Perceptyx, the global leader in employee listening and actioning for a better workplace, today launched AI Coach, the first AI-powered coaching agent to measurably improve business outcomes. Uniquely embedded within the Perceptyx employee listening platform, AI Coach is “experience-aware”—continuously drawing on each organization’s real-time employee experience (EX) data, including survey insights and 360 feedback, to understand the specific needs of every team. With this contextual intelligence, it guides leaders to adopt the precise behaviors that are proven to drive retention, productivity, and performance.
“Manager development too often happens in a vacuum — disconnected from the employee experience it’s meant to improve,” said Stacia Garr, Co-founder and Principal Analyst at RedThread Research. “Perceptyx stands out by grounding development in real employee experience data. That connection ensures coaching is not only personalized, but directly aligned with what teams need to thrive—building trust, boosting performance, and driving meaningful change.”
Poor management costs U.S. businesses $408 billion a year in turnover and up to a further $211 billion in lost productivity, according to Perceptyx research1. Organizations have turned to AI coaches in an effort to improve leadership skills at scale, but a common frustration with these solutions is that the advice they offer is too generalized to be helpful, and their impact is difficult to measure.
“What truly sets Perceptyx AI Coach apart is our unmatched ability to link individual coaching directly to employee experience insights,” said Joe Freed, Chief Product Officer at Perceptyx. “While other AI coaching products provide guidance on leadership skills, they lack context of a leader’s employee experience. By contrast, our experience-aware approach empowers organizations to guide their leaders toward precise actions based on their unique experiences, to genuinely move the needle for business success.”
For example, consider a large retailer struggling with frontline worker engagement, resulting in high turnover and low customer satisfaction. A one-size-fits-all approach with generic coaching guidance can’t solve the problem as the root cause of low engagement differs from team to team. One team may have psychological safety issues while another needs clarity and recognition. Perceptyx’s AI Coach provides unique ongoing conversational coaching to each manager, with every interaction personalized to reflect not only the managers’ own development goals but also what employee feedback shows are the specific needs of their team – even as those needs change. As a result, engagement scores rise, turnover rates drop, and customer satisfaction improves.
Built for Action—Not Just Analysis
While other EX platforms use AI to summarize results without taking action, Perceptyx’s use of AI turns employee experience insights into tangible actions that drive true behavioral change. AI Coach identifies and prioritizes the specific areas each leader must improve to significantly enhance overall business outcomes. It delivers:
- Personalized development plans based on manager blindspots and specific drivers of employee engagement
- Weekly behavioral nudges that reinforce key leadership behaviors in the flow of work
- Conversational, generative AI coaching that continually helps managers address the dynamic and ever-changing needs of employees
- Measurable impact tracking, allowing Leadership & Development teams to prove the impact of their leadership development investments.
Proven to Build Better Behaviors that Deliver Business Results
In early deployments, customers using AI Coach as a targeted intervention for struggling managers saw double-digit improvements in team sentiment—specifically on items tied to the capabilities being coached. Managers engaged with AI Coach weekly, received role-specific nudges, and used real-time, conversational prompts to address challenges like psychological safety, feedback, and accountability. Measurable improvements in employee experience were confirmed through follow-up surveys, with manager feedback scores rising as much as eight to twelve points in as little as six months.
And because AI Coach sits inside the broader Perceptyx platform, customers were able to link improvements to metrics like retention, store performance, patient experience, and customer satisfaction to understand the full impact.
Part of Grow: A Smarter Approach to Scalable Leadership Development
AI Coach is part of Grow, Perceptyx’s AI-powered leadership development solution. The power behind Perceptyx AI Coach and Grow, and the key to their effectiveness, is Perceptyx’s unique foundation of Nudge Theory. AI Coach proactively helps leaders build new habits in the course of their work by prompting them with weekly guidance, rooted in behavioral science and written by PhD-level behavioral scientists. With a library of over 2,500 nudges and drawing from a corpus of more than 10,000 pages of behavioral science research, AI Coach is able to help managers develop the critical soft-skills necessary for personal and organizational success.
Combined with the new Nudge Agent, which turns internal learning content into customized behavioral nudges using the same Nudge Theory framework, Grow reduces the manual burden on HR and L&D teams while dramatically increasing program impact.
“Leadership development has always been a black box—expensive, hard to scale, and nearly impossible to measure,” said John Borland, CEO at Perceptyx. “AI Coach changes that. We’re delivering development that’s deeply relevant, directly tied to what employees are actually experiencing, and proven to drive measurable behavioral change and impact—something no other coaching tool or survey platform can claim.”
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