In September this year, Valence, the company behind Nadia, the world's first enterprise AI coach, announced it had raised a $50 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. In an exclusive interview for Management-Issues with Anand Chopra-McGowan, Managing Director, Europe for Valence, we find out more about Nadia.
Nadia is now deployed at scale across Fortune 500 companies. Experian has embedded Nadia into its performance management process, with a third of its global workforce now actively using the coach. Delta Air Lines has rolled Nadia out to frontline leaders to provide real-time support and improve customer service across large teams. Analog Devices has given Nadia to its global workforce, supporting first-time technical managers with leadership coaching in 30+ languages.
Q: The coaching market is well-established – will this platform complement or be a threat to traditional one-on-one coaching?
Anand Chopra-McGowan: AI coaching doesn't just complement human coaching - it creates an entirely new paradigm. Traditionally, human coaches support maybe the top 1% of talent in an organisation. It's a high touch, executive service. With AI, we can now personalise and deliver that sort of coaching to every employee.
When every worker has an expert professional coach in their pocket powered by AI, organisations and teams can use this as a platform for performance. Our AI coach, Nadia, is now helping managers and teams with everything from delivering better performance reviews, setting clearer goals, learning new skills, and so much more.
As we've rolled out AI coaching at 50+ of the world's largest companies, we've learned that AI coaching is something fundamentally different from human coaching. Even if you could afford to scale 1,000 human coaches across the organisation, you would still face key limitations, like variation in coaching quality.
Just like human coaches, not all AI coaches are equally good. How well an AI coach performs depends on how well it understands and applies the context of your specific company to a particular individual challenge. Nadia has a proprietary context engine that constantly builds a model of your organisation, its goals, relationships, culture, and more to provide highly personalised and high-quality coaching.
Nadia also employs an intelligence and hypothesis layer that allows her to form and refine ideas about the most effective guidance over time. This creates a feedback loop in which every conversation enriches Nadia's memory. Combined with best-in-class voice AI and seamless integration into platforms like Microsoft Teams, Nadia offers employees a natural, conversational interface.
Take Costa Coffee. One café was struggling during the busy holiday season; in four weeks working with Nadia, the front-line manager redesigned team shifts around existing relationships, improved morale, and went from bottom performer to breaking sales records.
Q: Are there advantages to a platform like this in terms of it expanding the potential for people at more junior levels to receive coaching?
Anand Chopra-McGowan: Absolutely. Nadia empowers all employees, especially those at more junior or early-career levels. But the real story goes further than simply giving more people access.
Employees are engaging with Nadia earlier in their careers, learning how to reflect, set goals, and act on feedback - the foundational skills that make coaching effective. By the time they reach a level where they might work with a human coach, they already know how to be coached. That's a huge cultural shift: coaching becomes part of how the organisation operates, not a perk reserved for the top few.
Another point is that the dynamic between employees and AI is different. People often feel freer to explore sensitive topics without fear of judgment or consequence. It creates a space where they can admit uncertainty, test new ways of thinking, or rehearse difficult conversations before taking them to a colleague or manager.
And finally, there's personalisation. AI coaching adapts not only to someone's role and goals, but also to their language and communication style. People can interact with Nadia in their native language, and the platform continuously adjusts its tone and approach to match how that individual best absorbs information. It's a subtle but powerful difference.
Q: Do organisations that provide coaching at scale also tend to provide more personalised one-on-one coaching for their senior leadership teams and/or can the platform do that too and potentially replace traditional senior-level coaching?
Anand Chopra-McGowan: In reality, AI coaching is already performing at a level on par with the majority of human coaches, and the version of AI that exists today is the worst we'll ever have. Every month it learns, improves, and adapts.
That said, there are aspects of coaching that are deeply and uniquely human - particularly at the most senior levels, where trust, emotion, and strategic complexity are involved. Those relationships will always matter. But when it comes to creating an organisational coaching capability - one that's consistent, scalable, and personalised - AI has to be the backbone.
Many traditional coaching programmes start with human coaches and then try to wrap AI around it. The bigger opportunity is to make AI coaching the core infrastructure for performance, leadership development, and learning, with human coaching layered on top.
That's exactly what Experian has done. They integrated Nadia into their leadership development programme, and today a third of their workforce are active coaching users, with marked improvements in leadership effectiveness. The results have been recognised externally too - Experian recently won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for their use of Nadia.
Q: Should executive coaches be concerned that a platform like this could be a potential threat to their livelihood?
Anand Chopra-McGowan: Quite the opposite. Coaching at work has been too long viewed as a perk for the very top. High-performing teams are what drive high-performing companies. In sport, we know a coach is key to team performance, but we haven't applied that same insight to our workplaces. AI is rapidly changing that, and we believe it will usher in an era where coaching is central to every workplace and its performance.
Work is becoming human+AI, and coaching is a part of that change. Instead of fearing AI, we need to work with it to understand what it's uniquely exceptional at, and what humans are. AI excels at standardisation, personalisation, and continuous availability. It can provide ongoing support between sessions, reinforce learning, and surface insights in real time. But human coaches are still uniquely positioned to bring deep empathy, intuition, and in-the-room presence to help leaders with the most strategic decisions.
The best executive coaches already recognise this. They're using AI tools like Nadia to extend their impact, reach more people, and make the work they do between sessions even more effective. In that sense, AI isn't competition - it's collaboration. It frees coaches to focus on what humans do best: listening deeply, challenging thoughtfully, and helping people see themselves more clearly.