitchell: One of the things we're excited about with these summits is that we bring together two different sets of worlds, two different sets of folks experiencing AI in very different ways. We get a chance to hear from people who are at the frontier — at the frontier of how AI is scaling and how AI is growing in its capabilities — as well as people who are on the front line of how AI is being adopted, how it is being rolled out, and how it is changing work.

Our very first Summit, we had a chance to hear from Geoffrey Hinton, on the frontier side of things — the godfather of AI, the Nobel Laureate. And the thing that struck me most about my conversations with him was how he said, despite being as close to this technology as anyone, he underestimated how quickly the capabilities would grow.

My best friend described working with LLMs using an analogy from Rain Man. He said, 'I've been using these LLMs for a year and a half now, and I never know — am I going to get 246 toothpicks? Which is like, how did you figure that out? Or, am I going to get "I can't cross the street."' That's how we feel about AI. You never know if you're going to get a miraculous "wow" moment, or if it comes back insisting there are four items when you asked for four and there are clearly three.

At Valence, we've been really focused on this idea of personalization, and what we've seen is that 2026 is going to be the year, in enterprise, where AI is going to come to you. AI is going to come to your workers where they are, and it's going to try to understand them — instead of them going to AI and trying to understand AI.

The Origins of Valence: Engineering, Leadership, and Personalization at Scale

Parker Mitchell: I studied engineering. I did a minor in cognitive science. I was fascinated by how the brain works, and how the brain works in neural nets. My favorite course was Systems Design 422 — Machine Intelligence. We had a chance to build very small back-propagating neural nets — the foundational technology for LLMs — but they were in the order of 200 to 300 nodes, instead of 200 to 300 trillion nodes. That was the AI winter. But that fascination and curiosity was always there.

I founded an organization called Engineers Without Borders. Most of my job, as that organization grew from 100 to 10,000 people, was about culture — about how to bring people along in this movement. I got some very clear feedback pretty early on that, as an engineer, my EQ was a little less than my IQ. And so I realized that if I was going to help this organization achieve its mission, I needed to become a student of leadership.

The thing I very quickly realized is the thing that worked for me might not be the thing that worked for someone else. The thing that I've learned, my journey — I actually have to sometimes forget that, and apply experience from the person that I am working with, understand their journey, and be able to guide them. And so this idea of personalization — of how do we do this at scale? — was always on our mind.

In 2016, a New York Times article featured research from Prasad Sethi's team at Google — the founding father of the people analytics team at Google. Their research was unequivocal that when teams come together, the driver of performance is not the who on the team, but the how the team works together. That concept became the founding idea of Valence.

Building Nadia: Going All-In on AI-First Enterprise Coaching

Parker Mitchell: For five years, we had tools that really tried to help leaders and managers understand themselves, understand their teams, understand the dynamics of their teams. And it was exciting, but we always knew there was something more. We were always waiting for the technology to catch up to this vision of personalization at scale.

As soon as the APIs, as soon as the publicly available large language models to do this reasoning emerged, we quickly knew that we had two paths — and really only one path was the right path.

The first path is to say, this is going to be powerful — let's add it on to our existing SaaS software system. And the second path, the path we quickly decided was the only path that made sense, was to say: this technology is going to be the most transformative shift. We have to reinvent ourselves as an AI-first company. We need to go find the best AI leaders in the world, bring them together, and begin to solve some of the most challenging problems at work.

In 2023, we launched Nadia. And when we kicked it off, the question we kept getting asked was: would people even talk to an AI coach? Obviously, that question has been answered unequivocally. All the research out there says people are more comfortable, in some cases, talking to AI than they are to humans.

I have a very interesting relationship with Nadia — a creation I'm part of. On the one hand, I'm always very excited about the capabilities she has. And on the other hand, I know that every version, every time I try her, it is going to be the worst version of Nadia I've ever tried. And our mission is to just accelerate that growth.

Proactive AI Coaching: From Individual Coach to Talent Platform

Parker Mitchell: Last year, we partnered with people in the HR function and asked: what are the things you're wrestling with? There was really this belief that we could reinvent a talent cycle — a talent strategy, a talent management and performance management system that probably most of you feel is a little bit outdated. And so there was this chance to reinvent it.

What we found over the course of 12 months is that Nadia has moved from just an AI coach offered to individuals, to beginning to be almost a new talent management platform — one that should be able to bring the visions you have to life, in a much more personal way, that makes it easier and faster and better for your employees to do those performance processes that are core to driving performance.

I want to say a deep thank-you to everyone who brought a new technology and a new vendor into your organization. We know you take risks bringing in new technology, and our mission is to help you reinvent that talent process you have a vision for, as quickly as possible.

Live Demo: Nadia's Personalized AI Coaching in Action

Calendar Intelligence and Proactive Insights

Parker Mitchell: Imagine a coach who, all they're doing — 24/7 — is focused on understanding you and your world and how to help you. Imagine they had access to your systems, access to your calendar. Imagine they got a chance to know each of the different people you work with, and what their work styles are like, and what their personality is like, and what some of the dynamics between you or the group might be. Imagine how much better that coaching would be.

What Nadia has been doing is looking at my calendar and surfacing insights. She's identified what we'd call high-stakes meetings, and she's saying: 'Ana and you have very different definitions of ready.' She talks about what's coming up. I have an emergent style. But that is a good thing to know. These kinds of insights — I'm a busy executive. I don't have time to think through all the ramifications of things. So if Nadia's doing this and bringing it to me, it's an extraordinarily helpful experience.

Building Personalized Profiles for Every Employee

Parker Mitchell: At the heart of this new, highly personalized experience is the profile that Nadia's building of you. There's a private profile just for me — it has information about my organization, my team's goals, documents I've uploaded. We also support a range of different work style and personality frameworks. If you like DiSC, you can connect and upload your DiSC profiles. We have one called Perspective, that hundreds of thousands of people in the corporate world have used.

The coaching for someone who is pressure-prompted is going to be utterly different from someone who starts early and builds momentum. You need very different coaching on that. And what we discovered quickly is people actually want others to know about their work styles. They want to be able to say, 'The best way to work with me is X.' So Nadia can create a collaboration profile that you get full control over — and then you get to reveal it, so other Nadias can understand it and give specific coaching on it.

AI Coaching for Team Collaboration and Friction Detection

Parker Mitchell: Where do you find the source of truth about the teams that you are on? HR systems, we've discovered, are not the source of truth. The actual source of truth is really your calendar information. Nadia goes through and asks: who are the people you have most meetings with? And she can begin to assemble them into teams based on the types of recurring meetings you have.

I'm going to show you what it looks like when I ask Nadia: 'Kira and I will be organizing a summit together. We're trying to bring together 200 or so folks, speakers from across America, and it's in six weeks. Given what you know about the two of us, what are some friction points that might emerge as we work together on this?'

This isn't a simple question-and-answer GPT wrapper. There's a question here, and our intelligence layer and memory layer is going through, trying to understand: what is the situation? What are the pieces of information, the dots I need to connect? It's looking at profile information, calendar data, chat history — all of this is scaffolded to each step of the conversation to provide a better suggestion. We're going from general guidance to person-specific guidance.

Proactive Onboarding Support for New Team Members

Parker Mitchell: Nadia spotted that a new member had been added to our team, and she sent me an email: 'There's a new person who has been added to your team. Maybe that's someone you need to onboard.' She's highlighting what are some of the challenges that might exist with onboarding, especially when you're a busy executive. She's given me a manager alert about investments I need to be making to onboard Ana. We're trying to have Nadia understand your world — and then feed you the things that are going to be most helpful for you as a manager.

AI Coaching for New Manager Onboarding: Ana Martinez's Story

Ana Martinez, Head of Engineering, Valence

[00:27:18]

Ana Martinez: My name is Ana Martinez. I'm the head of engineering at Valence. I've been here for about four months. Before that, I spent five years at Slack. Slack had a reputation of having the best onboarding process in the industry. They did a fantastic job. By the end of my week of onboarding, I felt like I knew the company, its values, culture. I knew how to fix a bug. I even knew where the best coffee in the office was.

But then you're left to your own devices, and I was like, but I don't know how to do my job here. I don't know who's working with me. I don't know who in my team is burning out. I don't know who my colleagues are. Who do I need to be building trust with? And that takes months. We're working with people. People take a while to open up to you. The engineer who is a high performer might be afraid to tell me that things are not going well, because he wants to show that he has everything under control, even though he's interviewing and on the brink of burnout. I might not know what meetings I need to be careful about, what dynamics are in place.

That takes months, and quarters, and many, many conversations. In the meanwhile, you're expected to deliver with your team. You're expected to onboard new members. You're expected to interview people and figure out what personalities are going to work well with your team. And then you finish onboarding, do a great job, and now all of these new humans are under you. There's no onboarding for that.

How Nadia Accelerates Manager Effectiveness

Ana Martinez: That is the past. Now, how do we use Nadia to onboard? In My People, I can quickly add who my engineers are — the people who are going to be working with me — and I can look at their personalities and really understand who I need to be careful delivering feedback to. Who are the people that really prefer having a frank conversation? I'm a very blunt speaker, and it will be great to know who of my engineers will shy away when I'm trying to give them feedback.

As a new manager joining a new team, I want to know who in my team is burning out immediately. In this case, Nadia is telling me: 'Hey, Chris might be carrying too much.' Let me tell you something about Chris. I worked with Chris for the past four months. Chris will never tell me that he's burning out. Chris is a team player, and if I tell Chris, 'Can you do this for me?' Chris will say yes, even if he's working at 2 a.m. and feels like burning out. So, as a new manager, it's fantastic. Now I can see that Chris is at risk of burnout. Not only that, but the insights also say that he becomes hypercritical of himself under pressure. That tells me — blunt Ana — please be gentle with how you talk to him.

I also have the high-stakes meeting prep. This is a meeting with a leadership team where I'm the only introvert in a room of nine, so I never speak. It was really interesting to see this insight, because I thought, oh, this is why I feel like I always want to say something, and by the time I've made it in my brain and practiced it a few times, they move on. So it's been really helpful for me to know that I need to get out of my comfort zone and maybe be a little bit more assertive.

The last point I want to share is about John. John has an incredible ability to read people. I learned this through many conversations with him. But having this insight — knowing his EQ is actually quite high — tells me to pay attention to what he's telling me. I have 23 direct reports. I need my leaders to tell me, 'Hey, be careful about this.' Being able to get these insights immediately, and not have to build this level of trust through months or quarters, is fantastic.

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to join Valence. I am a very passionate manager. Managers make mistakes with people, which hurt people. And by the time you learn how to do things, your top performer might have left, or you might have failed to deliver the tough conversations that needed to happen.

Proactive AI Coaching and the Human-Plus-AI Era

Parker Mitchell

[00:33:08]

Parker Mitchell: To bring this back to full circle — this idea of proactivity is the key thing we are weaving into this idea of an AI coach. There are different proactive coaching options you're going to be able to have. You're going to be able to get different types of nudges. But the idea here is a bigger step: to bring our workforces along in this journey.

2026, I think, is going to be one of the most challenging moments for us as leaders as we try to help our workforces navigate this. One of the key things we need to do is try to put the most helpful and powerful and personal and augmentative AI into their hands.

As everyone who has a workforce knows, you're going to get a power law distribution. You're going to get some set of folks who are going to be the pioneers, pushing the boundaries. For the rest of the people, it's going to be a journey to help them build that fluency. And so we are actively trying to work to put this proactive AI into employees' hands — not just to help them perform better, not just to help reduce some of the friction of how people work together, but also to help them make this transition to the new human-plus-AI era.

We wanted to showcase to you some of the things we think are possible at this intersection of the frontier and the front lines. So, thank you.