Most HR leaders can name their best managers without thinking twice. What’s harder is explaining how to make more of them.
Coaching skills don’t scale the way headcount does. A great manager gets promoted, gets busier, and has less time to mentor the next one. New managers, meanwhile, are handed a team and a Review deadline with no real playbook for either. We built AI Coaches to close that gap, not by replacing the coaching that happens between people, but by making it available more often, to more managers, at the moment they actually need it.
What AI Coaches actually do
AI Coaches are conversational, and they’re fine-tuned to your company rather than generic. We started with three places managers and employees already spend time: Performance Reviews, 1:1 Meetings, and a general Coach Workspace for open-ended questions.
In a Performance Review, a Coach can assess what’s been written, flag Objectives that weren’t addressed, check that past 360 Feedback was actually considered, and make sure a major topic from a previous Review didn’t quietly disappear. Managers can also ask a Coach for inspiration on how to deliver a Review conversation, or how to prepare for a follow-up pay-raise discussion.
Ahead of a 1:1 Meeting, the Coach can help a manager remember what a good manager sometimes forgets six months in, like whether old Review feedback was ever actually resolved. It can also cross-check your career matrix to surface training or growth opportunities that fell off a manager’s radar.
Why this matters for developing managers, specifically
A Coach’s advice gets sharper the more it knows about your company. Upload your career matrix, your company values, or your internal guidelines and policies, and a Coach will assess a Review or suggest Talking Points against your actual standards, not generic best practice. You’ll see this most clearly in Review coaching: a Coach that knows your career matrix can tell a manager exactly what’s expected at the reviewee’s level, instead of offering vague encouragement.
This is also where AI Coaches go beyond a checklist. Since a Coach can reference your company values, it can help a manager approach a genuinely tricky topic, lowering the barrier for an employee to raise something they might otherwise sit on. And because a Coach has access to past Reviews and Objectives, it can run a manager through a role-play micro-training before a real salary conversation, so the first time they think through the hard part isn’t in the room with their direct report.
None of this replaces a manager’s judgment. It means they’re not building that judgment from scratch, alone, every time.
Making a Coach yours
You’re not limited to the Coaches we ship by default. From the configuration screen, you can decide which Coaches your staff see, and what company data each one can access. If a particular Coach isn’t right for your organization, deactivate it.
You can also write your own prompts, from something as simple as “verify that the Self-Assessment touches on each of our company values,” to something more involved, like “propose three Objectives based on the last Review and 360 Feedback data, but don’t repeat an Objective that existed in the past.” Or build a Coach from scratch and give it access to exactly the data it needs.
What’s available on your plan
Coach availability depends on your plan. On Launch, admins can preview the feature but staff can’t use it yet. On Grow, Coaches are fully available with moderate configuration, up to three resources and three custom Coaches. On Elevate, Coaches are fully configurable.
We’re starting with Reviews and 1:1 Meetings, with 360 Feedback, Objectives, and admin screens on the roadmap for the coming months. Writing Assistant and Objectives Coach will become customizable in the same way over time.
The takeaway
AI Coaches exist because coaching shouldn’t depend entirely on how much time a manager has left in their week. Upload your career matrix and company values, decide which Coaches your staff should see, and give your managers a place to prepare and think out loud before the conversation that matters actually happens.
See AI Coaches in action, or reach out to Support about connecting your company resources.
