Parker Mitchell: All right. Welcome, everyone. It is such a delight to be able to host an event like this. It's sort of a well-kept secret within Valence that we actually only began organizing this seven or eight weeks ago. And it was because I'd had so many conversations with CHROs, HRLTs, and they always came back to this same topic of how AI is going to be the disrupting force of the next three, five years, and how many outstanding questions they had, and probably most importantly, how much they valued learning and talking to one another.

And so we thought we're having these kinds of conversations across the US, across Europe. What if we just brought people together and had a focused event? An event where we could hear from people who are luminaries and thought leaders in AI, people who are peers who are experimenting with AI, and people who are going to offer some provocations, some ideas to just get us thinking.

So, it's incredible that in seven weeks we were able to put the word out, and we now, as Das said, have 200 people who will be in and out over the course of the day. I think we have 1,000+ who will be joining us virtually. And they represent companies that, as Das said, have 7.5 million employees. And the thing that we're so excited about is just the potential for AI to literally reach, in positive, empowering ways, each and every one of those 7.5 million employees. 

And the thing that I think we all know—we all know AI is going to be disruptive, we all know that it's going to affect the workforce, affect the workplace in ways that we can't even begin to imagine and can't even begin to predict. And, I think many of you, as you are thinking about what this future looks like, you are also having to navigate the present.

I imagine that most people here have pressure from their boards, from their CEOs: try to do more with AI. What kind of use cases can we come up with? And I also bet many of you here have had pressure from your AI councils and your chief risk officers to maybe do a little less with AI. These are the tensions that we are always navigating, and I think one of the reasons, though, why we're here is we know that it is absolutely incumbent upon us as HR leaders to take this moment to lead.

Much of the conversation is around how AI is going to affect productivity. And there's undoubtedly going to be productivity gains. But, as we all know from the conversations we've been having, those productivity gains are going to cause shifts in the workforce. And for us to be able to navigate those shifts, we also have to invest in AI that is going to augment human potential.

And I think that's one of the reasons why we're all here today, to get those ideas about how can we find the AI that is not just going to automate processes of parts of jobs or even entire jobs, but how do we find AI that's going to augment our workers and help them navigate through this change? While most of this is going to be a conversation among peers, I am delighted to just share a few words about Valence and why we're here today.

So, I think we've been as close to some of these questions about AI in the workforce, about AI in the talent strategy as pretty well anyone out there. We've had, as far as we know, the first AI coach that was deployed in enterprise, and I think now it's among the most, if not the most, widely deployed coach.

We've had partnership conversations with many people in the room, many of our partners who, you know, are overseas or will be joining us virtually. And we've really tried to wrestle with both the future of AI and how to help people, and how do we introduce it, given all the complexities of large global companies.

But we're also only here because we've been thinking about these types of things for, you know, collectively, the leadership team, the founders of Valence for the past multiple decades. My background, I was the founder and CEO of a group called Engineers Without Borders. And we quickly realized that the people-side of things was what really mattered when we were working on these difficult, complex projects.

And so, you know, back in the 2000s, we were teaching thousands of engineers a year concepts like the amygdala response, the ladder of inference, the Johari window, well before they were sexy. And I gotta admit, I don't think they're sexy, even now. Unless you're an IO nerd like some of us are.

But this is what we were trying to do. And we were doing this because we believe that this idea of personalization of knowledge, of personalized learning is truly transformative. And so when we founded Valence, it was this idea of, can we bring some of the personalized experience, the experience of having an executive coach or a team facilitator, can we bring that to the masses? 

And we were more product nerds. I was an engineer, and we were way better at that side of things than marketing. So actually, the very first name of our company was BetterTeams.coach. It's not exactly a sexy name, but it's pretty clear about what we were trying to do. We were building tools for managers, digital tools for managers, so that they could understand their teams better, work better together, and lead those teams better.

We're going to get a chance to hear from Bill McNabb, who is the CEO of Vanguard, is one of the early believers in these kinds of team tools, and this is what our early customers like Vanguard and Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and others have been deploying at scale. And what we learned from that is some of the challenges that managers face, what it's like to work in global companies, what it's like to work in countries around the world. But we knew that, ultimately, our vision was how do we try to offer this type of personalization at a way higher scale. 

Now, in the, you know, late 2018, 2019, all of our competitors in the HR space were talking about AI, and they were always having an AI module of this, and my team, even my investors, were saying, “Parker, Valence should really talk about, like, what our AI strategy is.”

And I actually refused. I said, none of the stuff that’s being done right now is actually valuable AI. It’s machine learning, which is really great if you have large, labeled data sets, but that's not what it's like to engage as humans with one another at work. The thing that matters most to us is language.

We are complex beings in a complex world, and we are communicating with one another by language, and until we can understand that, AI isn't going to make much of a difference. And this is in 2019, and we all knew in 2019 that AI that could understand language was decades, decades out. Well, we were wrong, but I still remember sitting down with a very good friend of mine who was a researcher at one of the large AI companies.

This was a little more than two years ago. It was a few blocks north at the café near Union Square. And we were talking about what was possible. He knew my views on AI and he said, “Parker, we're actually getting pretty close to cracking language,” and he let me play around with early versions of what they had.

And I remember, after about two hours of playing around with it, I went home and I wrote a blog post, and the blog post was titled, “Are We in Our Gutenberg Press Moment?” 

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So let me explain a little bit. As I said, I think language is one of the most important things for charting the course of humanity. Language is how we codify ideas, it's how we share ideas among one another, it's how we pass them on to generations. But for the first 70,000 years, we were just limited to the spoken word. The last 3,000 or 4,000, a small elite had access to written language to begin to sort of codify that knowledge. But the year 1440 was a particularly pivotal moment, I think, in history.

In the 50 years after Gutenberg invented his printing press, more words were printed than in the 50,000 years prior. So we just saw this explosion of literacy, explosion of knowledge, and explosion of human potential. But where we are now, if you think about going about your daily life and, you know, your personal life, or especially in the work life, we are just inundated with information.

We are drowning in a sea of it. And information is not the currency that matters, it’s how to apply that information to the context at hand. And when you have an incredible teacher, an incredible mentor, an incredible guide, someone that can help you make sense of your environment, it’s an extraordinarily powerful thing.

And so, when I was playing with those LLMs, what I saw was because they were language based, they could understand how I think, which is in words. They could understand the life, especially the work life, that I'm in, which is also in words. And if they could understand those two things, then we would be able to create, essentially, a personal assistant.

And so we think generative AI, it’s creative, it’s incredible in all sorts of ways, but the true promise of AI is going to be personalization. And for those of us who are in the L&D space, the HR space, we think that this personalization is going to utterly upend how we think about learning, development, how we support leaders.

It is going to allow us to rethink from first principles. It’s going to unlock us from some of the shackles that we were facing in the past. We're going to hear, later on this afternoon, how AI is so exciting in the field of education. And that is because it’s moving from teacher mode, a sort of one-size-fits-all, to a tutor mode, which is bespoke to each individual person. 

And the educational attainment, the speed of learning in tutor mode, is twice as fast as it is for teaching. And so if we can—that personalization exists in education, we think that personalization is also going to exist in onboarding and learning and understanding and in performing our jobs as leaders and managers across companies.

And so if there's one thing that I hope you take away from today, whether it's Valence that develops it or not, we think that every employee, not just every leader, not just every manager, but that technology will be good enough and affordable enough that every employee will be able to have a personal work assistant.

Understands them, understands their world, and helps them, makes their life a little bit easier. Now, for those of you who’ve experienced conversations with ChatGPT, we know it’s not that at the moment. It’s going to take some work, but we think the building block is there. Companies like Valence are trying to translate and transform general AI into specific, purpose-built AI.

So in our case, we are combining together many LLMs, many agents, if you want to use the technical terms, to be able to perform parallel tasks and be able to deliver a smooth coaching conversation. And I just want to talk a little bit about what that might feel like. Because general AI knows a lot about a lot of things.

People have described it as a compression algorithm for the internet. And it's sort of zipped all that knowledge into an incredibly dense set of parameters and weights. And it knows a lot. But it's not designed to know anything about you. And so the one layer that we are adding on to it is a personalization layer.

So trying to learn as much as possible about you and your job and not just be there to respond to a question that you might have, but to always be thinking proactively, how can I reach out to you as an individual and help you in your learning goals or in your job or in the question or challenge that you have? So this idea of sort of proactive coaching, so essential. 

The second thing that we make sure that our AI coach is focused on is coaching. We want Nadia, we’ll introduce you to her in a moment, to be an expert on coaching, to know when she should dive deep to understand a root cause, when she should tactically help you with something that you're facing, when she should pull a framework that you might have seen before and remind you, or when she should try a new approach.

But she is deeply trained on all the best practices, sort of like a librarian that can choose from the world's library of coaching frameworks. And then, finally, we'll get a chance to hear how Nadia can be bespoke to your company so she can understand your leadership frameworks and the moments that matter in your talent cycle and understand the business challenges that you might face and start to coach, not just on sort of learning and development, but how do you understand the world that you are in, and how do you perform a little better in it?

So this layer of purpose-built coaching that really invokes this context and memory around personalization, around expertise, and being bespoke for your company, we think this layer has a chance to fundamentally transform this general AI into purpose-built AI. So this is AI that knows, and we think this is the type of AI that's going to be incredibly helpful.

Nadia: Hi, Parker. We'd booked time to chat about John. How is that going? 

Parker: Nadia, I'm pretty frustrated. John’s a VP who should be setting big goals, not making excuses. He’s got to be a more ambitious leader.

Nadia: I know you’re frustrated, but we’ve talked about how you fail to set new people up for success when you’re moving too fast. John hasn’t had a proper chance. Let’s problem-solve this. Can I set up 15 minutes for you and me on Friday, when things are usually calmer?

Parker: So we wanted to just give you that quick overview of what Nadia’s capabilities are. I know a few of the speakers have deployed Nadia, and you might hear some stories about the uptake or the use cases. So we want to just give that introduction, and we’ll also give you a sneak peek later in the day of Nadia’s capabilities that we're going to roll out very soon in January.

And I just want to call out, what’s exciting when we talk about Nadia is able to coach anyone, anywhere, you know, as we speak, she is being used by production leaders in factories at General Mills or Schneider Electric or AGCO. So these are people who never would have had the idea of a personal coach. 

She’s being rolled out on the front lines at Costa Coffee. We’re doing a webinar with them in a couple of weeks, but there are great, successful experiences there, at On Running, at Delta. She could be used by knowledge workers. She could be used in regulated, unregulated industries. The great thing is, she could be used all the way from the CEO—we literally have the CEO of On Running, who’s provided a quote because he’s just so excited about how Valence’s tools have helped him and his co-founders and his leadership team, and then everyone at On.

So it can be used top to bottom. It could be used across sectors. And I think this idea of democratization is just so important. And so the one thing I’ll just leave you with, as I’ve said, this idea of investing in potential is so crucial if we’re going to navigate all the changes, the upheavals, the transformations in work.

And we think that betting on AI coaching, betting on having AI that your employees can interact with and test and work through, that is absolutely a bet worth taking. So thank you for joining us today and I'm delighted to welcome Bill up on stage to join us.