The Business Case for AI Coaching at Prudential

Robert Gulliver — Chief Talent Officer, Prudential Financial. Robert joined Prudential five years ago after nine seasons as Chief HR Officer at the National Football League, where he assessed head coaching talent, identified high potentials, and built development programs for next-generation coaches. At Prudential — a 40,000-person organization — he has been one of the leading forces behind a multi-year coaching strategy, culminating in the enterprise rollout of AI coaching to thousands of leaders.

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 at scale.

Prudential is a 40,000-person organization that, before this year, had brought coaching to roughly 400 employees — about 1% of its workforce. In September, it launched an AI coaching pilot with 1,000 leaders. Within six weeks, 90% were using Nadia regularly. At Gartner Reimagine HR, Prudential's head of HR — a former Chief HR Officer of the NFL who spent nine seasons evaluating head coaching talent — joined Valence CEO Parker Mitchell to share what drove that adoption, how Prudential customized the experience to feel genuinely theirs, and what the business case for AI coaching actually looks like when you build it from the ground up.

Key Takeaways

• 90% of 1,000 employees used AI coaching regularly within 6 weeks of launch. Prudential's pilot achieved near-complete adoption in its first six weeks — a result Robert attributes to deliberate pre-launch alignment across the leadership team, careful customization of the AI to reflect Prudential's language and context, and the fundamental appeal of on-demand, non-judgmental coaching support.
• Good coaches drive introspection — and so does Nadia. Robert draws directly on his NFL experience: great coaches force athletes to look at themselves, review the tape, and identify what they can do better. Nadia replicates that dynamic. When employees ask Nadia a question, the first response is typically not an answer — it is questions designed to drive deeper self-reflection. That approach is what builds lasting behavior change.
• "Prudentializing" the AI made adoption real. Prudential trained Nadia on its new leadership model, employee value proposition, earnings call transcripts, and analyst reports — so the coach could speak about the company the way Prudential speaks about itself, and with the same external context a well-prepared human coach would bring. That bespoke experience is what turned the pilot from a technology trial into a felt development resource.
• 20% of coaching conversations are about team and interpersonal challenges. Within the first six weeks, a fifth of all Nadia usage was employees working through team dynamics and interpersonal issues they felt comfortable raising with an AI but not with a manager or HR. The psychological safety of a non-judgmental, always-available coach is unlocking conversations that would otherwise never happen.
• AI coaching aligns naturally with performance management milestones. Prudential observed usage clustering around their quarterly "2+2" performance conversations — two things to keep doing, two things to develop. The future use case Robert is most excited about: leaders loading their employee engagement survey results into Nadia to think through what the data means and how to build an action plan. AI coaching becomes the preparation layer for every formal people process.
• The only wrong answer is doing nothing. Robert's advice to organizations waiting for the technology to mature: doing nothing is the one position that guarantees you fall behind. The due diligence is getting out there, hearing different stories, and using that perspective to bring colleagues along. A year of active learning and experimentation is the prerequisite for confident deployment.

Questions This Session Answers

How did Prudential achieve 90% AI coaching adoption within 6 weeks?

Prudential's rapid adoption came from deliberate preparation before launch. The team spent significant effort securing alignment across the entire leadership team — traveling to make the case directly to each leader — which had two effects: it created organizational buy-in and it surfaced insights that were used to further customize the AI. By the time Nadia launched to 1,000 employees, it already felt like a Prudential product rather than an off-the-shelf tool. The combination of leadership endorsement, a customized experience, and the inherent appeal of always-available, non-judgmental coaching drove 90% regular usage in the first six weeks.

What does it mean to "prudentialize" an AI coach — and why does it matter for adoption?

Prudential trained Nadia on its new leadership model, employee value proposition, cultural aspirations, earnings call transcripts, and sell-side analyst reports. The goal was simple: Nadia should talk about Prudential the way Prudential talks about itself, and with the external context a well-prepared executive coach would spend months acquiring. In practice, this meant employees could ask Nadia questions about navigating specific Prudential leadership expectations — the tension model, the quarterly 2+2 process — and get responses that felt grounded in their actual organizational reality rather than generic coaching frameworks. That specificity is what made the experience feel genuinely valuable rather than novelty.

What kinds of topics are Prudential employees actually bringing to AI coaching?

Within the first six weeks, Prudential observed a diverse range of use cases emerging organically — far beyond what the team had anticipated. About 20% of conversations involved team or interpersonal dynamics that employees felt comfortable raising with an AI but not with a manager or HR partner. Leaders were using Nadia to prepare for difficult conversations, navigate their new leadership model, update job descriptions, and think through career development decisions. One leader even used Nadia to rewrite an outdated job posting from scratch. Prudential's experience reinforces a consistent finding: when employees set the agenda and bring what matters to them, the use cases are far richer and more varied than any program design team would predict.

How does AI coaching connect to Prudential's performance management process?

Prudential runs a quarterly "2+2" feedback process alongside its annual performance review — two things leaders should keep doing, two things to develop. Nadia usage has already shown a pattern of clustering around those quarterly milestones. Looking ahead, Robert describes a use case he is particularly excited about: leaders loading their annual employee engagement survey results into Nadia to make sense of the data, work through verbatim comments, and build an action plan. AI coaching becomes the thinking partner that prepares leaders for every formal people process — turning point-in-time events into continuous development conversations.

What is the business case for investing in AI coaching now rather than waiting?

Robert's case is built on trajectory, not current capability. Prudential had been coaching roughly 400 out of 40,000 employees — 1% of the workforce — through a combination of executive coaching, internal talent partners, and coaching circles. AI coaching is the only mechanism that makes it possible to move that number meaningfully for a 40,000-person organization. The technology is already good enough to provide a high-quality experience and real development value. Organizations that wait for further improvement are choosing a guaranteed lag over a manageable learning curve. The lesson from Prudential's first six weeks: the upside of going early far exceeds the risk.

Full Session Transcript

How has Prudential been investing in coaching — and what gap led you to explore AI coaching?

Parker: I want to have a conversation with Robert about how Prudential is thinking about coaching, how they've been investing in it holistically, and how they've piloted Nadia — some of the early reactions, and the evolving use cases AI is able to support in the coaching space.

Nadia launched at Prudential in September. We're five or six weeks in, and already 1,000 leaders have signed up and are having conversations. I want to share a quick framing on AI. General AI tools — the sort of generalized versions — know a little about a lot. You can ask them extraordinarily creative questions, but they can also make the kind of mistakes an intern might make if they don't know your business context. Getting full value out of them requires real investment and effort.

What we believe the future of AI actually is, is personalization — a different architecture. What it can do is act almost on your behalf, think on your behalf, go get information it knows about you, bring it back, and give you the advice or support that's relevant for you in that moment. Nadia is purpose-built for coaching. It's AI that knows about coaching — about the right ways to help adults learn, develop, and be self-reflective. It's AI that knows about your company. And it's AI that knows each individual person's journey: where they came from, what they're working on, what they're aspiring to. When employees experience this, they feel like it is supporting them, teaching them, proactively in their corner — like a thought partner in their pocket.

Robert: Thank you very much for having me. We are certainly passionate about AI-enabled coaching, and it's something I'm personally passionate about. I've been at Prudential for about five years. But before that, I spent nine seasons at the National Football League — as chief HR officer. Based on my 160-pound frame, I don't think anyone is saying, "What position did you play?" I was assessing the pipeline for head coaching talent, identifying high potentials, and putting in place development programs for the next generation of head coaches. So I know a little bit about coaching.

What I've seen from sports is that good coaches win games, great coaches win championships, and outstanding coaches win Super Bowls. String that together several times and you're a Hall of Famer. I've had the privilege of working with world-class, Hall of Fame-level coaches. It's no surprise that I brought that passion with me to Prudential. When I arrived, we were already doing some work in the coaching space — bespoke executive coaching engagements for senior leaders, and more recently internal talent partners providing coaching to high potentials. We'd also been scaling coaching through coaching circles. Through all of that, we'd brought coaching to about 400 colleagues. Four hundred sounds like a good number — until you zoom out and remember that Prudential is a 40,000-employee organization. That's about 1% of our population. We felt there was an opportunity to do more, given the power of coaching to drive individual, team, and ultimately business performance.

That put us on the path of exploring a multiplier effect. For us, the answer was technology. We started looking at Gen AI-enabled coaching over the last couple of years — kicking the tires — but hadn't been ready to take the leap because the technology hadn't advanced as far as we would have liked. Then earlier this year, we met Valence. We had the team out to Silicon Valley to demo to our HR senior leadership team, and we were sold. Sold, for us, meant wanting to do a pilot and learn more. We rolled out to 1,000 employees, and at this point — about six weeks in — 90% of those participating are using Nadia on a regular basis. We're really excited about what we're seeing.

What makes a great coach — and how does that translate to AI coaching?

Parker: You and I have chatted about what a good coach does on a week-over-week basis to get the best out of their people. Can you share more?

Robert: My observation from working in sports is that really good coaches drive introspection. They force you to look at yourself and see what you can do better. In football, athletes literally review tape — a quarterback spends time in the quarterback room watching how he throws, how he reads the defense, how he moves on a run play. That's introspection. One of the things I love about Nadia is that it does the same. If you ask Nadia a question, the first thing you get is typically not the answer. Nadia is not there to say, "Here's the answer." What you get are questions — more questions to more deeply understand your issue. Those questions drive introspection. Very similar to what I saw in sports, and our employees are having really good experiences with it.

Parker: What I love about that is that introspection is by definition personal. Each person on a football team is working on something slightly different in any given week. If you tried to train them all toward one single improvement, it might work for some and not others. The same carries over to organizational leadership — if you can pinpoint what each person is trying to get better at and help them improve incrementally week over week, the compound effect at scale could be enormous.

Robert: The personalization is significant. The 1,000 colleagues we've brought into the pilot are telling us it's like having a coach in their pocket. You have a Nadia app on your phone. You can use it any time, 24/7. Nadia is always there. And that drives real customization, because you're using it to talk about your things, in the context of your learning, your growth, your development. Being able to do that at scale is very significant. It's the democratization of coaching we've been trying to achieve for some time.

How did Prudential customize Nadia to feel like a Prudential product rather than an off-the-shelf tool?

Parker: How did you expect the reaction from your leaders and employees — compared to what you've actually heard in the first six weeks?

Robert: We spent a lot of time doing upfront alignment work before launch — making the rounds to all of our leaders to ensure full buy-in. Those conversations were actually really impactful because they helped put us on a path to make the Nadia experience more customized, more what we say at Prudential: prudentialized. It wasn't something that felt off the shelf. It felt made for us.

We spent a good amount of time educating Nadia on who we are at Prudential. We have a new leadership model — we educated Nadia on that. We have our employee value proposition, our cultural aspirations. But through the executive conversations, we also got insights that pushed us further. One comment was: "Make sure Nadia talks about our company the same way we talk about our company." From that, I said — why don't we take the transcripts from our earnings reports and load those in? Publicly available, but they give Nadia the language and context. Another leader said: "Make sure Nadia knows how those outside of Prudential talk about the company." So we pulled analyst reports and loaded those in as well. All of that — loading in content, taking steps to make it feel bespoke — is helping our employees get a genuinely unique experience from an AI coach that really knows them and knows us as an organization.

Parker: One of the things we've heard is that an individual human coach might not know about the business, might not know the specific challenges of being in sales versus product versus engineering. AI can learn all of that information and feed it into a conversation.

Robert: The really good coaches we've worked with at Prudential have taken steps to learn our business — reading analyst reports, going through transcripts, learning our strategy and leadership model. But that takes time. With Nadia, that was instantaneous. The uploads happened just like that, and Nadia immediately had the ability to deliver really bespoke experiences for our employees.

How does Nadia support Prudential's new leadership model — and what unexpected use cases have emerged?

Parker: Can you share how you came up with your new leadership model, where it is in the rollout, and how Nadia is bringing it to life?

Robert: We rolled out a new leadership model this past year. It's essentially a tension model — the balance of behaviors that might feel like they're at odds. Our leaders need to run their respective businesses while also putting an enterprise-first hat on. They need to care for customers while also driving long-term strategic value. They need to care for employees while also being able to make difficult business decisions that often have people implications. Getting that balance right is what we believe drives results.

What we're finding is that leaders using Nadia are asking it for insights and guidance on how to show up relative to our new leadership expectations — how to get the balance right in their specific role and their specific decisions. In some ways, Nadia is doing what an L&D team would do in introducing a new model and providing learning content to help leaders get better at using it. That's an exciting unlocked use case, and we're only six or seven weeks in.

Just the other day, I heard of a leader who had to post a new job, hadn't done it in several years, had outdated job descriptions in his files, and loaded that content into Nadia with some notes on what he was looking for. He asked Nadia to help him update it — write something punchier that would attract a different profile of talent. And Nadia delivered. We hadn't been thinking about using Nadia to write job descriptions. But by doing the pilot and getting our hands dirty, we're unlocking potential we hadn't anticipated.

Parker: Can you share a little more about the 2+2 conversation model and how Nadia is connecting to that?

Robert: We have quarterly "two plus two" discussions — two things we want you to keep doing, two things to lean into for learning and growth. The notion is that performance shouldn't be a once-a-year event. We're already seeing Nadia usage align with the performance management calendar — there's more activity around the quarterly two plus two conversations. Going forward, I see a use case where leaders get their annual employee engagement survey results and load them into Nadia: "Help me think through what these results are telling me. Help me process these verbatim comments in aggregate. Help me build an action plan." We think that's going to be a very powerful use case as we continue to develop this.

How does AI coaching support the accountability and career development piece — and what about sensitive conversations?

Parker: You and I have talked about the accountability factor — how having an AI coach can be surprisingly powerful for accountability. Can you share how you've seen that play out?

Robert: We've taken the position that career development is employee-driven and leader-supported — we want employees to take ownership of their own careers. With Nadia, we're seeing employees take that ownership seriously, and they're looking at Nadia as an additional go-to resource. Nadia is being used to think through career growth decisions, what skills to add to the portfolio. Looking further out, I could envision uploading our skills taxonomy, having individuals upload their individual skills, and then using Nadia to plot a course from where you are to where you want to be. It's not just you and your manager anymore. It's you and your manager and Nadia.

Parker: One of the reasons something like Nadia is so helpful is the safe conversation it enables. People want to work through genuine weaknesses they would never want publicly discussed — and then present the path forward, not the messy process of "why was I given this role?" to their manager.

Robert: About 20% of Nadia usage in our pilot is dealing with team or interpersonal issues that people want to work through. It is that objective, non-judgmental go-to resource — not a call to your manager, or your HR business partner, or the employee relations department. Just a resource. We've been very clear that there are guardrails: if you have a genuine employee relations issue that requires formal engagement, Nadia knows to direct you to those resources. Nadia is not freewheeling into areas where it shouldn't be. We've been very deliberate about establishing those guardrails, and I know Valence has thought very deeply about that as well.

Parker: Those strict guardrails are crucial when you're deploying at scale across multiple geographies, multiple languages, and different legal frameworks. It's very important to have the confidence that Nadia is not going to point people in the wrong direction on sensitive topics.

Robert: The first thing employees see when they open Nadia in our company is actually a disclosure from our legal department.

What does the future look like — and what would you say to organizations still waiting to act?

Parker: How do you see the role of leadership support changing if AI coaching is available at scale throughout the talent lifecycle?

Robert: I see a future where we continue down the path of democratizing access to coaching. Going from 1,000 to thousands — getting that multiplier effect for the organization. At the end of the day, coaching is about driving performance: individual performance, team performance, and ultimately business performance. What our leaders get most excited about is leveraging a tool like Nadia to help us achieve better results with our customers and better results from a shareholder perspective. That's one of the core tensions in our leadership model — getting the balance right between caring for customers and driving long-term shareholder value. I personally get excited that Nadia is going to be that difference maker and help us drive those results.

Parker: In a world where everyone has a personalized AI coach, how do you see in-person programs fitting in?

Robert: It's going to be a both/and. There is still undeniable power to bringing people together in person — that's why we're all here in Orlando. None of that is going away. There will always be a need to convene real people in real rooms for real authentic discussions. But for me, the opportunity is what happens in the in-between time. How do you make sure that conversations are happening more regularly, with resources that help people be better at their jobs? The future is thoughtful HR organizations, thoughtful programs and platforms, combined with technology. In this time of change, I don't think there are proverbial right or wrong answers. But the one thing we are very clear on is that we cannot do nothing. That is why we have been leaning into this relationship and rolling up our sleeves. We have been very deliberate about not letting the technology pass us by.

Parker: What would you say to colleagues who are suggesting waiting six or twelve months to see how this plays out?

Robert: Part of the answer is doing more of this — getting out there, learning, hearing perspective. I found out about Nadia by going to another talent leader conference, networking, and getting the benefit of outside-in thinking that I could take back to my colleagues. So part of the due diligence is coming to forums, hearing different stories, talking to organizations that have had different experiences. Then using that perspective to take back to your organization and bring your colleagues along for the journey. I approached this year as a year of getting out there, getting the benefit of perspective, and then pushing, prodding, and nudging the rest of the team to ensure they were on board. That's how I approached it — and that's how I'd encourage others to approach it as well.

Parker: We are huge believers that AI responsibly built and responsibly implemented has the opportunity to truly democratize coaching and bring that vision to life. Thank you, Robert. Thanks, everyone.

Robert: Thank you.