How to elevate leadership performance with AI Coach

Today’s managers are responsible for empowering, mentoring, and leading their teams while balancing the needs of higher-ups. And they’re doing this as they juggle higher workloads, longer hours, fewer breaks, and less work-life balance than individual contributors.

This is where AI can help. AI coaching amplifies every manager’s impact with personalized coaching, assistance, and guidance, empowering them to build a culture of sustainable high performance.

The essential role of managers

Managers have a lot on their plates, and their work as people leaders has a major impact. According to Culture Amp research, employees who feel valued by their manager and receive effective feedback are more likely to achieve high performance.

Historically, companies have supported their people with static playbooks and processes that are difficult to scale to all people leaders. In the moments that truly test leadership – engagement issues, performance reviews, and the everyday, high-stakes conversations – managers often have to fend for themselves.

What can we do to help managers feel more confident as leaders and increase their efficiency so they have the time and energy to support their teams effectively?

Our study on AI in HR provides a compelling insight: Managers are already seeking out AI for conversational coaching support during these critical micro-moments of leadership. And there’s more that AI can do to help than just provide always-on coaching.

That’s why we created AI Coach.

Meet AI Coach

AI Coach delivers personalized, science-backed coaching via a powerful and user-friendly conversational AI interface and is deeply integrated in the Culture Amp platform. Grounded in people science, a manager can ask AI Coach any leadership, engagement, or performance question on their mind and receive friendly guidance and action plans on what to do next.

By leveraging AI Coach, organizations can:

• Deliver coaching at scale: Democratize coaching for non-executive managers, making AI Coach available whenever they need it.
• Unlock clarity, capability, and confidence: Managers can organize their thoughts, get summarized engagement and performance insights, and receive structured recommendations for becoming more effective leaders.
• Turn insights into effective action: AI Coach empowers managers to quickly take the next best step with impactful action plans and co-created tailored communications.
• Achieve better outcomes, faster: Managers get answers, tools, and support that strengthen performance and lead to improved strategic outcomes.
• Access personalized coaching – tailored to your organization: AI Coach integrates with your engagement survey and performance review data to deliver contextual insights and actionable guidance.

Grounded in people science best practices and proven coaching methods, AI Coach enables organizations to develop managers into more effective people leaders at scale. With AI Coach, each manager gets a private, safe, and secure space to think through work-related concerns, practice tough conversations, and elevate their performance.

AI Coach uses data-driven insights to address workplace, engagement, and performance challenges and pulls from multiple coaching methodologies to create a structured framework for moving forward. Depending on the question, it will share specific examples, practical strategies, and science-backed methods, such as role-play and step-by-step action planning, to clarify next steps.

While AI Coach delivers immense value to managers, it is available today for all Culture Amp users so that everyone in the organization – regardless of their job role, seniority, or experience – can get the coaching they need to take their performance to the next level.

Coaching that’s anything but robotic

AI Coach partners with managers to help organize their thoughts, and from there, it delivers contextual feedback, targeted guidance, and structured recommendations on what action to take and when to implement it for the most impact.

Here’s what makes AI Coach so effective:

• AI Coach was developed by experts who have studied the world's top-performing teams. It draws from insights gathered from 1.5 billion data points collected over a decade of research. Additionally, by leveraging Culture Amp’s people science knowledge base, AI Coach identifies the appropriate tools and frameworks to guide users toward positive outcomes.
• AI Coach is purpose-built for human interactions and shaping behavior change. Unlike off-the-shelf AI tools, AI Coach adapts each coaching session to a particular user’s needs – and their current unique challenge. Through tailored advice and recommendations based on proven coaching methods and frameworks – like SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact) and the 4 As (Awareness, Acknowledgment, Action, Accountability) – AI Coach offers opportunities for growth and equips users to move forward with confidence.
• AI Coach leverages people data to understand you and your organization and deliver personalized coaching. AI Coach draws on people data from across the Culture Amp platform to deliver deeply contextual insights and guidance that support users in strengthening performance and swiftly achieving better outcomes.

Turn your engagement data into effective action

Synthesizing engagement survey results and determining how to take action can be an overwhelming and time-consuming process. This can lead to inaction or generic initiatives that don't really move the needle.

AI Coach in Engage instantly summarizes engagement survey data and surfaces key themes across multiple survey questions, providing managers with better clarity on engagement drivers and translating insights into prioritized actions.

After identifying the most meaningful opportunities and key themes, AI Coach can collaborate with leaders to build tailored action plans and communication drafts for different audiences and channels, creating messages that drive change faster and more effectively.

Work through complex challenges together

Whether a manager wants guidance on approaching a direct report about a drop in performance, preparing for redundancy announcements, or giving honest upward feedback to their manager, AI Coach is there whenever they need it – no preparation or scheduling necessary.

AI Coach works through these tough situations with them, but the manager is always the one in the driver’s seat, deciding what action makes the most sense for their situation. Because AI can never replace the human connection and empathy that we all need to succeed.

Before a difficult conversation, managers can even role-play with AI Coach, so they can rehearse what they want to say and refine their approach.

Co-create effective action and communication plans

AI Coach helps managers move from insight to action, not only with targeted guidance, but with helpful tools and takeaways, such as action plans, script templates for starting conversations, how-to checklists, meeting agendas, and even messages managers can send to their team and executive stakeholders

By co-creating these guides and assets, managers can jump into action and swiftly create impact. Taking the right action with speed is essential for the best outcomes, especially in situations such as declining employee engagement, for example.

AI Coach can help managers identify the best content type for their team’s unique situation, such as implementing a Team Impact Check-in to boost morale and connection to the company mission. AI Coach can then suggest a step-by-step action plan, providing managers with helpful information, including the rationale and goals for the check-in, that makes it easy to refer back to later.

Coming soon: Write high-quality performance reviews faster

Performance management requires quite a bit of effort from managers: There’s a lot of data to process, and then they have to figure out how to turn insights from that data into meaningful feedback.

AI Coach will soon be able to uncover highlights and opportunities from past performance reviews and feedback data, helping leaders focus on what matters most.

AI Coach can then collaborate with managers to draft and refine reviews that are objective, actionable, and tailored to the individual – saving time and improving quality, while ensuring the manager remains in control.

Stay tuned in the coming months for more details on using AI Coach in Perform!

Grow lasting leadership capabilities

Using AI Coach feels like chatting with a trusted and knowledgeable colleague, and each science-backed conversation will help unlock your managers’ potential. Whether your people leaders need in-the-moment advice or in-depth guidance, AI Coach provides the just-in-time support they need to do great work and create long-lasting impact throughout your business.

Learn more about AI Coach

Find out how you can deliver personalized coaching to everyone in your business.

Meet AI Coach