Lesley Wilkinson — Chief Talent Officer, Experian. Lesley leads people strategy for Experian's 22,000 employees globally and has been one of the earliest enterprise adopters of AI coaching, integrating Nadia into leadership programs, 360 feedback processes, and performance management cycles at scale.

Bill McNabb — Former CEO and Chairman, Vanguard; Board Member, IBM and UnitedHealth Group. Bill led Vanguard from 2008 to 2017 and has been a Valence board member for three years. He brings a board-level perspective on AI investment strategy across both large enterprises and high-growth startups.

Colleen Sugrue — [Title and Organization TBC]. Colleen leads a large global HR function and shares her organization's experience deploying Nadia at scale — including viral word-of-mouth adoption and the decision to consider Nadia a formal part of their talent ecosystem. Please confirm title and organization before publishing.

What Enterprise Leaders Say About Nadia

Three enterprise leaders — Experian's Chief Talent Officer, former Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb, and a global HR executive — on what happened when they deployed Nadia at scale. The results: 100% adoption within an hour of launch, an NPS of 95 in beta, viral word-of-mouth that put change management in the hands of employees themselves, and a clear answer to the problem that has frustrated leadership development for decades — how do you make learning stick after the program ends?

Key Takeaways

• 100% adoption within an hour of launch — adoption rates unlike anything seen before. Lesley Wilkinson describes the Experian pilot as unlike any leadership content deployment she has ever seen. One hundred percent of participants were using Nadia within an hour of the experiment launching. The speed and depth of engagement caught even the team that designed the rollout off guard.
• NPS of 95 in beta — even with early integration friction, NPS was 85. Experian's first Nadia experiment returned an NPS of 85 despite some integration issues that slowed the experience. The beta test, with those issues resolved, returned an NPS of 95. The two most common feedback themes: genuine surprise at the quality of the advice, and relief at being able to use Nadia in their native language.
• AI coaching solves the leadership development retention problem. Bill McNabb names the frustration directly: organizations invest heavily in leadership training, but without constant reinforcement, most of it disappears. An AI coach available in the moment — when a real situation is actually happening — can surface exactly the framework or concept from a training session months earlier, making that investment stick in a way classroom learning alone never could.
• Nadia became viral — change management moved into the hands of users. Colleen describes employees spontaneously sharing Nadia with colleagues, asking whether they could pass it on, and becoming organic advocates. The change management that organizations typically have to engineer from the top happened naturally from the bottom, because employees who tried Nadia wanted others to experience it too.
• Nadia is not just an L&D tool — she is part of the HR talent ecosystem. Colleen frames Nadia not as a learning and development feature but as a structural piece of the overall HR and talent support system: the resource that is there when a manager or HR partner cannot be. One organization even asked whether Nadia should be added to the org chart.

Questions This Video Answers

What kind of adoption do organizations typically see with Nadia?

Adoption rates for Nadia consistently exceed what organizations have seen from any previous leadership development content. Lesley Wilkinson at Experian reports 100% usage within an hour of launching their first experiment — a result she describes as unprecedented in her experience. The pattern repeats across organizations: employees who try Nadia engage with it immediately and return to it regularly, driven by the quality and relevance of the coaching rather than organizational mandate.

What do employees actually say when they first use Nadia?

The two most common spontaneous reactions reported by enterprise deployers are: genuine surprise at the quality of the advice ("Wow, she actually gave me really good advice") and relief at being able to use Nadia in their native language. Both reactions point to the same underlying dynamic — employees did not expect an AI coach to feel genuinely helpful and personally relevant. That gap between expectation and experience is what drives the word-of-mouth adoption organizations consistently observe.

How does AI coaching solve the leadership development retention problem?

Bill McNabb identifies one of the most persistent frustrations in enterprise leadership development: organizations invest heavily in training programs, but without ongoing reinforcement, most of what is learned fades quickly. AI coaching addresses this by being available in the exact moment a real leadership challenge arises — days, weeks, or months after a formal training program ended. In that moment, Nadia can surface and apply the frameworks from the earlier training in a way that is directly relevant to the situation at hand, turning a one-time learning event into a durable capability.

How does Nadia fit into the broader HR and talent ecosystem?

Colleen describes Nadia not as a standalone L&D tool but as a structural component of the overall HR talent support system — the always-available resource that fills the gaps when managers, HR business partners, or formal coaching programs cannot be present. One way she frames it: Nadia is what is there for an employee or leader when no human support is immediately accessible. Her organization went as far as to discuss adding Nadia to their org chart — a signal of how embedded the tool had become in how they thought about people support.

Full Video Transcript

What was your first reaction to seeing Nadia used in practice?

Lesley: Actually, Brad — who's on — sent me this link on a Friday night, and I was sitting with my husband. I was like, "Oh boy, you have to see this." It wasn't edited. It was just a live recording Brad did of role-playing with Nadia for a performance conversation he was about to have, and it just blew my mind. It's been insane. I've never seen adoption like it. We had the first experiment we ran — 100% usage within an hour of launching the experiment. I've just never seen adoption like it, and the speed.

Colleen: I feel like Nadia is a tool that's an extension. We actually laugh — we thought, should we put her on our org chart? Can we add that piece there? Because it's: when I can't be there for you, or your manager can't be there for you, you have an additional piece.

What problem does AI coaching solve that traditional leadership development couldn't?

Bill: My single biggest frustration as a leader at Vanguard, on the talent front, was that we invested an inordinate amount of money in training new leaders in particular. You're investing all this time and money to develop these great leaders. And then, unless you're putting them back in the classroom almost on a daily, if not weekly, basis, they're going to lose a lot of it.

Colleen: And the challenge is, you have these leader development programs — a lot of them are great programs — and you can hit a very small percentage of your population with those programs. But really, the question I was asking is: "How do we get truly a solution that works for everyone?" When we started doing that analysis, looking at the return on investment — if we do this right — we know the power of coaching in organizations, but we've never been able to get to a price point at which we could really scale that. And I will say that we were able to do that here.

Bill: And up comes the idea of an AI-driven coach. Somebody I can go to as a new leader and say, "Hey, what do I do?" Everybody says, "Well, go to your boss and have a good one-on-one about that." But in the real world where things are moving that fast, and your boss has got a set of priorities, and you're trying to show that you can manage something — to be able to type that out as a question and get a really thoughtful response back. What an amazing thing to reinforce the basic learning that you might have gotten in the leadership bootcamp six months earlier. "Oh yeah, that's what that course was about. That's what that module was about. Now I know what to do." This is where these capabilities could make an incredibly profound impact on companies quickly, because now you have the ability to potentially give everyone a coach.

What were the NPS results — and how did employees respond when they tried it?

Lesley: We've given all of our leaders the ability to role-play whenever they want, in their own language, in the safety of their own space, without having a human being sitting across from them judging. And then incredible repeat usage. We had an NPS of 85 the first time around — because we had some integration issues, so it was a bit slower. The beta test, we had an NPS of 95. But the same response.

Colleen: What happened for us was that people did try it, and they became supporters, and it became this viral thing. And the funniest thing I get all the time is people asking me, "Is this for everybody? Like, could I share this with somebody?" And I'm like, "Yeah, that's the intent." So now our change management is actually in the hands of the people using it. We had so much amazing feedback. Mostly: "Wow, she actually gave me really good advice." That's what we heard all the time — complete shock. And then the second piece was, because we are such a large global organization: "Wow, I could talk to her in my native language." I don't see Nadia as just an L&D piece. I see this as a support for the whole overall HR talent ecosystem.

Bill: This is going to sound like an unabashed pitch for Valence. I get dizzy thinking about how exciting it could be — because we could transform how we develop leaders pretty quickly.