Key takeaways:

• Prudential wanted an AI solution to scale personalized coaching to every employee.
• Six weeks into a year-long pilot program with 1,500 managers, about 90% were engaging with Nadia regularly.
• Pilot users gave Nadia a NPS score of 91. Responding to a groundswell of interest, Prudential moved to a wider rollout after just six months.
• Nadia has integrated into Prudential’s talent calendar, supporting:
  
  • Rollout of a new leadership model
  • Development of Business Resource Group leadership
  • High-potential leadership programming 
  • 2+2 performance conversations
• More than 3,700 Prudential employees in total have engaged with Nadia for nearly 10,000 coaching conversations

Finding Purpose through Coaching

Prudential’s talent philosophy is all about purpose — helping employees connect what they do to the bigger picture and giving them the resources they need to succeed. That includes individualized coaching for leadership development.

As Head of Talent at Prudential, Matt Dreyer and his team had worked for years to expand their in-person coaching program from a few dozen to 400 current and future leaders. But for a company of more than 40,000 employees, that still meant they were only reaching about 1% of them — a tiny fraction of those who could benefit from personalized training. 

To build a coaching program that could truly make the most of Prudential’s talent resources, he needed a solution that could scale beyond face-to-face interactions. Even with the help of digital tools, one-on-one coaching couldn’t achieve the scale Prudential was looking for. And traditional leadership development software didn't have sufficient context on the individual to provide real personalized value. 

Matt knew that AI had the capacity for scale he was looking for. But the tools he had seen so far hadn’t impressed him. That all changed when he learned about Nadia from a talent executive at another Fortune 100 company. A week later, he demoed Nadia at the annual SIOP (Society for I/O Psychology) conference in April 2024. 

“I literally walked away from the demo texting my boss and my CHRO saying, I've solved our coaching problem. Wait ‘til I get back and tell you about this tool called Nadia.”
—Matt Dreyer, Head of Talent, Prudential

Nadia arrived at just the right time for Prudential. Matt’s talent calendar was packed with new initiatives—the rollout of a new leadership model, the LAUNCH program for high-potential employees, and a new 2+2 performance review framework, just to name a few. By embedding Nadia in these key programs, Prudential not only scaled the reach of personalized coaching; they turbocharged the impact of each of these programs. 

Piloting Nadia with Prudential’s LAUNCH Program and BRGs

Last September, Prudential invited a pilot group of 1,500 managers who were either members of one of Prudential’s Business Resource Groups or part of its LAUNCH program, a training course for high-potential employees, to start working with Nadia. Importantly, these were not people who’d previously had access to one-on-one leadership coaching. 

The pilot group included both early-career managers and individual contributors — people who would never have had access to traditional person-to-person development, but who are crucial to Prudential’s future success.

Six weeks into a year-long pilot program with 1,500 managers, about 90% were engaging with Nadia regularly. Pilot participants gave Nadia a glowing net promoter score of 91. As more and more people asked to be invited — what Dreyer called a “grassroots surge of support” for AI coaching — the Prudential team decided to expand access to Nadia to a broad swath of managers.

“One of the most frequent comments I get from people who use Nadia is: ‘She gave me exactly what I needed when I needed it, and she actually coached me.’ So Nadia solved the scale issue for us, and she solved how we help our people when they need it, not when a coach is available.”
—Matt Dreyer

Achieving Personalized Results at Scale

Before arriving at Prudential, the company’s Chief Talent & Diversity Officer Robert Gulliver spent nine seasons in the NFL, advising Super Bowl-winning teams develop their coaching talent, so he’s seen the difference good coaching can make. Now he’s seeing it again, with Nadia.

The really good coaches we've worked with at Prudential have taken steps to learn our business, but that takes time. With Nadia, it was instantaneous. And Nadia then had the ability to deliver bespoke experiences for our employees, which is making a difference.
—Robert Gulliver, Chief Talent & Diversity Officer, Prudential

To date, more than 3,700 Prudential employees have engaged with Nadia, seeking help with everything from updating a job description to delivering difficult news to their team. That’s more than 9X the reach of the coaching program pre-Nadia.

After the pilot, about 20% of users said Nadia had helped them deal with interpersonal or otherwise sensitive issues — things they might not have felt comfortable discussing with a human coach — a key use case that has borne out with wider adoption.

Since Prudential opened up Nadia access to more managers, users have reported turning to the platform to help them tactically work through difficult issues. And because Nadia can scale in a way that human coaches cannot, it’s able to offer this guidance to any Prudential leader who needs it, 24/7. In all, Nadia has facilitated 10,000 coaching conversations, including 2,000 in March 2025 alone. 

Reinforcing Prudential's Leadership Model with AI Coaching

When Prudential rolled out a new leadership model, they were working to strike a balance between behaviors that might feel like they’re in tension — for instance, keeping a laser focus on their own business while keeping in mind the whole company’s needs (what Gulliver calls “putting on the Enterprise First hat”), or responding to customers while maintaining a long-term strategic vision. These are complex challenges with no easy answers. Moreover, no HR VP has specific knowledge of every single role within the company.

But Nadia does.

Because Nadia was specifically trained on Prudential's new leadership model, managers could work with the AI coach to gain a deeper understanding of what these expectations meant for their particular role. This “day in the life”-style coaching helped break down abstract competencies into actionable behaviors, making the new leadership model more tangible and easier for employees to internalize.

“In some regards, Nadia is doing what a learning and development team might be doing, in terms of introducing this new model and providing learning content to help our leaders get better at using this new tool. So it's great to be able to unlock those types of new use cases.”
—Robert Gulliver

New Use Cases: Performance Reviews and Skill-Building 

Nadia has also proved useful in more traditional, human-centric managerial settings, including delivering performance discussions. In addition to annual reviews, Prudential does regular “2+2” goal-setting sessions: Managers help their team members identify two areas where they’re excelling and two growth areas they should lean into. 

“I personally get excited that Nadia is going to be that difference maker, give us that multiplier effect, and ultimately help us drive business results.”
— Robert Gulliver

More than 600 employees reported using Nadia to help them prepare for these conversations — and that includes people on both sides of the discussion, those giving feedback and receiving it. Managers used Nadia to help them structure feedback and script reflection prompts, while employees could work with the AI on how to receive and process constructive advice. And because Nadia had been trained on Prudential’s 2+2 framework, the support they got was specifically tailored to how they were being evaluated.

More than 700 Prudential employees say they turned to Nadia for help after performance evaluations help them develop skill-building plans and implement feedback. Those plans then form the basis of a continuous feedback loop, which means future Prudential leaders always have a trusted resource to track their progress and find greater purpose in their work. 

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More from Prudential

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We keep hearing that AI is joining the org chart, but what exactly does that mean? In this roundtable discussion, Lucien Alziari (former CHRO, Prudential), Diane Gherson (former CHRO, IBM), and Larry Emond (Senior Partner, Modern Executive Solutions) explore how AI is becoming a new part of how work gets done, how the best leaders are onboarding AI into their organizations, and what the future of talent looks like.

https://youtu.be/nulqC58oUCs

At the 2025 SIOP Conference in Denver, experienced talent leaders from Prudential, Experian, General Mills, and Inizio joined us to share the transformative effect of AI coaching on leadership development and talent management across their global workforces.

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Levi Goertz is cofounder and Head of Client Solutions at Valence. He works closely with each of our enterprise clients, bringing deep expertise on how Valence’s tools unlock the full potential of every employee.