An AI Coach for Frontline Managers

When Tim Hourigan, former CHRO at The Home Depot, describes the frontline, the part of the workforce whose job happens somewhere other than a desk, he starts with a typical 2 a.m. night shift scenario:

Two team members are having a heated argument in the receiving area. A delivery truck showed up late and the freight is still sitting on the dock, while the fight plays out. Two other team members called out at the last minute, and the manager on duty, who was promoted to manage the team less than a year ago, has to decide to run overtime or open understaffed. Her boss is asleep, and there's no HR partner in the building. And whether any of this gets resolved, the store opens at six.

According to Tim, at The Home Depot, frontline managers are the most critical management positions in the company because the decisions they make at 2 a.m. on the receiving dock determine how the store performs that day, and how stores performed was how the business performed.

For most of Tim’s career, however, it was impossible for HR to support frontline leaders in the moments that mattered most because they lacked the tools to reach them. An HR business partner typically carries 200 or 250 managers, and traditional programs could reach maybe 2,000 of the 50,000 people who would benefit from the training. And even then frontline managers were on their own to apply what they learned.

At The Home Depot, Tim invested in Valence's Nadia because he saw a way to equip every frontline leader, 24/7 in over 100 languages, with the coaching they need to show up as a great leader and get results from their teams, even at 2 a.m. when a shift goes sideways.

Frontline leaders are under more pressure.

Depending on whose count you use, around 80 percent of the global workforce works on the frontline: store floors, plants, distribution centers, hospital units, airport ticketing counters.

The typical frontline manager is recently promoted from the crew they lead, often managing 10-15 people or more, a span of control that has been steadily increasing. Most also carry their own operational work on top of managing. Gallup has the average manager at 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 a year earlier, and 97 percent of managers doing individual contributor work on top of managing.

The frontline manager is even more important as AI rewrites how work is done. In late 2025, PwC and the Manufacturing Institute found that 54 percent of manufacturers have low confidence in their frontline leaders' readiness to guide AI change, and 45 percent say that excluding frontline leaders from the design of AI initiatives is why an initiative failed.

But there is good news for frontline leaders. A longitudinal study from Valence’s Research Initiative (VRI) found managers were nearly three times as likely as individual contributors to be power users of Nadia, and when a manager used her heavily, their team was twice as likely to adopt her too. As Jennifer Carpenter, one of the lead researchers on the VRI study, puts it: “Managers are the catalyst of AI transformation, not the casualty.”

Nadia reaches and supports frontline managers in the moments that matter most.

“Our frontline leaders were our super users. They're out there every single day leading our 90,000 flight attendants, pilots, res agents and ground agents, with teams of 50 to 100 people. We embedded Nadia on their mobile devices because these folks aren't at their desks, nor do we want them to be. We want them out there with their people and with our customers,” -Toby Broberg, Delta’s Global Managing Director, Talent Management.

To return to that 2 a.m. receiving dock, when the fight breaks out, the manager doesn't get generic management advice because Nadia is grounded in the company’s policies and on the device the leader already carries. Nadia is customized to each company's values, leadership model, and the policies and procedures a shift manager actually works from, so the guidance she gives at 2 a.m. is the guidance the best HRBP would give, in every location, in the manager's language.

Delta first deployed Nadia for performance management, saving time on reviews and improving the quality of feedback. Nadia proved the highest rated tool HR had ever rolled out, with one end user calling it: "The best leadership tool we've received at Delta during my 12+ years here." That feedback motivated Delta to expand access to the frontline. Today, Nadia supports 15,000 leaders with coaching anchored in Delta’s "Flight Plan" and "Rules of the Road", documents that lay out the strategic vision and best operating practices. Frontline leaders turn to Nadia for smoother shift handovers, compliance and safety communications, and to prepare and debrief from hard conversations at the ticketing desk and on the hangar floor.

Nadia personalizes the coaching to what she knows about that manager and their team. For instance, from past coaching conversations and team collaboration profiles, Nadia knows the night shift manager on the receiving dock was promoted just over a year ago. Nadia has built a picture of their relationship to the two team members arguing on the receiving dock. One is a young student working part-time while studying at the local community college. He is a hard worker, but doesn’t yet fully work the way the team operates. The other was a close colleague and friend before the manager was promoted. From what the manager has shared, Nadia also knows this team member is going through personal difficulties that he has been taking out at work.

With that context, Nadia can tailor the recommendation and suggest that the new manager take the older colleague aside and give him a safe space to confide what’s really going on before sending him home to rest. Meanwhile, the newer employee gets to work unloading the receiving dock and stays on for overtime.

Over time, Nadia proactively recognizes the moments that are going to matter. Nadia can nudge before the next shift the two associates share and prep a check-in conversation with the older colleague and then schedule a follow-up a week later on how it went so the situation improves over time.

As another example, at Costa Coffee, Nadia helped a frontline store manager turn around a low-performing store during the critical holiday season. Sharon Ann Hattie had run a flagship Costa Coffee store for 13 years when she was transferred to a struggling store. Because the team was new to her, Nadia had her keep a journal for four weeks, watching who worked well together. As she fed those observations back, the coaching got more proactive. Nadia helped her rework the rota around the pairings that actually clicked, then set targets the team could see itself hitting.

Four weeks later the store had beaten its targets every week of the holiday season, with sales 38 percent higher than the year before, and the highest customer loyalty score of the year.

When every frontline leader has a coach, HR can see the entire organization more clearly.

The 2 a.m. scenario shows how an AI coach can support a single frontline moment, but the larger change is what HR can do when every frontline leader has Nadia. HR can use Nadia to connect talent moments and deliver initiatives like performance reviews, goal setting, new leadership development frameworks, and strategic changes. And the anonymized picture that comes back gives a clearer sense of the organization than anything an engagement survey has been able to produce.

Of course, in coaching, trust is critical. What any individual says to Nadia stays private. Nadia is built with trust as a first principle and certified to ISO 42001, the international standard for responsible AI. The more managers and their teams can speak candidly, the more the aggregate, anonymized patterns HR receives become a GPS for the organization, allowing leaders to see where a change is landing and where it isn't and where teams are struggling.

That moment on the dock at 2 a.m. is what makes or breaks the next day of business, and with Nadia, HR can finally be there.

--> Learn more about how Nadia supports the frontlines

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