00:00   Talent Development at AGCO

Colleen Sugrue: My role is all about talent development. Right? So, basically, it's ensuring that AGCO has a pipeline of people that can do the job both today, but also the job of the future. Right? And as we all know, the job of the future is kind of a challenge to keep up with these days. Right? So I develop people. And whether that's leadership development or functional trainings or whatever that might be, we are invested in making sure that our employees have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and mindsets to be successful. 

00:38   Scaling Coaching with AI for Global Impact

Colleen: The biggest way that I feel like AI's impacted my role is it's given me the ability to scale things that, historically, that just wasn't an opportunity. Right? I think about coaching. Right? That's the biggest piece for us. Coaching was this really small, niche kind of market that we used to have to heavily invest in. It was only available to a small number of people within the organization. But we've been able, through our partnership with Valence, to really scale this globally in a way that we can both sustain and offer great value to our employees. 

01:14   Why AGCO Explored AI Coaching

Colleen: It was this moment in time for me where we really needed to look holistically across our talent development strategy. Right? We had a lot of things in pieces. We had a lot of things in pockets, but we truly, truly didn't have this global strategy. So I was really looking at everything at the same time. Right? So today is the story. It's about coaching, but just know that it's, it was part of this broader story about how are we really, truly scaling and adopting talent development strategies around the globe. 

01:48   AGCO’s 3 Criteria for L&D Tools

Colleen: For me, there's kind of, like, three key categories that everything had to fit in. Whatever we were gonna do, it had to be scalable. So it had to reach a global audience, and it had to reach a large global audience. Right? So we're about 23,000 people globally. So we had to be able to hit that audience. 

It had to be sustainable. So it had to be something that, if we were gonna implement, it wasn't going to require more people resources, a whole lot of money. Like, it had to sustain itself long term for the future. 

And then the third piece of that is, it had to be about the employee. We had to put the employee first in the decisions that we were making and make sure that it was gonna be something that was applicable to that. 

Here's an AI solution that could speak all of the languages that I need because we have we have a global audience, and we do, we have 13 core languages within our organization, and we have other languages that people speak. Right? So we needed to consider that. We needed to consider this large audience. And with AI, well, this coaching tool was able to customize it to that employee. Right? And it wasn't just this class that I was gonna send people to. It was this always on, always available, 24/7 guidance that was going to be able to be the support for the employee. 

03:14   Designing the Nadia AI Coaching Pilot

Colleen: It was really important for me, though, that I pulled different groups of people in from around the world from different cultures that could also test in different languages. So we had a whole, I think there was about 50 of us in that trial that we did, and we set realistic goals in there. Please try to use it once a week, test out the language capabilities, and we gave some prompts at that point. So here are some conversation starters that that test with her and see how this goes. And then we would meet monthly, and we checked in. We said, how is it going? What are you learning? What are you hearing? At the end of the trial, then we asked everybody really basically sort of that MPS question. Would you recommend this to be used here at AGCO? In our case, the answer was absolutely. 

04:12   Encouraging Experimentation with AI

Colleen: We'd be talking and somebody would say, oh, you know, I really wish or I gotta think through that or I wanna talk through this, and I would say something like, hey. Why don't you give Nadia a try, you know? Why don't you try to have that conversation with Nadia, see if she can help or this, and without a doubt, they would come back to me with, via Teams, typically, I went and I talked to Nadia, and it was amazing. Thank you so much for recommending that to me. 

04:39   Global AI Coaching Rollout at AGCO

Colleen: So I kinda laugh a little bit at this point because I'm like, well, you know, the truth of the matter was, in my team, we're in a position. Like, we needed a win. Okay? Like, we needed a win that was gonna be global, that could have big global impact fairly soon because, like I said, we didn't have a global approach. We didn't have a global strategy just yet, and so much of our work was piecemeal. So we had some things in different regions and not in the others, and licenses were managed all over the place. So really took a moment and said, well, what's our biggest bet? And it was Nadia. 

So it was this moment for us where we felt like we could hit the biggest number of people. We had something globally. You know, we have our voices survey. We get feedback from the organization on what they want, and we knew they wanted more of these opportunities. So we tied straight into that. And we said, look, we heard you from our voices survey. We know that you want more development opportunities. We're working on it. Step one, here's something we have right now. And we went big with it for that reason. 

05:47   Integrating Nadia into Talent Initiatives

Colleen: So kind of two of the major things that we did, one, was implement Nadia as a way to help coach the managers based on the feedback we get from our employee engagement survey. So that was a direct partnership with my peer in that space where she, said, well, yeah, we could do this, and I think we should. And we worked and we said, well, here are the results of the survey. What would we want a coach to talk about? And then how can Valence partner with us to customize that. Right? 

So now it's really amazing. After the voices survey, when a manager gets the results, they can then say there's a, there's a link in the communication that says, would you like to talk about your results with Nadia and get some custom personalized feedback on what you should do with your team and how you should action plan for this? And they can just click it, and there's Nadia, and she's trained up and ready to support them on that. So just an amazing partnership there. Again, find your team, find your partners because they matter. 

You know, my other peer, Doug, on the other side of the fence, talent management, we started partnering on performance conversations and around, well, how can Nadia help coach the managers on how to have better performance conversations? And so same deal. We pulled in Valence. We said, this is what we're trying to do. How do we customize the tool? So now, anytime it's time for performance conversation, they go out there, and Nadia is the support that's in those communications to say, hey. Would you wanna prep for a conversation? Do you have one that's particularly difficult? You know, Nadia can help you role play for that.

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