AI coaching: The new frontier for developing managers

00:03 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Welcome to HR Disrupted with me, lucy Adams. Each episode will explore innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals and challenge the status quo with inspiring but practical people strategies. So if you’re looking for fresh ideas, tips and our take on the latest HR trends, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

00:29
One of the biggest challenges facing HR is the perennial challenge of leadership capability. Despite years of investment in programmes, frameworks and workshops, many organisations still struggle to see real behavioural change. The world around us is moving faster, the expectations on leaders are higher, and yet our development approaches can still feel generic, a bit theoretical and removed from the realities of day-to-day work. But what if technology, and specifically AI, could help us do it differently? Instead of a one-size-fits-all course, what if every manager could have a personalised coach in their pocket, one that gives them real-time practical guidance in the moment that they need it most? So, increasingly, hr teams are deploying AI leadership coaches to enhance leadership performance and scale meaningful personalised development. And to help me explore what AI personalised coaching can deliver today. Deliver is my guest today, anand Chopra-Maghawan, managing Director of Valence in Europe, which is the owner of one of the leading brands of AI coaching, nadia. Welcome, anand.

01:49 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Hello, thank you for having me.

01:50 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Oh, it’s a real pleasure to have you on the podcast. So before we get into it, could you just give me a little bit of your career history and just tell me how you kind of came to be working with AI and coaching, because you didn’t start there, did you?

02:07 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Well generative AI as a thing is only two and a half years old, so I am considerably older than that. My professional career began in the US. I grew up in India, but then went to university in the US. I’m a US citizen and I’ve lived in London for the last 10 years or so, and my first. So I’ve always been in the field of workforce development in one way or another, and my first venture was a business called General Assembly that I helped to start in New York in 2011 and then moved to London to launch our business in the Middle East and Europe. We sold that business to the ADECO Group in 2018. I then stayed on for a little bit after the acquisition and joined a business called Emeritus, which is one of the world’s largest executive education businesses, and I set up their Europe operation as well, and I also serve on the board of two really interesting ed tech ventures. One is called A Political, which is a really large network for government civil servants to learn how to do their jobs better and share what’s working?

03:22 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Oh, interesting, because there is a lot of headlines at the moment about public service competence and capabilities, isn’t there?

03:32 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Exactly, and most of the training that goes on for public servants is, unfortunately, retrofitted corporate training and, of course, the reality in the public sector is very different in terms of budgets and timescales and politics.

03:45
So apolitical sets out to change that. And then I’m also on the board of a business called Shortlist, which helps to find senior executive talent from around the world and place them into companies all across Africa. So that’s their focus, and I’ve always been interested in early stage ventures and using technology to make workforce development better. And in 2018, I was connected to Parker Mitchell, who was starting Valence at the time, and we had a mutual friend, you know, who was looking at investing in the business. I got to know Parker and stayed on really after that initial investment, as an adviser for about five years while he was building the business, and then around 2024, when the AI product our coach Nadia was really taking off, parker and I began speaking about what a more full-time formal role could look like, particularly given the traction that Valence was seeing in Europe, and so I joined on in March of 2025, full-time to join our leadership team here at Valence. So that’s been my trajectory.

05:00 – Lucy Adams (Host)
We’re really, really grateful that you could find the time, with everything that you’ve got going on, to join us today on the pod. So let’s get into it. And let’s kick off with a question around perhaps traditional models of leadership development. You know leadership capability has been on the HR agenda for years. I mean, you know my background’s in HR for decades and you know we’re still talking about developing leaders and developing managers and I know from my own experience, despite all this investment, you kind of still really struggle to see any real behavioural change. So, from your perspective, why are the traditional models of leadership development? Maybe, you know, maybe they never worked, but they certainly don’t seem to be working right now. What’s your perspective on why they’re not working?

05:52 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Well, I mean, there are so many challenges for getting large organisations to really change at scale, but I think one of the big ones is the disconnect between theory and practice. We often deploy leadership development programmes removed from where the work is actually happening, and you’ve seen a trend of programmes getting shorter. We talk about micro learning, we talk about these kinds of shorter and shorter sessions that people might do, but they are still fundamentally a different thing from where the work is actually happening. And what we know about behaviour change is that if you don’t get the opportunity to practise the new skill in the moment when it’s most relevant, you’re not really going to change that much. And so I think that’s one of the big gaps that leadership development has had this disconnect between where we learn and where we work, and I do think that technology today can play a role in really closing that gap.

06:53 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, I think you’re right. You know this kind of in the moment practical help. You know I always kind of think you know when you let’s say in your human lives you know you come across something I don’t know. You don’t know how to use the washing machine and you just that you’ve just bought you know you wouldn’t kind of immediately go and enrol on an engineering programme for you know domestic appliance maintenance at the local college. You would be googling it, you would look on YouTube, you would use AI. You want that practical help in the moment. Let’s just kind of have a bit of a step back and think about, perhaps, some of the skills capabilities. Do you think that what’s being asked of leaders the skills, the mindsets, the attributes that they’re expected to have today is that different from how it was five years ago? How has it changed?

07:52 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
To be honest, I actually don’t think that it’s that different.

07:55
I think the things that we need to expect of leaders, that we should expect of leaders, are even more important than they were maybe five years ago, because so much of the role of the leader is in setting context, providing clarity, giving direction, and in a world where there is so much more change, where it feels like everything is so much more chaotic, I actually think that it doesn’t mean that leaders need to do different things.

08:20
It’s just more important that they provide that sense of clarity and guidance. But one of the things that I think is perhaps even more important within that is this notion of how teams and colleagues really collaborate together. Part of the change that we’re seeing is driven by technology. Part of it is also driven by new rules of work around remote working and things like that as well, and in this scenario, it can be so difficult to get the level of collaboration and communication and interpersonal relationships among teams that is so critical for underpinning the agility and adaptability that organisations need to see. And so I think it’s less about different skills that leaders need to have. It’s more about the increased importance and criticality, really, of the skills that they’ve always needed to have.

09:17 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And I totally agree with that. I think that you know, when we talk to thousands of HR professionals every year, and you know and you’re asking them about what are the skills that their leaders seem to be lacking, and it’s still really quite, in some cases, quite basic. It’s the ability to have a conversation with somebody who might be struggling. It’s the ability to set direction. It’s the ability to not micromanage but to create an environment which gives them a bit more autonomy so they can kind of do their best work. As you say, it’s not necessarily that these are new skills. In fact, these are perennial challenges, but I agree with you. I think the kind of the increased importance in this disrupted world where you know things are moving so fast, this, this, you know, these skills become even more important. Tell us a little bit about Nadia for people who are listening and going. Well, I haven’t come across this product yet. How does it work in practice?

10:22 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
For sure. Yeah, nadia is an expert coach. Nadia learns about you, learns about your colleagues, learns about your company and your company’s strategy and values and ways of working is available in what we call the small moments, the everyday challenges that we all have as managers. Whether that’s feedback that you need to give to a colleague and you’re a bit nervous about it, whether that’s a ton of work that you have to do and you’re struggling to prioritise, whether that’s a new skill that you need to build, that you’re struggling to stay on top of, new skill that you need to build, that you’re struggling to stay on top of, nadia can be there for all of those moments.

11:11
But then, increasingly, we’re now seeing companies use Nadia for the big moments as well, the big moments and programmes that kind of underpin the employee lifecycle, whether that’s onboarding new employees so that they get better connected to the company, faster and more productive faster. Whether that’s performance reviews, which many managers, myself included, really struggle to do. Well, how do you balance between just an opinion and real detail and fact All of that stuff that managers have to deal with? We’re finding companies really using Nadia to in a more customised, focused way to support those big moments and programmes that we all struggle to deploy with the consistency and speed and quality that organisations really need.

12:02 – Lucy Adams (Host)
So you described Nadia as kind of you know in the moment personalised coaching. But what does that actually look like for a leader or a manager on, say, a busy Tuesday morning?

12:12 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Sure Well, so we’re recording this on a Wednesday. I’ll tell you about my interaction with Nadia just this morning. You know, I’ve got a meeting later today with a colleague, uh, feedback to around the level of um, some of the details that we’re missing that I’ve seen. I think we’re missing in um, some of the client conversations that this person has been having, um, and so I went to Nadia uh to say hey, um, nadia, I’ve got this meeting coming up with this person, um, can you uh just help me think about how I should give this feedback? And you know, nadia gave me some sort of general advice and everything, but then helped me by reminding me that two weeks ago I had said something about this same colleague, that this person had been working until 11 pm a few nights in a row in a row and that, therefore, when I go and give this feedback, I need to acknowledge that work ethic first and be mindful of the scenario in which this person and probably, if I had thought back and looked at notes or something somewhere, I might have remembered that, but the speed and pace at which we’re all moving these days means that sometimes those little details are forgotten.

13:31
Nadia has perfect memory, so nothing is forgotten, and she reminds me that this is the context in which this person is coming in, and therefore, the feedback that you give should be one that incorporates that.

13:43
So, then, we did a little role play of what this thing might, how I might open this conversation, and this entire interaction was about six minutes, and I think that’s the kind of everyday support that Nadia is providing. So, on a practical basis, in this case I spoke to Nadia on my mobile device, but I can go into a browser mode. Increasingly, we’ve been turning on a Microsoft Teams integration so people can just chat with Nadia within their interaction. So it’s a very easy to interact with thing, and we encourage managers, leaders, to bring the day-to-day challenges that they face to get the support that they need and trust that Nadia has the expert context and memory based on some of the most advanced conversational AI in the world, to not feel like it’s a tool or an app or something that you’re using, but to really feel like it’s a teammate and an expert and a coach that you can go and speak to.

14:47 – Lucy Adams (Host)
So Nadia’s drawing on data inputs from you, the manager, any other data and inputs that Nadia draws on to personalise the experience and I’m particularly interested on the kind of the ethics piece around that how do you ensure that it remains ethical and trustworthy?

15:10 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Yes, well, privacy and trust are critical components that underpin the relationship that users and companies have with Nadia. Part of that is the way that we design Nadia, so that every instance of Nadia is private at the company level and then individually at the user level as well, and we go through very intense testing and validation in usually a multi-month process. I mean, we’re deploying Nadia to over 80 Fortune 500 businesses now around the world, and it does take quite a long time for the data security privacy teams to make sure that we are actually providing a truly secure and private experience. It’s also, of course, in our interest to make sure that we do that, because if you don’t have a private interaction with your coach, you’re never going to feel comfortable bringing the true concerns or issues or challenges that are on your mind, and so we need to, both at a technical level, but then also at a training level, ensure that users have the trust and confidence to be able to interact with Nadia.

16:23
In terms of the data that Nadia is using, there’s three levels to it. The first is access to one of the large language models, and so this is. You know, we’re typically using either OpenAI or Anthropix models, but we do switch between them because, you know, these AI companies are investing so much money to make their models more and more performant and we want to make sure that our customers benefit from that investment. So we don’t stay stuck on any one particular model. We constantly test all of them and can switch depending on which one is most performant.

17:01
The second layer is corporate context.

17:04
So our deployment team works with each customer to figure out what we want Nadia to know in order to be a truly effective coach within the context of that company.

17:16
So, whether that is your ways of working, your leadership principles, your maybe a learning and development programme that Nadia needs to learn the curriculum for so that she can become a practice tool, all of that is part of the design and deployment process that we have. And then the third layer, of course, is the actual conversations that you have with Nadia, so users can share proactively whatever they want, and that can be direct things that you might just say to Nadia in a session. It could also be documents that you upload that can become part of Nadia’s memory, become part of Nadia’s memory. And what becomes really interesting is when Nadia starts to spot patterns and blind spots that you may not even be thinking about, based on all of the context that you share over time, and some of those insights will show up in your memory profile of Nadia. Some of them will just show up in the kind of way in which she’s coaching you and she’ll remind you of some of that. So that’s the architecture, really, of how Nadia is designed.

18:19 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Thanks, anand. I’m just going to pause very briefly here to mention our Disruptive HR Club. So we’ve got thousands of members, hr professionals, who want to do things differently, and in the Disruptive HR Club you get tonnes of resources, live on-demand training, our own AI agent, so you’ve got consultancy kind of 24-7. If you’re interested, just check out our website, disruptivehrcom, and you can find links in the show notes from this podcast as well as contact details for Anand. We’ll confirm that at the end. Right, let’s just have a look at the kind of return on investment, the impact side. What indicators or metrics do you use, or the organisations that you work with use, to measure the value of Nadia and AI coaching and leadership, because it’s really hard, isn’t it, to measure progress and performance around some of these softer skills. So how do you measure it?

19:23 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Well, the interesting thing about measurement when it comes to an AI coach is that many of the traditional problems that the HR function has often faced are really solved, because you do have access to a lot more data and you are looking at this in the way that employees actually work, as opposed to having a training thing happening here and then work happening here and you have to kind of go and chase people to hope that they’ve applied what they learn. We are deploying Nadia at the moment of actual work and so it’s actually easier for us to track things. So I’m going to read a couple of examples here. Costa Coffee here in the UK went from we’ve deployed to thousands of people and we saw one store that went from an underperforming to the highest customer loyalty score. We saw another store that increased the team’s net promoter score because during the holidays, which is usually a time that the NPS really dips Financial insurance, we saw 78% of users followed through on a career goal that they had set with a career development goal that they had set with Nadia, and part of the reason that we can see that is Nadia is proactive, so she will nudge you and remind you of things, not just in a generic, kind of annoying sense, but in a contextual, specific thing based on what you’ve been speaking about, and so that sense of both setting a goal with Nadia and then sticking to it becomes dramatically easier. Delta Airlines they’ve deployed Nadia to thousands of managers and they’ve seen that the time it takes to write a performance review has dropped by 90%. So just dramatic time savings.

21:18
As a metric there, experian, the big data company here in the UK, did a really interesting study as well where they looked at they’ve got over I think a third or so of their employees are using Nadia and they’ve actually deployed Nadia to all of their leaders as well. And they did a cohort analysis to see which everybody has a leadership effectiveness score. That’s a kind of default that everyone goes through, and they could see that those leaders who were using Nadia scored substantially higher in their leadership effectiveness score compared to those who weren’t. And so there’s a variety of different ways that companies are monitoring and evaluating Nadia’s impact. It’s typically some mix of time savings, behaviour change and just engagement and activity engagement with the company, that is.

22:16
And so it’s actually quite easy for us to put together a pretty robust scorecard for clients to understand how this thing is actually being used, and I’ve been on the other side of this where measuring impact is so, so difficult. I wrote an article about this actually in Harvard Business Review a few years ago, and the conclusion kind of was that you sort of have to work with proxy metrics. Basically right, you hope to make some kind of a connection, but seeing direct impact is just really really difficult. And of course we haven’t perfectly solved that I mean, we’re still on a journey with Nadia as well but we can start to see those directional metrics quite a bit more strongly than we used to.

23:01 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Thank you. So let’s have a look at deployment now For organisations that are just maybe thinking about how they can use AI. Deploy AI for talent or leadership. You know what are the kind of key decisions that you would advise them to make, or which are the decisions you want them to avoid to get a successful deployment.

23:27 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Yeah, it’s a great question and you know, at Valence we’ve now had over a million coaching conversations with Nadia and I do the little air quotes thing deliberately because you know it’s. These conversations often look different than your standard coaching conversations. They’re not always big picture step back reflective conversations that you might have with a human executive coach. They tend to be much more acute in the moment, fast moving support that you need and in so doing, I think there is a certain level of benefit that you will find purely in just giving more people access to a coach. Typically this is a elite benefit.

24:25
Yeah, so that whole democratization piece Exactly, and I think honestly that benefit is almost a given now. We believe that in the not too distant future, every worker will have some form of an AI coach. What we’re seeing now more interestingly and more strategically in terms of enterprise value from an AI coach, is when HR leaders direct and customise and point the coach in service of particular moments and programmes where they’re seeing the most friction. So imagine you’ve got a performance review or performance management programme. You find that people aren’t filling out, aren’t doing reviews very well, they aren’t delivering the feedback very effectively. Maybe it’s taking too much time.

25:13
That’s a great place for Nadia to be deployed. You may have a learning and development programme where you’re struggling to show real impact. That’s another great place for Nadia to be employed. She can learn the curriculum and then be a proactive practice tool for employees in perpetuity after that programme. So it’s looking at your HR strategy, your moments and programmes as you go into your planning cycle and saying where do we anticipate the most amount of friction? Where do we anticipate that costs will be too high or compliance will be too low or quality will be too low? And then let’s talk to Nadia and see how Nadia can learn this context and therefore be helpful there. So articulating the use cases is, I think, the biggest decision that HR leaders should make when they’re thinking about deploying something like an AI coach.

26:07 – Lucy Adams (Host)
They’re thinking about deploying something like an AI coach and have you come across kind of sceptical managers who are saying there’s no way I’m going to be coached by a robot. You know how do you have you? How do you cope with encouraging those sceptical leaders and managers to to come on board with it?

26:30 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Well, I have a thought on this, but I’m actually curious for your thoughts. You speak to so many HR leaders. Are you still seeing skepticism or concern about AI coaching and tools?

26:40 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I think what we’re coming across is that there is still a you mentioned the kind of elite aspect of leadership development and I think that there is still an interest from leaders and managers for the elite business school leadership education, you know, and which is interesting because then you also have this, the biggest pushback coming from leaders around time.

27:11
So they’re, you know, they’re time poor, they’re super busy. So I think that, yeah, there is always going to be those leaders who, unless they’re going to Harvard or London Business School or INSEAD, then they’re going to kind of look down on it. But I think, increasingly there is a growing acceptance right, there is a growing acceptance that AI is not the clunky language models that we were seeing before, but can actually help with in the moment stuff. And I think, for me, the more people that use it, your early adopters, get on board, they see the value in it. You then get that kind of peer-to-peer advocacy and I think that overcomes a lot of issues. You know, let’s face it, if something is working, helps you deliver more effectively as a leader and manager, doesn’t impact on time, then you’re going to use it. So I think there is still some resistance, but I think it’s diminishing. Does that correspond?

28:18 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
with your. I would agree with that. I mean, if you look at the research on how people are using AI generally not just what we’ve seen with Nadia Wellness therapy that kind of personal support is the top use, so I think people are getting actually quite comfortable with that. That said, I don’t think that this is a substitute for the step back contextual leadership development programmes that leaders have been used to. In fact, I think some of those programmes may actually be more important now, as we need to create those spaces for true exploration and alignment and learning, given that the actual pace of work on a day-to-day basis is so much faster and so much more chaotic. I think there’s a role for the HR function to play in creating those spaces for leaders to really step back and learn. But look, let’s face it, most employees aren’t getting to go to an Ivy League business school for an executive education programme.

29:25
And if you look at who the users of Nadia really are, they are not usually the most senior leaders in the company. We’re talking about store managers at Costa Coffee.

29:37 – Lucy Adams (Host)
We’re talking about yeah, who would not be getting to go to the elite programmes and they wouldn’t be getting the executive coaches?

29:43 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Exactly, and that’s-.

29:46 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Sorry to interrupt your point there about a supplement to perhaps more traditional forms of development, whether that be classroom based or peer to peer scenario discussions, which can be incredibly effective. Coaching is the kind of nudges and the prompts and picking up on that development as a way of reinforcing it, because, as an HR director, that was always my frustration. You would have this immense investment, huge amounts of energy around the face-to-face, in-person development, but it was when they got back to the day job. So actually using that AI coach there can be very powerful.

30:29
Unfortunately, we’ve run out of time, anand. I’ve got a million more questions. I think this is just so exciting and, you know, for all of those HR people out there who are kind of, you know, beating their head against a brick wall because they’ve still got leadership development issues that they appear to have been trying to rectify for decades, I think this could. You know it’s not the only answer, but it’s definitely some fresh support that could have a really big impact. How can listeners contact you and find out more about Nadia and what it could do for them?

31:08 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Yeah, no, look. Thank you for the conversation. I really do think that we are at a new paradigm of what leadership development really looks like and this notion of in the moment support to make all of the small and big moments that we face as managers and leaders at all levels more effective. Best way to get in touch with me personally is on LinkedIn.

31:36 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Great, we’ll put your LinkedIn connection in the show notes so people can reach you there.

31:41 – Anand Chopra-McGowan (Guest)
Great, and then you can also look at more about Nadia at valenceco. We’ve got a bunch of really great case studies there where you can see how companies are actually grappling with the planning and the deployment of AI coaching.

31:58 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Anand, thank you so much for joining me today and giving your time and your thoughts. It’s been a real pleasure.