We are so lucky to know the themes from thousands of conversations with our AI Coach Nadia. Valence has analyzed all the conversations from September to see what people want coaching and help with. We see three overarching themes: Effective Human Interactions and Relationships, Personal and Professional Growth, and Strategic Thinking & Operational Effectiveness. It’s somewhat surprising that the themes feel less linked to modern challenges like technology change, business complexity or tightening pressure on metrics. Instead they’re focused on the age old challenge of working with other people and striving to get better. However, these folks now have a new asset, in an AI Coach, to help them handle these evergreen challenges.

This data not only provides a unique window into the minds of professionals seeking guidance and growth but also offers critical insights for HR leaders and organizations aiming to support and develop their talent in meaningful, impactful ways.

Overview of Top Themes

1. Effective Human Interaction and Relationship Management

This theme combines Communication and Interpersonal & Team Dynamics. It represents the largest portion of the conversations, at 60%, highlighting the critical importance of human-centric skills in today's workplace.

These conversations cover a range of topics but we’ll highlight a few recurring themes. On the relationship front the two biggest themes are conflict and winning people over. Conflict is often in a manager to direct report relationship, a manager trying to mediate conflict between two other people or challenges between adjacent functions or teams.. Dealing with different styles and personalities is also a frequent topic, especially when this occurs with a direct report and their manager, where they want advice on how to adapt, communicate with and influence their manager in the right way. Many team topics are about motivation and engagement, where there’s a difficult business environment and a need to figure out how to get the most out of an overstretched team, often dealing with change.

The communications themes are vast but how to deliver difficult messages emerges time and time again. This can be about sharing constructive performance feedback, messaging about layoffs or changes in strategic direction or reorganization. Users often bring a narrow communication challenge, but end up talking about root causes and bigger picture issues. For example a user may come in asking for how they should announce impending layoffs, but ends up with a more fulsome communication and support plan to manage the full transition. Or a user comes with an ask on how to deliver a specific piece of feedback to a report but realizes through the conversation that a bigger rework of that report’s training, task assignment and check in process is needed to address the performance challenge. There have been fewer conversations about meetings than we expected for September’s return from summer, as the themes were overwhelming what’s stated above around tough messages, motivation, conflict and interpersonal influence.

2. Personal and Professional Growth

This theme includes aspects of Skill Building & Leadership, Career Growth, and Personal Stress & Resilience, totaling 25% of conversations. It reflects a strong desire for individual development, both in terms of career progression and personal well-being.

Users want to get better. For some that is pursuing a bigger change in career path or acceleration in reaching the next level. These folks will talk about foundational skills but also about strategizing for achieving their next career goal, which ends up being a multi-faceted approach to learn, gain advocates, make a bigger impact and much more. Some conversations are about employees feeling stuck and unsure about where to go with their career, where the users are in need of internal clarity and then need a map of options for where to go.

Skill building covers a huge range of topics. Users focused on this often end up having a large number of conversations on them over time. This is perhaps a driver of the high portion of skill building conversations, in that the same user may come back multiple times over a series of weeks as they try to put the skills into practice and seek the next round of coaching guidance, feedback and the next step in their skill development.‍

3. Strategic Thinking and Operational Effectiveness

This theme encompasses Strategy or Business Work, HR Work, and Prioritization and Decision Making. While these categories individually represent smaller percentages, together they indicate a focus on improving strategic thinking, making sure we’re doing the right tasks and making the right decisions.

This category has a huge variety of topics that are largely driven by the role and company/industry of the user. While small (4%) the biggest theme in this area is conversations classified as HR work where the output is on topics like building a program, supporting other groups, creating a strategy or output for whatever talent, learning or OD challenge is mentioned. Another critical theme in this category is users struggling to prioritize across a large load of work or goals and people facing decisions with no obvious answer, and significant trade offs no matter what they choose. The AI Coach at times gives these people frameworks and advice on how to work through the prioritization or decision and at times the coach helps them work through the specific example they are facing to develop an answer.

AI Coaching & Vulnerability

We’ve added a few detectors into our conversation analysis and the two I’ll highlight are for intense emotions and personal vulnerability. We’ve been surprised at the number of conversations where users come to Nadia in a heightened emotional state needing to process what they’re feeling and work through it. They don’t need problem solving but they need to blow off steam, or feel empathy or just have someone listen. It happens more often than we’d expect that our “high emotions” detector goes off  in a conversation with Nadia. The other, potentially related, surprise for us is the number of conversations that get labelled as high in vulnerability, people express fears, anxieties and personal weaknesses quite regularly. This is supports our hypothesis that an AI is a safe space to be real and honest without fear of being judged.

Implications for HR Leaders

For HR leaders we see a few implications of this mix of topics employees are seeking help with:

1. Provide real time coaching (Provide a coach in your pocket): There are enough issues users are facing in any given week that a real time and always on offering is incredibly helpful. The issues raised are often relevant in the same day or certainly within the week. A client recently shared the story of a newly onboarded user who had a presentation at 3 pm that they weren’t sure how to tackle, and at 2 pm they talked to Nadia and got a plan. They then texted our client after the presentation to say the advice really helped.‍
2. Invest in training & skill building for all things interpersonal (Bridge the soft skills gap): There is clearly a big need to manage all the interpersonal and relationship challenges of a demanding and complex modern workplace. The skills, knowledge and emotional approaches needed for this are topics  managers and individual contributors are asking for help with. Getting to the root of building those skills would enable more issues to be resolved by employees without extra help, even from an AI Coach.‍
3. Provide customized skill building solutions, that use an action learning cycle (Give a skill building personal trainer): With users having an ongoing conversation with Valence’s AI Coach Nadia about skill building we see that each person needs unique feedback and advice based on their specific strengths and challenges. It’s good to have generalized advice to initially frame the skill building but an employee needs constant check ins and redirection to put the skill into practice. In a webinar with one of our customers a user spoke up about how Nadia sends them reminders of the skill they’re supposed to practice, holding them to account and pitching new strategies based on what they shared in their last update. 

We’re sure there are more insights and implications of this data and we’re excited to work with each of our customers on this in the coming months!