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When Michael Phelps dove into the pool at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and his goggles filled with water, he didn’t panic. He had trained for this scenario. His coach, Bob Bowman, was famous for “sabotaging” practices by breaking goggles and getting Phelps to swim blind, relying on rhythm and stroke count rather than sight.
That’s the athletic mindset. Athletes prepare for the unexpected because high performance depends on resilience under pressure. The same is true for organizations in the agentic era, and that mindset is exactly what organizations need.
Business conditions are fluctuating faster than ever. Markets move, technology evolves again and again, and expectations can shift before your eyes. The old model of workforce development — launching courses on an academic calendar, sometimes only every few years — is out of sync with the pace of change. In these conditions, competitive advantage comes from having a workforce equipped to adapt in real time: aligned at every level, in every function, and able to execute with precision, rolling with every change.
This is where BetterUp’s new Human + AI Coaching for All platform release comes in. It solves two core challenges:
- Delivers both depth and scale: CHROs often have to choose between programs that are deeply transformative or broadly scalable.
- Prioritizes continuous over episodic learning: Instead of sporadic learning, it offers science-backed daily practice, feedback, and accountability.
The result is a coaching program that improves performance across the workforce, reinforces the behaviors organizations care about most, and reaches far beyond the handful of executives who typically get coached. This product update builds the infrastructure for continuous adaptation that’s woven into the fabric of daily work.
The agentic era demands deep transformation at scale
We’ve already accepted that the rate of change is speeding up. What matters now is how organizations respond to it. The real challenge isn’t keeping up with technology or market shifts, it’s aligning an entire workforce to move with them.
Faced with new tools and technology, the instinct is to double down on skills training. Upskill developers to use new AI-enabled coding tools. Offer a “How to prompt GPT” workshop. Hope that knowledge fills the gap. But the real task is changing how people show up at work, how they make decisions, how they handle ambiguity, how they adapt when the job they were hired to do no longer looks the same, how they integrate technology into their work, and how they use their newfound time.
Adapting to that requires breakthrough performance — and that doesn’t come from a burst of inspiration in a classroom. It comes from practice, habit, and mindsets that carry into daily work. Traditional coaching models can’t deliver that with both depth and scale.
What does readiness really mean?
Organizations love to talk about being “future-ready,” “tomorrow-proof.” But being ready for constant change isn’t only about reacting to new external forces or strategies. It’s about being ready for your job itself to change. Whether your job is getting automated or you are automating it, AI is taking pieces of work that used to define entire roles. Writing code, drafting emails, preparing reports — the tasks change, and suddenly the job isn’t what it was.
That can feel threatening, even terrifying. It can also feel like an opportunity. The difference comes down to mindset. And mindset change isn’t something most managers can hand-hold people through. No company has enough leaders to personally coach everyone through an identity shift, and not every manager is equipped to do it.
Readiness must first be cultivated within the individual. The employee who embraces that half their job can be automated but gets creative about solving other problems and doing work that moves the company mission forward — that’s the employee who will thrive. And organizations benefit most from that kind of person.
But that ability doesn’t come from a corporate training program or an upskilling course. It’s built through deep, personalized development. Cultural change comes from shifting habits, mindsets, and daily behaviors. That’s the level of change this release is designed to make possible at scale.
How is BetterUp’s Human + AI for All different from traditional coaching?
Past attempts to modernize development leaned on microlearning: short modules, static content, a more convenient version of the classroom. That approach doesn’t always change behaviors, partly because the coursework is not aware of the individual learner or the context and because the emphasis is more on knowledge than on practical application and habit formation.
Human + AI for All changes that.
It is built from millions of real coaching conversations. It implements the science of what drives transformation — the questions, reflections, and nudges that change thinking and spark tangible action. It delivers interactions designed to move people forward and apply new behaviors that are tailored to their unique situations.
It also carries the context of the organization embedded in the system:
- Competency models
- Business goals
- Role expectations
That context travels with the individual. Whether they’re role-playing a feedback conversation with the AI coach on a Tuesday or meeting with their human coach on Friday, they don’t start over.
Nothing is lost in translation. It’s in the fabric of development, continuous and connected.
What makes this system unique is how the two forms of coaching learn from and respond to each other. The AI coach recognizes when a challenge needs deeper human connection and can cue a handoff to a live coach when empathy, nuance, or accountability matter most.
What the data shows
The payoff is measurable. In a large-scale BetterUp Labs study, employees who used AI coaching before tough conversations reported lower anxiety and higher confidence compared to those who reflected alone. Across the platform, blending human and AI coaching drove boosts of:
- 36% in basic performance – getting the right work done
- 15% in collaborative performance – working beyond role, with others
- 26% in adaptive performance – changing fast with creative intent
- $29M in ROI per 1,000 employees
And when asked what they prefer, the majority of workers (52%) said both: the empathy and lived experience of a human coach, combined with the objectivity and immediacy of AI.
And the coaching experience shows up where people are. In Slack and Teams. In calendars. In the flow of work, not outside it. Employees can rehearse high-stakes conversations, get just-in-time prompts before big meetings, and receive feedback tailored to their role. Meanwhile, leaders see unified reporting that connects individual growth to business outcomes.
This release works like an operating system for the human dimension of business performance — always on, always aligned, always adaptive.
Competing in a future that won’t hold still
In this age, competitive advantage doesn’t come from new strategies that fail to mobilize aligned action. It comes from people who can execute any strategy with precision and adaptability. That capability can’t be bought in a course catalog or sparked by a keynote. It must be built into the daily operating system of the workforce.
That’s what Human + AI for All provides. A way to deliver personalized transformation at scale. A way to embed cultural change into daily practice. A way to close the readiness gap between strategy and execution.
CHROs don’t need another program. They need a system that helps an entire workforce learn new mindsets, skills, and behaviors in an aligned way so the organization can move with speed, precision, and purpose. With this release, that system is here.
Human + AI Coaching, built to scale behavior change.
Get the empathy of a coach, the precision of AI, and the daily reinforcement it takes to drive real performance.
