Key Takeaways

• Delta piloted Nadia to help with year-end performance reviews; the results speak for themselves: 96% of managers would recommend Nadia and 75% became return users.
• Managers of large teams went from taking days to draft performance reviews to getting everything done in an hour.
• Nadia helped managers align their goals with Delta’s strategic vision and deliver consistent feedback that drives performance improvements.
• Nadia earned the highest NPS of any technology product Delta had ever released to employees.
• Delta is now expanding to use Nadia for goal setting, high-potential development, and coaching for frontline leaders, paving the path to making Nadia available to all 105,000 employees.

How Delta used AI coaching to improve performance reviews and unlock enterprise-wide benefits

Performance management is essential to organizational health, but the process is often time-consuming, inconsistent, and a source of stress for both HR leaders and managers. For nearly 100 years, Delta has built its success on a high-performance culture and robust talent management, but mandatory performance reviews, goal setting, and mid-year check-ins have become an administrative burden that threatens to undermine their purpose. That’s why Delta piloted Nadia, Valence’s AI coach, to streamline and standardize the review process, transforming work that once took managers days into an hour’s worth of effort while improving completion rates and improving the overall quality of employees’ performance reviews. 

While the performance management pilot was a clear success, Delta uncovered something even more powerful: when an AI coach is tailored to a company’s culture, values, and employee needs, it offers the ongoing support that frontline workers need to manage stress and stay grounded in a high-stakes environment, creating endless opportunities to connect with employees and drive future success.

From pilot rollout to results

• 21,171 coaching sessions to date
• 95% would recommend Nadia to a peer
• 90% reduction in time spent creating performance reviews
• 92% saw stronger alignment between personal goals and company strategy
• 89% reported increased confidence during performance management

Tim Gregory, Delta’s Director of HR Innovation and Workforce Technology, led the Nadia performance management pilot, bringing together stakeholders across HR, IT, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement. Because Nadia is enterprise-ready—GDPR and SOC 2 compliant with strong data privacy—the rollout moved quickly and smoothly. Valence trained Nadia on Delta’s “Flight Plan” and “Rules of the Road,” which lay out the company’s strategic vision and best practices for developing great teams to achieve that vision, and a full professional development library, giving her a deep understanding of Delta’s culture, values, and expectations so she could apply them consistently and at scale.

Delta introduced Nadia to 300 employees across a carefully constructed user group of diverse roles. Managers received grounded, tailored coaching that helped them craft thoughtful reviews in far less time, cutting a process that once took days down to an hour. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Nadia also learned team dynamics, helped users draft personal goals, track progress, and provide accountability throughout the year, resulting in higher completion rates, stronger alignment to Delta’s strategic vision, and giving the company a more consistent picture of performance across the organization. 

“When our folks were interacting with Nadia, it was able to retrieve all the grounded information related to Delta,” Tim said. “One of the things that really stood out was the almost shock—"Wow, this actually knows us.” It also aligned to Delta’s “Flight Plan,” which lays out the company’s strategic vision and priorities, and consistency across teams.  - Tim Gregory

Employees quickly realized that Nadia deeply understood Delta’s culture and values, building trust, inspiring advocacy over other AI tools, and driving strong engagement. By the end of the pilot, 400 employees had participated, Nadia earned a 96% recommendation rate, 75% of users returned weekly for repeat sessions, and 83% said it was more helpful than other performance tools. After expanding the pilot to 1,400 users, Valence discovered that 70% of all Nadia conversations focused on broader needs such as problem-solving, real-time guidance during high-pressure situations, and deeper career development and skill building. This revelation, combined with user feedback, began shifting Delta's perspective, sparking a plan to expand Nadia to an even larger user base.

“It’s one thing when people try something out of curiosity. It’s another when it drives real productivity—and they come back to it. That return rate told us we had something valuable,”  -  Tim Gregory in a recent Valence webinar

Strategic, tailored expansion

Nadia’s expansion strategy began with executive coaching integration, where she served as an interim solution for senior leaders. Despite initial resistance to replacing human coaches with AI, Nadia achieved a 4.6/5 satisfaction score with 25% activation. The next phase rolled Nadia out to Delta’s entire corporate population, quickly reaching thousands of active users and boosting participation in the mid-year review process from 90% to 93%. She also earned the highest NPS of any technology product Delta had ever released to employees.

During this expansion, Nadia demonstrated how she could boost productivity and provide organizational insights beyond performance reviews. Unlike generic AI tools, only Nadia could tell leadership what their workforce was actually struggling with and striving toward. Delta leadership recognized her strategic value, using Nadia to identify roadblocks, gain unprecedented visibility into workforce challenges, and explore new use cases. What began as a cautious experiment quickly earned recognition as a highly innovative deployment. 

Empowering employees across the organization

Delta began rolling out a new series of Nadia use cases designed to expand her impact across talent processes, frontline support, and long-term career development:

• Talent Planning and Succession Management
  Delta’s 2,000 directors conduct multi-year promotion and succession planning, a process that previously demanded heavy HRBP support. Valence customized Nadia to understand Delta’s 12-box talent grid, helping leaders assess talent, build succession plans, and identify development needs, relieving HRBPs.
• Connect Conversations for Frontline Leaders
  With frontline managers overseeing up to 75 employees, Delta’s CHRO launched an initiative requiring at least one meaningful annual check-in per direct report. Nadia offers mobile-optimized coaching, synthesizing conversations into required forms, and guiding stressed employees to underused wellness resources.
• Workforce Intelligence That Drives Talent Strategy
  Perhaps, most powerfully, by aggregating anonymized conversation data across thousands of employees, HR leaders gained visibility into workforce patterns – which skills managers struggle to develop, what obstacles most often derail goal achievement, and where employee aspirations diverge from organizational needs. This intelligence enabled the Delta team to make more informed decisions about how they allocate development resources, design training programs, and address systemic performance barriers—transforming every Nadia conversation into a data point that strengthens the organization’s talent strategy.

Tailored, strategic guidance for every Delta employee

Building on her success in performance management, Delta is now expanding Nadia’s reach to support employees in real-time across talent development, frontline leadership, and career growth. Nadia is on the path to becoming a comprehensive partner for every Delta employee, supporting talent processes, long-term career development, skill development, and day-to-day performance in a way that reflects Delta’s values and strengthens its high-performance culture. 

“The best leadership tool we’ve received at Delta during my 12+ years here.” - Nadia user

“The structure Nadia brings feels like a Delta voice telling me to ‘keep climbing’—very motivating and on brand.’” - Nadia user

Delta’s journey shows how Nadia evolves from solving a single pain point to becoming part of the organization’s cultural fabric, transforming how work gets done and how a company invests in its most important asset: its people.

For more on the Delta story, watch our webinar, "AI Coaching for Performance Management" featuring Brian Sullivan (Director of Talent and Performance Management) and Natalie Tincher (General Manager, Talent, Skills, and Performance Managment.)