Leading Through the Human and AI Revolution

Arianna Huffington — Founder and CEO, Thrive Global; Co-Founder, The Huffington Post. Arianna is one of the world's most recognized voices on wellness, resilience, and human potential in the workplace. Her work at Thrive Global focuses on behavior change through AI-powered micro-interventions, bringing personalized health and wellness coaching to employees at scale across organizations including Walmart. She is the author of multiple bestselling books including "Thrive" and "The Sleep Revolution."

Parker Mitchell — Co-Founder and CEO, Valence. Parker leads Valence, the company behind Nadia, an AI coach deployed across dozens of Fortune 500 organizations to support leadership development and human potential at scale.

Das Rush — VP or Marketing, Valence.

Only 10% of people say they are excited about AI — and yet the leaders deploying it often assume their employees feel the same enthusiasm they do. That gap, Arianna Huffington argues, is one of the most important things business leaders need to close right now. In this conversation with Valence CEO Parker Mitchell and COO Das, Arianna explores what it will take to bring workforces along through the human and AI revolution: why personalization is AI's true superpower, how AI coaching works as a non-judgmental companion on a human journey, and why the AI era may turn out to be more like the Renaissance than the Industrial Revolution.

Key Takeaways

• Only 10% of people are excited about AI — leaders need to close that gap. A recent Pew survey found that excitement about AI is far from universal. There is a real and growing disconnect between leaders who assume their employees are enthusiastic about AI adoption and employees who are anxious or skeptical. Closing that gap requires paying genuine attention to fear, uncertainty, and the unequal distribution of resilience across a workforce.
• Human development needs to be funded at the same rate as machine development. Arianna cites Yuval Harari: for every dollar invested in developing AI, we need to invest equally in developing humans — or we are placing all our bets on machines. The organizations and leaders who understand this will be the ones who capture the full value of the AI era rather than just a fraction of it.
• Personalization and memory are AI coaching's true superpowers. What distinguishes an AI coach from a generic chatbot is context: knowing your aspirations, blind spots, schedule, anxieties, and history — and showing up proactively at exactly the right moment. A coach that reaches out five minutes before an anxiety-inducing meeting, reminds you of your preparation, and tells you you've got this is qualitatively different from any on-demand query tool.
• Great coaching is non-judgmental — more GPS than critic. The most powerful thing an AI coach can do is accompany someone on their journey without judgment. Like a GPS that recalculates when you take the wrong turn without shaming you for it, an AI coach meets people where they are, suggests the smallest next step, and stays with them when they fall off track. That is what produces lasting behavior change.
• The AI era is more like the Renaissance than the Industrial Revolution. If AI only makes us more productive, we will have missed a much larger opportunity. The Renaissance was about creativity, human exploration, and consciousness — not just efficiency. AI's deepest potential is as a copilot for human development: helping us know ourselves better, become more self-aware, and bring our fullest capacity to the relationships and challenges that matter most.
• The workplace is one of the last places where people are required to engage across difference. At a time of growing polarization, work remains one of the few contexts where people interact with those outside their self-defined tribes. That makes workplace culture — and the tools that support it — an important lever for building the kind of belonging and connection that extends far beyond the office.

Questions This Session Answers

How are employees actually responding to AI in the workplace?

Despite widespread enthusiasm among business leaders, employee sentiment toward AI is far more cautious. A recent Pew Research survey found that only 10% of people say they are excited about AI. Arianna Huffington points to a significant disconnect: leaders often assume their workforces share their optimism, while employees are experiencing real anxiety about job displacement, loss of identity, and uncertainty about the future. Closing this gap requires actively investing in human development alongside technology deployment — not just communicating change, but building the resilience and trust needed to navigate it.

What makes AI coaching different from a general-purpose AI tool?

The difference between an AI coach and a general-purpose AI tool is context, memory, and proactivity. A general AI tool responds to queries. An AI coach builds a cumulative understanding of who you are — your aspirations, blind spots, schedule, relationships, and history — and uses that knowledge to reach out at the right moment with the right support. Parker Mitchell describes a Nadia feature that contacts a user five minutes before an anxiety-inducing meeting to offer encouragement based on prior conversations. That kind of proactive, personalized presence is what produces real behavior change and what users most frequently thank Valence for.

Why is non-judgment so important in AI coaching?

Human coaching — and most institutional feedback — carries enormous implicit judgment. Coaching has historically been stigmatized as corrective, especially in high-stakes corporate environments. Arianna Huffington argues that the most effective AI coaching model operates more like a GPS than a critic: when you take the wrong turn, it recalculates without commentary. It knows what you love and what you struggle with, suggests the smallest achievable next step, and stays present when you fall off track. This non-judgmental companionship is what allows people to make changes they would never attempt if they felt they were being evaluated.

How should business leaders build trust around AI with their workforce?

Building trust around AI requires going beyond technical upskilling and addressing the deeper human challenge of navigating major uncertainty. Not everyone has the same predisposition toward change — different people have different psychological biotypes, and some are naturally oriented toward negative forecasting. Leaders who acknowledge this and invest in helping employees build resilience and belonging — not just technical proficiency — are the ones who will bring their workforces successfully through the transition. The goal is not to eliminate fear but to ensure no one is left to navigate it alone.

Is the AI revolution more like the Industrial Revolution or the Renaissance?

Arianna Huffington argues it should be treated as more like the Renaissance. The Industrial Revolution was about efficiency and productivity — important, but limited. The Renaissance was about creativity, consciousness, and the full flowering of human potential. If AI is only deployed to automate tasks and improve output metrics, organizations will miss a far larger opportunity. AI's deepest potential is to help humans know themselves better, grow continuously, and bring their fullest capacity to the work that genuinely requires human judgment, empathy, and collaboration.

What role does context play in effective AI coaching?

Context is everything. An AI coach that knows your calendar, your communication style, your relationships with colleagues, your anxieties, and your goals can intervene in ways that are genuinely useful rather than generic. Parker Mitchell describes a Nadia feature that creates a shared "user manual" — a profile of how someone works best, what they need, and how they tend to react — that can be made visible to teammates so that every interaction is informed by deeper mutual understanding. One CEO who heard about this said it would increase the EQ of his company by 20 points — and that he would choose that over a 20-point IQ increase.

Full Session Transcript

How has the conversation about AI shifted in the past three to six months — and what are you picking up on in terms of how people are reacting?

Parker: I'm delighted to welcome a person who needs no introduction. Arianna Huffington is known for transforming the idea of health and wellness for individuals, and especially individuals in the workplace. I want to start with a topic you and I were chatting about earlier tonight: what are you picking up on as the threads of conversation about how people are reacting to AI, and how has that tone shifted in the past three to six months?

Arianna: First of all, I'm really excited to be here with so many people who are at the center of the transformation happening in workplaces, and with the creator of Nadia. Did you know what Nadia meant at the beginning? Not another dumb intelligence application. And apparently, at one moment when you thought maybe we need a gender-neutral name, people complained and said, no, don't take Nadia away. I love how attached people get. Don't give us ChatGPT-5. We love ChatGPT-4.

I feel that this is both the most unbelievably transformational moment we're living through, but also a moment that we need to pay great attention to people's fears and anxieties. It's a real inflection point. If you look at the surveys being done — there was a recent Pew survey saying that only 10% of people are excited about AI. Maybe you all are in this room. But there is a real disconnect between leaders in companies who think, "Oh, we are all so excited about it, and our employees are loving it," and the employee who is saying, "No, we are not."

This is a really important moment to pay attention to. A lot of Silicon Valley leaders need to start talking to the millions of people who are using all these chatbots and not talking to each other. That's the question of trust. That's the question of bringing everyone along. We saw what happened recently with data centers that were supposed to be built in Wisconsin and Indiana by Amazon and Microsoft — they withdrew the plans because there was so much community opposition: electricity rates going high, noise, pollution, fear of job displacement. That's really the moment we are in. Resilience is not an equally distributed resource. Uncertainty is very hard for many people. Some people are really good at not knowing what the future is going to bring; some really struggle. We did a study with Stanford about different biotypes. There are eight main biotypes, and a prevalent one is negative bias — you look at the future and imagine the worst. We need to help people, whatever biotype they have, deal with uncertainty and huge, transformative changes instead of assuming that everybody is just doing it.

What advice do you have for CEOs and leaders trying to build trust and bring their workforce along?

Parker: If we take for granted that trust is a really important currency — and that trust is built through both words and actions — what advice would you have for CEOs and leaders on what they should say and do as they try to bring their workforce along?

Arianna: I think it's very important to recognize that what we need to teach employees is not just technical skills, but that the human skills of navigating this world are incredibly important. There's a big assumption that it's all about getting technically proficient. I don't think that's the main problem. The main problem is going to be adapting to these huge changes that are coming much more exponentially than what we've already seen.

Yuval Harari — who wrote "Nexus" and is more of an AI doomsayer, while I'm an AI optimist — said something I love: if for every dollar and every resource we invest in developing the machines, we invest in developing humans, we are going to be okay. But if we place all the bets on the machines, we are not. And I'm afraid that right now, we are putting all our bets on machines.

Today there was an announcement by Mark Zuckerberg about their foundation focusing on LLMs and the AI possibilities to cure and prevent all disease. And I thought: we know we'll never cure and prevent all disease if people don't recognize that health is also what happens between doctor visits, in our daily lives — how we eat, how we sleep, how we exercise, how we manage stress, how we connect. Our habits are much more important for our health than our genes. And yet we still talk about curing everything without involving humans. We need to involve humans in their own health — and in everything we are doing. If you look at human history, the limiting factor has always been human nature, not technology. And that's why I love what you are doing, because you are dealing with humans every day.

Parker: I once heard that all literature can be boiled down to one of three themes: man versus nature, man versus man, or man versus self. The LLM AI folks are talking about man versus nature — can we cure the disease? But as you say, man versus self: I'm a deeply flawed human being. If AI could help me be a little more self-aware, build slightly better habits, be slightly more reflective — that might be even more powerful than the man versus nature narrative.

Arianna: That's so great. We need to acknowledge that human beings change. We are not fixed. It's not like human nature is fixed while machines keep getting better. Human beings can keep getting better too — and we'd better. I know for myself that if I were the same person now that I was in my twenties, I would consider my life pretty useless — like I hadn't learned anything. It's really important to see all of us as works in progress. We all have the better angels and the lesser angels in us.

Solzhenitsyn had this great line: the line separating good from evil crosses through every person's heart. Some people have lesser angels more dominant, others have better angels more dominant. But we have to believe in human redemption. And how can AI actually help us? That's one of the things I'm most excited about — because of its power of personalization, to tap into what's best in us.

What are the first principles of AI that will define what it can actually do for human potential?

Das: I was stepping back because there are so many commonalities in how we think about this. In engineering, there's the idea of first principles — things from which you derive everything else, the things that don't change. I think you share three first principles of AI. The first is that it's a tool to unlock human potential. The second is that its real superpower is how it will personalize information so that we each have a coach in every part of our lives. You need to book a trip — an AI coach helps you do that better. You need a project management plan — an AI coach helps you do that better. And the third is that the quality of that coaching is going to be determined by the context the AI has. What's the task you see for the people in this room?

Parker: If all of us in five years look back and ask what was it that we wished we got right, I think the answer is helping our workforces transition to this human plus AI era. Trust is going to be at the center of it. Humanity making decisions that prioritize humanity from the leaders is going to be a key part of it. The role of the CHRO — both helping leaders see that, and bringing the message from the front lines up to leadership so that excitement is tempered with reality — is crucial. And then helping each individual person think through how they can work in this human plus AI era, and providing the support for them to get there. That's the core challenge we need to get right in the next five years.

Arianna: I completely agree that AI's hyper-personalization is its superpower — plus memory. We're now going to have hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of memory context. And I love the way a lot of ancient wisdom connects to this moment. The Delphic Oracle was about "know thyself." Self-knowledge is really the key to human development. And an AI coach can help us know ourselves very powerfully because it's going to know us better than we know ourselves — it will remember things we've forgotten.

When we do onboarding for our AI health coach, we ask about five behaviors: how you sleep, what foods you eat, how you move — we don't even call it exercise, because millions of people don't move. Forget exercise. The minute you say exercise, people think they have to go to the gym. We also ask about stress management and connection. And then we ask questions like: is there a piece of poetry you love? A piece of music you love? Can you upload pictures of the people you love, the pets you love, the quotes you love? So that in moments of stress, the coach can feed them back to you.

The key here is no judgment. Because people have been so judged on their journeys — whether it's their health journey or any other kind of journey — and the coach doesn't judge. It's more like the GPS in your car. If you take the wrong turn, it doesn't say, "This is idiotic. Why did you go right when you knew you should have gone left?" It just recalculates. The combination of knowing so much about you that it remembers, feeding it back to you at the right moment, and getting smarter and wiser every day — that is the superpower.

Is "I think, therefore I am" still true — and what does AI force us to ask about who we really are?

Parker: You've said this idea of "I think, therefore I am" may no longer be true in the era of LLMs. In a conversation with Geoffrey Hinton, we proposed "I learn, therefore I am" as a currently still distinguishing characteristic of humans compared to LLMs. What do you think about learning — and what deeper answer does AI force us toward?

Arianna: Learning is obviously incredibly important — being a continuous learner, as Satya Nadella says, being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. But I think we can go deeper. The fact that we've now assumed AI will be more intelligent than we are is an incredible forcing mechanism for a conversation we have been ignoring since the Industrial Revolution: if we are not our IQ, if "I think, therefore I am" is not the reality we're inhabiting, then who are we?

I agree with Teilhard de Chardin that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. That means we are soul, spirit, consciousness — and AI can never, ever be these things. Don't believe for a second the talk about AI being self-aware or conscious. These are delusions. But AI can be a forcing mechanism for us asking these big questions that we stopped asking at some point, and we are paying a very heavy price for that. This is at the heart of every spiritual and philosophical tradition: that we are more than these bodies, and we are more than these minds. It's an incredible exploration.

That's why I think the AI revolution is more like the Renaissance than the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was about efficiency and productivity. The Renaissance was also about creativity and human exploration and human consciousness. This is much more exciting than just "AI is going to help you make better PowerPoint presentations" — which is great, I'm not putting it down. But if that were all it did, if it just made us more productive, I think we would miss a great opportunity.

Parker: I would imagine that most CEOs' visions for AI are a little more Industrial Revolution and a little less Renaissance. How do you start to seed that concept among business leaders?

Das: I think there's sometimes an absence of imagination — that's why people jump to what they know. We know productivity. We know how to measure these things. That's the easy part. The harder part is painting the picture of what the future looks like. Paint a picture for us: everybody has wellness coaching, a coach in their pocket at work. It's unlocking new potentials and making us more self-aware. What does that world look like for you?

Arianna: If we really paint that vision, it will alleviate a lot of fears. When people think of AI as just making us more productive, they think: then it's going to take many jobs away. But if you think of a richer productivity — augmenting what we do with creativity, collaboration, empathy — then it's not as scary. It doesn't just take the drudgery out of work, which is the Microsoft promise. It's also a copilot for your whole human development, not just a copilot for what you're doing at work.

Parker: When we founded Valence, Valence is actually a chemistry term — the combining power of atoms to form more complex molecules. The DNA of what we've been building is around how you help people work together in teams, how you collaborate, how you reduce unnecessary friction. We've all been in collaborative relationships that feel so powerful — a flow state, where you feel like you get one another, and you challenge each other and put different viewpoints in front of each other. That's a very powerful, very rare moment at work.

Nadia, our AI coach, is not just designed to take things off your plate. It's designed to help encourage you to bring your whole self to those collaborations — to ask the question of the collaborator you need to have, to identify a friction point or a misunderstanding. AI can actually help you be a better and more creative collaborator. That's where humans will still thrive in this human plus AI era.

Arianna: I love that. And I think that's also going to address our first question about the growing fears and mistrust. Incidentally, Parker and I were both at Cambridge in England — 3,000 years apart, but that's another story. Parker studied engineering and brings a lot of that into what he's building. I studied economics and only retained two things: the concept of opportunity cost — any time we're doing something, we are foregoing doing something else — and the concept of diminishing returns. There are a lot of diminishing returns if we don't unlock the fuller potential. If we're just focused on productivity, we are going to miss the bigger opportunity.

What context does an AI coach actually need — and what is the hidden context that's hardest to build?

Das: In all the examples you've painted, some of the context that's hardest to build is really invisible. Every job I've ever had, the thing people complain about the most is other people. In the old world, you built that context slowly over a bunch of informal conversations. How do you get that sort of hidden context into a technology? Can you?

Parker: When you think about what a human coach is an expert at, a human coach is an expert at human nature. An executive coach can detect, with the slightest change in your body language or tone, things you might not yet realize are under the surface — and draw them out with reflective questions. That's incredibly valuable. But a human coach rarely knows everything about what your job is and how hard it is to be a shift leader in a retail store, or to deal with customers eight hours a day, or to work on a supply chain snarled by changing tariffs. An AI coach can be an expert on all of those pieces of context simultaneously.

What we believe is that if an AI coach can know about you — your aspirations, your blind spots, who you really are, what you hope to be, the challenges in front of you — and can know everything about your day, your calendar, your upcoming challenges, and can weave all of those into the right nudge at the right moment — that's where the most potential lives. A coach that reaches out five minutes before a meeting you're anxious about and says, "Hey, you've got this. We talked about these two things. I know you can do it." That's actually what people thank us for with Nadia most often. It's the proactivity, and the feeling of being seen and a little less alone on a journey that can often feel very lonely.

One of the features we've released is a user manual — your coach helps you create a profile of how you work best, and you can make it public. If I have a Nadia and Austin has his Nadia, Austin's Nadia can access my user manual and tell him: "You're going to talk to Parker about this subject — he likes to process information in this way." Or in a meeting with seven people: "Three of them are going to respond to this example. Two are going to be bored. Here's how you might adjust your presentation so it lands better." A CEO who heard about this said: "That would increase the EQ of my company by 20 points. And I would choose to increase the EQ of my company by 20 points over the IQ by 20 points."

Arianna: Absolutely. And I would love the coach to also be trained on some general first principles about forgiveness and not assuming the worst from people. If you don't remember my user manual at a particular moment and say something I don't like, give me another chance. That's so important. We've moved to a time where people were walking on eggshells around each other, often in the service of creating a culture of greater belonging — but it had the exact opposite effect. People ended up staying in the wrong cliques because they already knew how everyone would react. A sophisticated AI coach that has access to both the user manual and some first principles about being a human on a journey of becoming would do both.

Parker: And going back to your point — if the AI coach had as a starting point that we are souls living out existence on Earth, the advice would probably be a little different, a little richer, and a little better for us and the people we're with on a regular basis.

What would you say to CHROs who want to build more resilient, connected cultures — and how do they bring others along?

Parker: Work is one of the places where people have to interact with people who might not be part of their self-defined tribe. Maybe we'll end on this: how would you help the CHROs in this room articulate this mission to their colleagues as they go back to work tomorrow, next week, next month — trying to make this encouragement happen at a corporate level?

Arianna: I feel that everybody here wants their employees to be as resilient as possible. We just launched a program at Walmart, and we called it resilience, growth, and belonging. Because if you don't cultivate your own growth and resilience during these times, it's very hard to cultivate a culture of belonging — because you operate from fear, from survival. The more we can create a culture where we are all on this incredible journey together, here to support each other — and that does not mean we're going to agree on everything, and that's totally okay; I don't agree with myself on everything — that is going to be a way to build workplace cultures that are thriving and use AI to accelerate that.

Parker: That's the perfect concluding point for a wonderful evening and a great conversation. Arianna, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts. We really appreciate you being here with us.

Arianna: Thank you so much.

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