Grow Smarter: Unlock Greater Leadership Potential with AI Coach

Companies know that managers have a massive impact on engagement, performance, and retention. 

Leader and manager development has topped HR leaders’ list of priorities for the last three years. Yet, despite significant investment in development programs, organizations are not seeing the desired results. 

Most initiatives are too generic, rooted in outdated models, and disconnected from the day-to-day realities of leading a team. Without timely support, relevant context, or a clear path to success, managers are left to figure it out on their own.

The result? Frustration, wasted resources, and little to no impact on business outcomes.

Perceptyx created Grow to change that. Grow is a leadership development solution designed to flatten the “forgetting curve,” driving continuous manager improvement based on feedback from their peers and their teams.

Grow delivers personalized, measurable, and continuous leadership development in the form of Intelligent Nudges and AI Coaching aligned to actual employee experience — replacing static content with dynamic, continuous coaching powered by AI.

Why Grow? Because Better Leadership Drives Better Outcomes

Strong leadership is one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement, retention, and performance.

But organizations have a lot of trouble developing managers with leadership skills at scale. The typical methods tend to rely on static, one-size-fits-all learning content that can be difficult to apply in the context of day-to-day work. Trainings take place once or twice a year, then managers return to regular routines and quickly forget what they just learned.

Grow takes a different approach.

It leverages insights from employee listening channels like engagement surveys and 360 feedback to identify the most important areas for growth, then delivers focused coaching to help managers build the skills that will make the biggest difference for their teams.

AI Coach: Support That Adapts in Real Time

At the core of Grow is AI Coach, an experience-aware coaching agent that guides leaders based on feedback from their peers, supervisors, and direct reports.

Rather than one-time training sessions, managers receive ongoing support in the form of weekly nudges, delivered via Slack or Microsoft Teams. Managers can also engage Coach on demand to help prepare for meetings, role-play conversations, and navigate management challenges as they arise.

This isn’t just another chatbot — it’s a personalized coach purpose-built for employee experience, with insight into employee feedback, organizational goals, and the leadership skills needed to help achieve them.

Built for Action, Not Just Analysis

With AI Coach at the center of Grow, we turn feedback into targeted, continuous support that drives real behavioral change.

AI Coach identifies and prioritizes the specific leadership behaviors each manager needs to improve based on employee feedback from 360 assessments and survey data. It then delivers personalized development plans tailored to individual blind spots, followed by weekly behavioral nudges that reinforce key skills in the flow of work.

Through ongoing, conversational coaching, managers get real-time support that evolves as their team’s needs change. And with built-in impact tracking, HR and L&D leaders can measure progress and confidently demonstrate the value of their leadership development programs.

From Feedback to Impact: Consider an Example from FinTech

Picture a fast-growing FinTech company facing challenges with manager effectiveness as it scales. In one engineering team, employee feedback reveals a lack of psychological safety. Developers feel hesitant to speak up in meetings or challenge decisions. In a customer success group, team members say they aren’t getting enough clarity around shifting priorities and rarely receive recognition for their work.

A one-size-fits-all leadership training session can’t address these unique, team-level issues.

With AI Coach, each manager receives personalized, ongoing coaching based on real-time employee feedback. The engineering team’s manager is guided on how to create a more open, inclusive environment by inviting dissenting opinions and modeling vulnerability. Meanwhile, the customer success manager gets tips on setting clear expectations and making appreciation a visible, regular habit. Weekly nudges reinforce these practices, helping both leaders build lasting behaviors over time.

As feedback continues to roll in, AI Coach adapts to reflect new priorities and shifting team needs. Over time, engagement improves, internal communication strengthens, and customer satisfaction rises because teams feel heard, supported, and aligned.

Backed by Behavioral Science

AI Coach is built with input from PhD-level behavioral scientists and trained on the same research that informs Perceptyx’s extensive library of over 2,500 behavioral nudges. This includes a knowledge base of more than 10,000 pages of peer-reviewed behavioral science, ensuring the coaching is rooted in proven principles of behavior change — even as it adapts to each manager’s unique context.

The Results Speak for Themselves

A fatal flaw of most leadership development programs is the inability to measure results. Even when they manage to drive real improvements, L&D leaders struggle to prove impact.

Perceptyx is uniquely positioned to address this gap. We combine Grow data — manager engagement with nudges, AI Coach, and learning content — with trends from employee experience surveys. Now you can connect the dots from manager-led action to impact on team member engagement, employee retention, and other downstream business metrics.

In early deployments, AI Coach has delivered measurable, meaningful results. Employees reporting to managers who received coaching reported double-digit improvements in sentiment, specifically on the topics being addressed through coaching. Manager feedback scores increased by eight to 12 points within just six months, validated by follow-up employee surveys. In one enterprise rollout, 83% of managers engaged with AI Coach weekly — a powerful sign of adoption and value in the flow of work.

These gains aren’t just confined to HR metrics. They’ve translated directly into improved business performance, including lower turnover, stronger team cohesion, and higher customer satisfaction. One customer summed it up: “AI Coach isn’t just a tool. It’s how we lead now. It helps us stay connected to our teams and respond with confidence.”

Ready to Grow?

Today’s workplace demands agile, people-focused leadership. Grow gives managers the tools to lead with confidence, combining real-time data with the latest in behavioral science. It offers personalized leadership development at scale, delivers coaching in the moments that matter, supports lasting behavior change through proven methods, and produces measurable results that align with your most important business goals.

Schedule a demo to explore how Grow and AI Coach can help your leaders thrive.