Every manager knows the feeling. You’re about to walk into a difficult feedback conversation. You have five minutes. A calendar that’s already overbooked. Competing priorities, pulling your attention in every direction. And no playbook that’s specific to this employee, this situation or at this moment. Leadership rarely happens when you have time to prepare. It happens in moments like this. Today’s managers are being asked to do more than ever. They are expected to coach employees, navigate organizational change, provide continuous feedback, manage performance, support career development, and maintain team engagement, all while operating in increasingly complex and fast-moving environments. At the same time, many organizations are becoming more distributed, decision cycles are accelerating, and employee expectations continue to evolve. Leadership has become more important. It has also become harder. The pressure is showing. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace research found that manager engagement has declined significantly in recent years, accounting for much of the broader decline in employee engagement worldwide. Supporting managers has become more than a leader initiative; it’s increasingly a business imperative.
The challenge is that traditional approaches to leadership development haven't always kept pace.
Coaching, workshops, and formal training remain essential. But they are often episodic. The moments when leaders need support most rarely happen during a scheduled training session. They happen five minutes before a difficult conversation. During a performance discussion. While leading a team through change. Or even when helping an employee navigate an unexpected challenge.
That shift points to something much larger than a new AI application.
Enterprise AI is entering a new phase. For the past several years, much of the conversation has focused on automation and productivity, how AI can help people work faster and complete more tasks. The next opportunity may be different.
We believe the next generation of enterprise AI will be defined not only by the work it automates, but by the people it helps develop. Increasingly, AI has the potential to strengthen judgment, communication, leadership, and decision-making by providing guidance in the moments when those capabilities matter most.
That is one of the reasons ADP Ventures is excited to partner with Valence.
Valence's AI coaching platform, Nadia, provides personalized, on-demand guidance designed to help managers and people leaders navigate recurring workforce moments such as feedback conversations, development planning, organizational change, leadership coaching, and performance management.
What makes this category particularly compelling isn’t simply the technology itself. It’s the opportunity to make high-quality coaching more accessible, timely, and scalable.
For decades, personalized leadership coaching has often been constrained by cost, availability, and time. AI creates the possibility of extending thoughtful guidance to far more leaders, not as a replacement for human coaching, but as a complement that helps people prepare, reflect and grow in the flow of work.
Of course, enterprise environments bring additional responsibilities.
Organizations must think carefully about trust, privacy, governance, compliance, and how AI operates alongside existing people's practices. Success is not simply about introducing AI into the workplace. It is about doing so responsibly and in ways that genuinely help people perform and grow.
That’s also how we think about investing. At ADP Ventures, we focus on helping emerging technologies move from promising ideas to enterprise adoption. We were evaluating not only innovation, but also trust, scalability, workflow fit, enterprise readiness, and long-term business value. Our work with Valence reflects that philosophy.
More broadly, we believe workforce technology is entering a new chapter, one where systems of record are increasingly complemented by systems that help people learn, develop, make decisions, and solve problems, and develop throughout their careers.
Because the future of enterprise AI isn’t simply about helping organizations operate more efficiently. It’s about helping people lead more effectively. And the companies that create the greatest long-term impact may not be those that automate the most work, but those that find new ways to help millions of people make better decisions, one conversation at a time.
