As a talent acquisition manager, you might appreciate having an executive coach. That rarely happens. Executive coaches are expensive and unless you are genuinely in a senior role organizations are reluctant to pay for one. However, things are changing; a new generation of AI coaches will bring coaching to everyone in the organization, including you.
The most dramatic element of AI coaching is its impact on cost. Alex McMurray, part of the founding team of the AI coaching company Valence, says “The cost of our AI coach is often as low as 2% of the cost of a human coach. The pricing model is different; while a human coach typically charges by the hour over the course of a multi-month engagement, an AI coach is a subscription with unlimited usage.”
Of course, a low cost isn’t enough, the quality of coaching needs to be good. Dr. Anna Tavis of NYU and co-author of The Digital Coaching Revolution has looked at various AI coaching systems. She says, “AI coaching is not just the future of coaching; it’s the future of learning and development. Tutoring is the most effective way of learning.”
This combination of low cost and high quality could spark a coaching revolution.
It’s encouraging to know that academics like Dr. Tavis think highly of AI coaching, however, if you are looking at a specific tool then you need to do your own assessment. The two main metrics for assessing an AI coaching tool are:
The usage statistics are where the rubber hits the road. If managers are using the AI coach a lot, then that’s a sign they find it valuable, if not, then either they need training on how to use the coach, or else they have found the coach is not worth the effort.
It is relatively easy to run a pilot and find out how good these tools are in your environment.
Valence’s AI Coach, Nadia, leverages LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Google’s Gemini. The AI application developed by the team provides an added layer of coaching best practices, frameworks, and methodologies. You can get basic coaching from a tool like ChatGPT, but a coaching specific application will create a superior coaching experience.
Also under the hood are the components that provide administration, reporting, and integration. Part of the assessment of an AI coaching tool will be how easy it is to administer and how well it integrates with your other systems.
Management involves a wide range of skills that must be deployed day by day, meeting by meeting, and email by email. Managerial challenges may involve interpersonal issues (“How do I tell an employee they are performing poorly?”), planning issues (“Help me think through my priorities.”), or self-development issues (“How can I become more empathetic?”). Humans often fall short in some of these areas, particularly in the heat of the moment. If AI coaches live up to their potential, they will provide instant feedback right in the flow of the work. This could lead to the most significant advancement in management ability in the past 40 years.
Valence’s McMurray notes that AI coaching will interest talent acquisition managers both as a tool for their own use and as a tool to onboard the managers they hire. An AI coach tuned to organizational values and methodologies should improve the success rate of new managerial hires.
Dr. Tavis says that “There will still be a role for elite human coaches, but coaches not at the elite level may struggle to find clients. The future of management will involve some kind of hybrid collaboration between humans and AI. The AI coaches can provide personalized feedback and advice, they will even help humans interact with each other more effectively. There is a bright future both for managers and their AI coaches.”
