Speakers

Alex McMurray, Cofounder, Valence. Leads the commercial team at Valence and has been building Nadia, Valence's AI coach, since before AI coaching was a category.

Tim Hourigan, Former CHRO of The Home Depot, where 95% of associates are frontline. Tim led talent strategy across one of the largest frontline workforces in North America.

Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, a facility services company supporting more than 100,000 employees across the US, UK, and Ireland.

Why Frontline Workers Are the Untapped Opportunity for AI Coaching

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Alex McMurray [01:29 – 05:11]: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, and thank you all for carving an hour out of your day to chat with Tim and Raúl and myself. I hope that most of you have a nice lunch if you're in the East, maybe a tea if you're overseas, but thank you so much for joining. As you join, we would love for you to share your name, maybe your organization, and your geography. And because we're really diving into a super specific and interesting topic of how we all serve our frontline team members, please do share what's on your mind, whether there are challenges that you're trying to solve for this workforce or amazing things you're trying right now that you'd love to share with other people. We're really excited to hear what is on everyone's mind.

I think we have enough people here that I will start my introduction. I'm Alex McMurray. I lead our commercial team at Valence and founded the company well before we all talked about AI every day. Valence has been around serving the ideal of how do we democratize the experiences that people have in an organization through technology. And that has never been easier to do than it is now with AI. I'm seeing some names pop up here of people who have deployed Nadia. As we've been building our AI coach over the last three years, we really did start with perfecting how can we serve the leaders that we know best, and that tended to be what we might call our desk population, our headquarter population. But we realized that was completely missing the opportunity.

As we partnered with organizations, we really transitioned to thinking about how can we use AI to not just serve this homogeneous group of the people who are probably on this call at their laptops and at their desks, but how do we go out and actually serve the massive part of the workforce who are working on production lines, in production facilities, driving, serving our actual clients, whether that's in a retail situation or in an airport, and how do we help those people better develop their massive teams. There's a stat that I find fascinating. If you wanna have fun with me, you can drop it into the chat, but I'd love for you to guess what percentage of the Fortune 500 actually work in what we would define as frontline non-salaried positions. It's a number between 70 and 80 percent, which I just find fascinating.

When we think about the investments that we're putting into the leaders in our organizations, the outsized impact we can have from serving these people is really clear. I would love to introduce Tim and Raúl, two friends of Valence, an active CHRO Raúl and a recently former CHRO Tim. I'd love for you guys to share a little bit about how you thought about the frontline and serving them when you were at The Home Depot and now at ABM. Raúl, maybe we'll kick off with you.

Raúl Valentín [05:11 – 05:46]: Great. Thank you. I'm excited to be here, and thanks to everyone who joined. I know how busy everyone always is. I think it's just critically important for us. ABM, 100,000 plus employees spread out across the US, UK, and Ireland. I've worked in a number of large organizations before, but trying to deliver against that population is probably a different challenge for us because we support many of you and many of your headquarters, your manufacturing sites, and your locations. So how we do that becomes really different. I look forward to sharing some of that with you. Tim, to you.

Tim Hourigan [05:46 – 06:57]: Thanks, Raúl, and thanks, Alex. Pleased to join the chat today. The thing for me, Alex, you said 70 to 80 percent. At Home Depot, it's 95 percent of the associates are frontline associates. And, Raúl, I'm sure it's a similar percentage with your team. The ability to touch those frontline associates is so critical because they represent your brand. And frankly, until the development of Nadia, you really didn't have a cost-effective scalable way to do that. For me, the thing that excited me as I was transitioning out of the CHRO role at Home Depot was introducing Nadia because I saw that as the enabler to release the energy, the potential of that frontline leadership team to enable that frontline associate to be their very best in serving customers and serving each other. So we look forward to the conversation today, but this is an exciting time where truly AI can come in and add so much value to that frontline team.

The Waymo Moment: How CHROs Build Conviction in AI for Frontline Coaching

Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, said his conviction about AI for the frontline shifted after his first ride in a driverless Waymo in San Francisco. If AI could safely navigate a complex urban environment, his thinking went, the assumption that AI couldn't handle nuanced human coaching was probably wrong. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, framed it as a "burning platform" issue: there was no good solution for real-time leadership coaching at 2:30 in the morning, and Nadia changed that.

Raúl Valentín [12:25 – 13:50]: The Waymo story is somewhat simple, but I think for many of us, or I hear a lot even among my colleagues and peers sometimes, well, AI will never do this or AI will never do that. If you've had the pleasure, I guess, of being in the back of a Waymo, at least for me in a really simplistic way, it was: if I can be in the back of a car in San Francisco, which is the city I was in the first time I was in one, driving from one part of the city to the other, commuting across the city, not hitting someone, not hitting another car, reacting to people stepping in the curb, a light changing, merging traffic, and there's no driver in that seat, I think we sometimes are limited in our thinking when we then say, well, AI can't do this. I don't know about the complexity that is as hard as that. Yes, humans are hard. Humans are difficult. But that's exactly what Waymo is trying to get across as humans walking the street, driving in other cars, and we're still in early days of this. So for me, Nadia was that ability to say, how do I jump on board and for the organization provide learnings and opportunities about what the future will be, which is not about it's only AI. It's AI and people, or AI and HR or AI and managers and HR working together. That kind of reframed the conversation for me and the way I thought about things.

Alex McMurray [13:50 – 14:02]: Tim, anything you'd add on how you developed conviction that there might be a new way of serving this 90 percent of the workforce that you're responsible for?

Tim Hourigan [14:02 – 15:03]: Alex, there was never a good solution. So you start there. The problem statement, you often think about, well, I need a burning platform. We had a burning platform because there was no good solution to deal with the example you raised: Larry, the night ops manager. That's real-time stuff. You'd say it's 2:30 in the morning. How are you going to be able to address that? When I discovered Nadia and the capability, it was like the light came on and said, this is gonna give us an opportunity to drive consistency across the enterprise in the way that we tried to grow and develop our leaders. And then specific to some of the challenges, being able to provide in-the-moment coaching that actually makes them much more effective. So I had a burning platform for as long as I was the CHRO. Unfortunately, I discovered it a bit at the end. I wish I had discovered it many years earlier.

What AI Coaching Looks Like for a Frontline Manager

Before going deeper with Tim and Raúl, Alex walks through a concrete scenario: "Larry," a night-shift manager who needs to handle a difficult shift handoff at 5 AM with no HR business partner available. The Larry example is a useful anchor for anyone trying to picture what AI coaching actually does for a frontline leader in a moment of need.

What Does AI Coaching Look Like in Real Time for a Frontline Manager?

AI coaching gives a frontline manager an on-demand thinking partner for the moments when no HR business partner or peer is available. In a Valence example, a night-shift store manager named Larry uses Nadia at 5 AM to role-play a difficult handoff with the incoming day manager, get feedback on tone and ownership, and follow up afterward to reflect on what worked. Nadia carries context about Larry, his colleagues, and the company's playbook, so the coaching is specific rather than generic.

Alex McMurray [06:57 – 12:25]: Now I have a ton of questions that I wanna dig into with Tim and Raúl. But before I do, I'm gonna take a minute and share a little bit about what the heck we're talking about. We talk about an AI coaching platform. We talk about a talent platform that can enable people at work, and I know that's an abstract concept. We think about: okay, is this just like ChatGPT? Is this just like my Ask HR bot? What are we actually talking about here? Let me walk through an individual story of how someone might use AI coaching to deal with the complex people-oriented challenges of being a leader on the ground. Raúl, let me know if my screen is properly shared.

Raúl Valentín [07:55 – 07:56]: Yep. I can see it.

Alex McMurray [07:56 – 12:25]: Fantastic. I'm gonna ask my colleague Mallory, is that big enough for people to see? I think so. Fantastic. As you all know, being a manager is really a compilation of many micro-moments throughout the year. You have those individuals on your team who are coming to work with their personal baggage, with their interpersonal relationships at work, with the relationships they have with their clients. Across all of those, they need support, they need guidance, and they need intervention.

At the same time, your organization and your HR leaders and your CHRO, Tim and Raúl here, are telling you what you need to do to be a great leader. You need to give feedback. You need to do a midyear review. We need to have compensation conversations. Sometimes we need to exit an employee. All of those really challenging things where there is a playbook and there is a recipe for how to do this, but it's really hard to translate that playbook and that recipe into the conversation you might be having at the end of a shift at 8:00 on a Friday night. And then we have the even bigger org layer on top. Maybe the company is not doing well, and we have to go through a set of layoffs. Maybe we're not paying out a bonus before the holidays this year. Maybe there was an accident. How do we deal with all of those things in a really supportive way?

Let's take Larry, a manager who works in an organization. He works the night shift in a store. Every morning, he has to transition with the day manager coming in and share all the good stuff that happened in the evening and all the things that didn't happen, like a delayed delivery. Perhaps he didn't have some of his employees show up and needs to explain to the incoming what's happening. Sometimes we can just call a friend. Sometimes we're doing this in our head. Or Larry can jump into Nadia, who's going to have context about this colleague that Larry works with.

He can jump into a role play to get some feedback on how can I best address this interaction, not only just to get through it but use it as a way to deepen how we work together and become a better operating partnership. Larry's gonna be able to get feedback that's never before been possible. Larry obviously has an HRBP. That person does not work at 5 in the morning. There's no one to role-play this and say, hey, you showed a lot of ownership here. You can work on your composure a little bit. I know you're super frustrated, but let's think about approaching this a different way. Then a couple days later or a couple hours later, Nadia can come back, not only to help Larry in the moment but to say, hey, how did that go? Was there anything you tried that was different that actually helped you solve this problem in a way that was way more productive than it's ever been before?

These are the types of interventions both in a pull that Larry has as well as in a push that Nadia can bring to help an individual really become a better leader with the least commitment possible, knowing that these individuals are busy around the clock and don't have time to sit down for a 45-minute or hour-long coaching conversation around the different challenges that come up through the day. I'm gonna pause. We can come back to this later if there's more interest and pass it over to Raúl and Tim. Raúl, I might kick it off with you in terms of, I love your Waymo story of really reinventing what is possible with technology and how you opened your mind to the fact that we can really serve people in a different way than has previously been possible.

How AI Coaching Expands HR Capacity and Capability

Tim and Raúl converge on a shared insight: AI coaching does two things simultaneously for HR organizations. It frees up generalist time previously spent on basic, repetitive issues, and it lifts the capability of frontline managers who don't always have access to (or comfort asking) HR for help. The conversation goes deep on this dual benefit, including the language barrier issue Raúl raises for ABM's English-as-second-language frontline managers.

How Does AI Coaching Free Up HR Business Partner Capacity?

More than half of HR business partner time is spent on issues that an AI coach can resolve out of the box, according to Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot. Common examples include attendance disputes, basic policy questions, role-play preparation for difficult conversations, and minor employee relations matters. By handling these high-volume coaching moments, Nadia frees HR generalists to focus on higher-value work like succession planning, complex employee relations, and strategic talent decisions.

Raúl Valentín [15:03 – 16:31]: Alex, if I can hop on to that, I think, Tim, your point's a really good one. I look at it as it's a capacity and a capability issue, which we're always working on. How do we find more capacity? And then do we have the right capability once you have that capacity? Is it channeled in the right manner? For me, the beauty of it, as Tim said, is we're 24/7 supporting places like airports and buildings and other sites. An HR person is not always available at 3 in the morning for support. Oh, by the way, most of our frontline managers, it's English as a second or third language. So if they're available, they're speaking in a language that may not be their native tongue, and how do they engage their team. So Nadia became, it did two things. It provided capacity for the HR team because that freed them up from some issues so they could now do the higher-end coaching, counseling, advising work because they weren't caught up in some of the more basic coaching work. But then it also drove capability. Our managers now were equipped that whenever they really needed it in the moment, as Tim said, to be able to handle a performance issue, to do role playing. And let's face it, a lot of our frontline managers, they don't always wanna go to HR to say I need help, because that means that they don't know how. As much as I'd like to think we create a safe environment, sometimes it's first of all not accessible, or two, they'd rather keep that information to themselves. So to me, it addressed both capacity and capability, which is terrific and needed.

Tim Hourigan [16:31 – 17:02]: Raúl, I love the way you hit on that, because more than half of the generalist time, the business partner's time, is spent on dealing with issues that Nadia can solve out of the box. In addition, when you don't have that coach, the likelihood that there's some negative implications from the decision taken is elevated. So now not only didn't you deal with the first issue, you've exacerbated the problem.

Raúl Valentín [17:02 – 17:02]: That's right.

Tim Hourigan [17:02 – 17:11]: What I love about it is those types of things free that HR business partner up to do the higher-value-added work.

Raúl Valentín [17:11 – 17:12]: That's right.

Beyond HR: AI Coaching as a Frontline Performance Tool

Raúl makes a critical point that reframes the value of AI coaching: Nadia is not just an HR tool. ABM managers used it to navigate an ERP rollout, role-play difficult client conversations, and make progress on operational goals like implementing a new inventory management system. Tim builds on this with a sharp observation about operator buy-in: the moment Nadia stops being framed as "an HR thing," frontline operators engage differently.

How Are Frontline Managers Using AI Coaching Beyond HR Issues?

Frontline managers are using AI coaching for operational performance, not just HR support. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, shared that ABM managers used Nadia to role-play difficult client conversations during an ERP rollout, navigate building-issue discussions, and follow through on operational goals. In one case, Nadia repeatedly nudged a manager about an inventory management system he had set as a goal, and he ultimately credited the AI coach with helping him implement it.

Alex McMurray [17:12 – 17:38]: Raúl, I know there are some examples of feedback you've had from managers on what Nadia enabled for them both as leaders but also to perform in the actual role against the goals that were set for them. There were some stories about inventory, about the PRP billing system. Maybe share just a little bit of that to give people the nitty-gritty of what this actually looks like.

Raúl Valentín [17:38 – 19:32]: I think your setup with Larry before is a good one because you thought about it from the manager's perspective on what they're responsible for, and you talked about the layer above, but that layer above is actually huge. It's their day job outside of management, which is production or client delivery or service delivery. Candidly, I viewed Nadia initially as kind of an HR performance coach type thing. And then very quickly, the feedback was, we'd implemented an ERP. Those who are going to do that, I apologize in advance that you have to go through that. The ERP created challenges that really put our frontline managers, who deal face to face with our clients all the time, really in the middle of the battle. What we started hearing from them was, hey, I'm using Nadia to role-play the conversation with my client because I've had to talk to them about a building issue that they're very concerned about. We didn't even understand that.

Another story was a manager that early on, in what I'll call Nadia intake, when the manager shared their goals and their objectives for the year, they said they wanted to put in place a new inventory management system at one of their sites and locations. Nadia kept prompting and nudging the person to say, how are you doing with your inventory management system? At which point, the person was like, I wasn't doing it because I was too busy. I had no capacity. But eventually, he credits Nadia with getting to a place where he put in an inventory management system finally. Those were some benefits that I will admit I didn't fully see. I viewed it very much as Tim and I have been talking about, kind of core HR, employee relations support, driving consistency, minimizing issues around compliance or adherence, which it did all of those things. But then what we heard back from our managers was, hey, this is really a performance coach. It's not just an HR performance coach. And that makes it doubly or even more worthwhile for the organization.

Tim Hourigan [19:32 – 20:03]: Raúl, you hit on something there that's equally if not more important, and that's the operator buy-in. Many times in our world, we would launch an HR initiative with a focus on addressing a particular issue, and you would hear feedback that would say something along the lines of, well, that's just an HR thing. We have to do this for HR. And you can say, no, no, it's a business issue. But by the time you're explaining it, you've already lost the audience.

Raúl Valentín [20:03 – 20:03]: That's right.

Tim Hourigan [20:03 – 20:30]: The fact that it's also a performance coach in a holistic way makes it a much more useful tool and one that the operators can get behind. As this continues to roll out within Home Depot, and even though I've retired, I do get some feedback from some of my former colleagues, that is where there's so much untapped value in the ability to connect.

Raúl Valentín [20:30 – 21:06]: The other piece there, Tim, is it's so difficult regardless of your structure and your infrastructure: how do you deliver development support to those frontline managers? With respect to just time in the day, let alone, and Nadia does that. Where we talk about performance coaching and role-playing, it's delivering development. We hear so often, are we spending enough time and energy developing our folks? It's unfortunately disproportionately sometimes at the top of the house. It doesn't get to where it's needed most sometimes. And it builds therefore a stronger bench for you in the long term. So I think that's another important benefit that sometimes gets lost.

Tim Hourigan [21:06 – 21:08]: Agree. Agree.

Addressing Apprehension and Building Trust in AI Coaching

Alex pivots the conversation to one of the most common implementation questions: how do you address employee apprehension when introducing AI coaching? Tim breaks the apprehension into two buckets: comfort with technology itself, and confidentiality concerns. Raúl adds a third for HR teams specifically, the fear that AI will replace them. Both share what worked at their organizations, including starting deployment with the HR community itself.

How Does AI Coaching Stay Aligned with Company Culture and Policy?

AI coaching is "company aligned" when it reflects the organization's specific standard operating procedures, values, and policies rather than generic management advice. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, said this consistency is one of the most important benefits of a tool like Nadia: when something happens overnight in a store and no HR partner is available, the manager gets guidance that reflects what the company has decided is the right approach, not what an individual or a generic chatbot thinks.

Alex McMurray [21:08 – 23:47]: One of the things that I think is so critical when you're talking about how are we generating the buy-in to come to this tool to get that coaching and guidance that is company-aligned with your values and your culture and the very thoughtful way of working that you probably spent so much time thinking through, whether it's the Get scores in The Home Depot, etcetera. One of the things that is possible, that I think many of you probably know a lot about and maybe is newer to some, is the ability for AI to develop context both about an organization, a topic, a problem that's trying to be solved, and the individuals. That's actually really hard.

When we think about Copilot or ChatGPT, for example, the way that those applications are thinking about the memory of the individual, whether it's Tim or Raúl or Larry or Alex, is very much about a feeling of personalization versus a development and coaching-oriented longitudinal development approach. So whether you're coming to Nadia on a daily basis or a weekly basis or even on a quarterly basis for those really acute problems, Nadia is gonna pull in the context around you and your organization's moment that's gonna offer the very specific kind of company-aligned coaching and individual-aligned coaching that will make that person feel so well served that they're gonna continue coming back and back.

When we think about the step change we've been able to take from more static learning initiatives, rolling out playbooks, holding hands, to giving people things that truly feel perfectly aligned to their moment, it's just been such a challenge that the more different everyone's role is, the further out to the frontline they are in the organization, the more challenging this gets. And this gets back to Raúl, you're telling a story of someone who used Nadia and then really found the value. We talked a little bit about what's the apprehension that you sometimes hear about people wanting to use an AI application. How did you guys think about defusing that apprehension or fear as you roll out this or even with other HR applications as well?

Raúl Valentín [23:47 – 23:49]: Tim, you wanna take that first?

How Do CHROs Address Frontline Worker Apprehension About AI Coaching?

Frontline worker apprehension about AI coaching usually breaks into two categories: comfort with the technology itself and confidentiality. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, said many deskless managers are not used to sitting at a computer terminal, so easy access (often on a handheld device) and gamification helped drive adoption. On confidentiality, he stressed that data is reviewed in aggregate to identify trends, not surfaced at the individual level, a clear message HR leaders need to deliver before rollout.

Tim Hourigan [23:49 – 26:44]: I'll start in and then Raúl, correct me as I go. I'd appreciate it. I think one of the biggest challenges, Alex, you mentioned two words: company-aligned. That's so important to have a consistency across the enterprise, whether it's rolling out a new HR system or whether it's trying to implement certain actions that you want your leaders to take relative to a particular incident. The example we've talked about many times is there's something that happens overnight in a store, and there's no one there to be able to provide guidance. That's where Nadia provides the consistency that is company-aligned. It's not what I think. It's what the company has wanted us to do from an SOP standpoint. I think that's critical.

When you think about rolling that out then, I think there's two areas of apprehension that come out. The first is technology itself. I don't know how it works. Especially when you think of deskless employees and deskless managers, they're not used to sitting in front of a computer terminal. They're not used to having a laptop necessarily. If they're on the floor, they definitely don't. They have some handheld device. So how do you make them comfortable with the technology? I think that's usually the first hurdle. What we've tried to do is just make it easy and put gamification into other aspects of HR products that we've rolled out. The gamification has tended to have a high degree of adoption. So that was an approach that we've taken broadly with the other HR-related initiatives.

The second thing, and this is a work in process, is confidentiality. What I do love about the use of Nadia is shortly after using it, people forget that it's a technology, and they start talking to Nadia and talk about Nadia as if Nadia has human traits, which I guess she does. But you think about it: well, if I tell Nadia this, will this get back in a way that might be used in a negative way? I think you have to assure your team that, yes, we scrape the data to look for consistency. So if we have 70 percent of our managers querying a certain topic, we know maybe we need to do a push. But it's not individualized. It's a conglomerate of data that we look at. That's the second thing for me, how do you assure a leader, especially a frontline leader that might be somewhat insecure in their role, that this is gonna be used in a way that continues to support you, not as a tool against you potentially.

Alex McMurray [26:44 – 26:46]: Yeah.

How Do HR Teams Address Their Own Fear of Being Replaced by AI?

HR teams often worry that AI coaching will eliminate their roles, especially in employee relations. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, said his team addressed this head-on by being transparent: roles will change, skill sets will need to advance toward higher-level coaching and counseling, and some displacement may occur. ABM also rolled Nadia out to the HR community first so they got comfortable with the tool, and the deployment also improved consistency across HR managers' interpretations of policy.

Raúl Valentín [26:46 – 28:22]: To build on Tim's thing, for us, we weren't doing gamification, so I'm a little jealous there, Tim. But back to the apprehension: for the HR team, it's a little bit around fear. Is this gonna replace me? Maybe you don't need the people doing the HR employee relations roles and things like that. We've taken the approach at ABM to be very transparent to say to folks, look, I can't guarantee your job, but I try to remind people, I couldn't guarantee their job two years ago. It's not about AI. That's the reality of business. So it is about saying now your role will change. You may need different skills. Even as I said, if they're not handling basic attendance issues anymore, or some of them say, you know, someone stole my lunch from the refrigerator issues, well, their skill set's gonna have to advance to be able to provide higher-level coaching and counseling. Some of them will be able to do that. Some of them may not. So there may be some displacement. We're being really open, but we'll always be upfront, give them other opportunities within the organization, but it does change their role.

When we rolled out from a deployment, we started just using it within the HR community at first and those frontline people, so they'd get comfortable with the tool. It also helped, if we're honest, their consistency, because you could get sometimes a feeling like, depending which HR manager you spoke to, you got a slightly different interpretation of a role or a policy. It helped us sharpen our tools around consistency and adherence, and made them more comfortable to then promote and support it as we rolled it out to people leaders throughout the company.

Tim Hourigan [28:22 – 28:59]: Raúl, you hit on something there that I think is so spot-on. It's: will this replace me? If I'm the HR business partner, you go, this Nadia is really good. It's taking a lot of the work I do today. I think there's twofold. One is reskilling. When we think about how do we reskill and upskill our HR teams, that becomes a very high-level priority. But then secondly, the question that I'd ask our team is: how much time do you spend on really non-value-added interventions that have to be done?

Raúl Valentín [28:59 – 28:59]: They're...

Tim Hourigan [28:59 – 29:35]: They're urgent. So somebody did take a lunch, and you'd say, that's such a trivial thing. Well, guess what? It happens every day. And if you have 2,500 locations as Home Depot does, you'd say in one of those locations somebody's having to help adjudicate that situation. It's not complex. It's a very easy lift for Nadia to provide a very simple structured way for the leader to address it, which then frees up that HR partner to do the bigger value-added things that frankly are critical.

Raúl Valentín [29:35 – 29:36]: That's right.

Tim Hourigan [29:36 – 29:42]: When you said that, it just struck a chord in such a relevant way.

Raúl Valentín [29:42 – 31:01]: Thank you. That again goes back to my capacity and capability. They may have the capability, but they don't have the time or the capacity to get to it. This is providing capacity. Now let's make sure we're focused the right way. I know Sarah had a question, does it replace management 101 training? For us, it hasn't yet. But it supports and amplifies it, because we load some of that content into Nadia. So Nadia is able to reinforce what our management guidance principles are, what our success behaviors are, which is our competency set. So it's another person. What I've tried to say to my team, and we're not there yet, but for all of my direct reports, as we talk about deploying a new training module, compensation platform, I keep saying to them, I want you to envision or think about what's Nadia's role in that deployment. Is there a role for Nadia for that deployment? Is that something we should be loading until Nadia reinforces that message, that philosophy? Is she equipped to answer that question? Is that an appropriate question? So I think it will change ultimately how we think about learning and development, because Nadia will play a different role for certain levels. I think we're still learning that, is what I would say from an ABM perspective.

Tim Hourigan [31:01 – 31:32]: Great point. Great point. We would be kidding ourselves, and I can speak from a Home Depot lens, 25,000 frontline managers. When you think about management 101, you'd say, how do you touch that 25,000 not only initially but on a repeat basis to continue to grow and refine skills, reinforce certain aspects of the training? We kid ourselves if we think we're that effective today without having an AI tool like Nadia.

Raúl Valentín [31:32 – 31:35]: Yeah.

Choosing an AI Coaching Partner for Long-Term Value

Alex asks how Tim and Raúl think about choosing a partner in this new era, where AI coaching is fundamentally different from traditional enterprise software. Raúl draws a sharp distinction between vendor and partner. Tim follows with his "toolbox versus hammer" framing: many providers are hammers trying to make every problem look like a nail.

How Should CHROs Choose an AI Coaching Vendor?

CHROs should choose an AI coaching company that operates as a true partner, not a vendor. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, said the most important signals are: a willingness to listen and adapt, cultural alignment with the customer's organization, integrations into the tools managers already use (like Microsoft Teams), and a shared willingness to learn together over time. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, added that the right partner brings a toolbox of approaches, not a single hammer trying to make every problem look like a nail.

Alex McMurray [31:35 – 32:31]: This is fantastic. Raúl, one thing you were talking about is having the HR team be so deeply involved in the development of the ABM version of Nadia, and similarly how we're working with the crew at The Home Depot and other organizations. We'll maybe chat about how you think about choosing and working with a partner in this era where AI is not just another new technology or new piece of software but a fundamentally different way of serving. It's a new container for, Tim, like you said, how well do we serve these 2,500 or 25,000 managers? It's not just one-to-many content absorption. So maybe talk about how you think about partnering with Valence and why you're comfortable partnering with Valence as we bring on this quite new and novel way of working.

Raúl Valentín [32:31 – 34:22]: What I look for, maybe starting with the word partnership. I don't want a vendor. I want a partner. So as I talk, it's: you could have a great tool, but do I walk away feeling like there's gonna be a partnership? You've got the capacity to listen. I understand your vision for where the product is going and how it supports us. That was really important to me. When people think they can use other tools or there'll be other offerings, what I was impressed with as we started to build the relationship was even in the time period as we were talking, the new things that you were adding to it, the collaboration tool, the other pieces that I thought were culturally aligned. Nadia has to be culturally aligned to what you're doing, or have that framework or that agility to be able to expand in ways that are consistent with what I value.

The other piece, which I've been very honest about, Alex, is I'm not sure long-term who the winners are in this. But in the short term, I wanna pick someone I can learn with together, because I do think the next couple of years is all about learning. Tim, to your point, three years from now, what this looks like and how this is done, it's hard to picture. But if I can pick the right partner, I can say, hey, I think we're looking at it the same way. There's a value. They understand our space in HR, what we're trying to do, and they're building flexibility, and they're expanding in that regard. Congrats on your partnership with Microsoft and looking to embed into things like Teams. Critically important. That makes it easier for that manager, that people leader, to access it real-time. To Tim's point, we don't wanna make it hard. Where do I find that? What part of your internet do I find it in? What password? All of those are obstacles and create friction that we don't need. Again, I look for a partner that says, hey, I think we can grow together, and they're going to help me learn together, and they're open to the feedback. That's how I approach it and why we chose you.

Tim Hourigan [34:22 – 35:28]: Raúl, I'd piggyback on that a little bit. In a Home Depot context, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And many of the providers are hammers. They've got, hey, here's our product, and then let's squeeze you into the product. What I liked about our initial discussions with Valence was the openness to consider other approaches. So I see it more of a toolbox. Yes, I have a hammer, but I also have pliers. I have screwdrivers. I've got a saw. I've got a chisel. I've got all kinds of tools. How can we bring those to bear to solve what you're trying to fix? None of us know where this is gonna be in three years. If you had asked me three years ago, would we be here? I would have been scratching my head and said, this is too hard to envision. So it's gonna continue to evolve, and I'd say probably more rapidly than the past three years. But if you're picking a partner, the one that brings a toolbox versus a hammer, you've got a better chance to win.

Raúl Valentín [35:28 – 35:33]: Tim, you're building that multi-sale, that multi-ticket there. Nice job.

Tim Hourigan [35:33 – 35:37]: How'd you like to run with that guy just with that ear?

Alex McMurray [35:37 – 35:43]: They can't help it. He can retire, but The Home Depot lives on.

Tim Hourigan [35:43 – 35:44]: Yes, it's me.

Making the Business Case With CIOs, CFOs, and Operators

Alex shifts the conversation to one of the most pressing topics for HR leaders today: how do you make the business case for AI coaching to a CEO, CFO, or CIO? Raúl admits he learned this one the hard way after a successful pilot didn't translate into automatic enterprise approval. Both speakers stress that AI coaching is no longer just an HR budget line, it's an enterprise investment that requires shared metrics, hands-on executive experience, and operator partnership.

Alex McMurray [35:44 – 37:53]: When you go from this desk HQ community where everyone's jobs are homogeneous, but as we go out to where the real work is being done in the world, those roles are so unique. As a technology creator and a technology provider and a company that's harnessing AI to serve a different community, we really need to partner with our clients. I have no idea what it's like to run a crew at LaGuardia. We need to come and see them at work and ask what their challenges are so that we can create an application that is actually going to serve them the way they need. That's completely different from someone working in a distribution center for The Home Depot, completely different from a nurse, completely different from someone working in a production facility. We're very humble in knowing that in every one of these clients that we're able to partner with, we're learning so much more about how we can help people in very different jobs.

Switching gears a little bit, I know this one is really on a lot of people's minds. Historically, when talent teams would think about learning and development, even if you were buying human coaching, that was a decision that was made more in isolation. As AI has become such a big strategic decision for so many organizations, I know that our partners are being pressed by their CEOs, by their CFOs, by their CTOs as to how something like Nadia, which is purpose-built for development, fits into the overall ecosystem. I'd love for you both to share some advice or experiences on working with your peers on those conversations.

How Should CHROs Build Executive Buy-In for AI Coaching?

CHROs should treat AI coaching as an enterprise investment that requires CIO, CFO, and operator buy-in, not a decision they can approve alone from the HR budget. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, said this is a positive shift: AI elevates HR's strategic conversations and creates stronger partnerships with CIOs and innovation leaders. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, added that connecting AI coaching to business outcomes (revenue, profitability, retention), and getting line operators to advocate for it, is what turns it from "an HR initiative" into a business initiative.

Raúl Valentín [37:53 – 39:54]: First of all, Alex, I've gotta make funny, and maybe Tim and I can think OG here, but, like, "even human coaching." Way back in the day. Way back in the day. You're right. But in all seriousness, on the positive, we in HR often talk about wanting a seat at the table, and maybe that's an old and dated conversation as well. That has changed now. So I think it's appropriate that these conversations, AI is not an HR thing. It's a company enterprise thing. It's a future thing. As you're seeing with the headlines around ROI and compute costs, it changes the dynamic of the executive team around where are we gonna place our bets, where are we gonna prioritize. We only have so much capacity in IT or HR or finance from, I think of resources always as people, time, and money. That's fixed actually to a certain degree.

So it becomes a different conversation now, whereas before, I may have said, and I did, with Nadia, I was like, oh, this is just gonna be in my HR budget, and I'm just gonna make the decision. Then when I started talking about rolling it out, I was like, hey, we need to talk about it. Where does this fit in our priority for the organization? I was at first taken aback because I was like, well, wait a second, this is my decision. Then I realized, well, no, just like I comment on other things as an executive in the other parts of the company, they get to go, is this where we wanna spend our time, our resources? It elevates the game, which I think is good for us in the long run. I feel I've got a much stronger partnership with my CIO and my chief innovation officer as a result. Always a good one with the CFO because you need that for the money access. So it changes it. It makes us think about what's really the return versus kind of soft anecdotes. You start thinking about what's really the impact, how are you measuring it. It's hard to sometimes measure capacity easily versus being able to draw a line to the outcome. So it is changing the game. I don't think it's bad, but we do have to think about it very differently.

Tim Hourigan [39:55 – 41:23]: Raúl, I'd just hitchhike on that a little bit. The concept of, well, it's within my budget, I can make that decision, those days probably weren't a good idea even then. And I would suggest even today it's passed, because it becomes an HR initiative. A lot of times as HR professionals, we get blamed for developing HR things for HR activities. So I look at it and say: yes, it's a little more frustrating. It takes longer to get it done. Eyes wide open. It was much easier when you had the budget and you could say yes. But now you'll get the support, and it's like the proverb, one person taking a hundred steps gets a hundred steps ahead, but a hundred people taking one step, you've moved an entire organization.

For me, connecting with our CIO and our CFO to say, here's what this impact from a business standpoint is, is so critical. And most importantly, when you get that line operator, that person who actually has their name at the top of the P&L, and they say this is something that's going to release capacity for my team to do better work and drive revenue, drive profitability, then you know you've got commitment across the board. It's not an HR initiative. It's a business initiative that will impact the total company results.

How Do CHROs Measure the ROI of AI Coaching?

CHROs should measure AI coaching ROI by linking it to business outcomes the organization already tracks: customer service scores, retention, attrition, and revenue. Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot, recommended starting with the end in mind, define which metrics the tool will affect, then track them. He also suggested using a control group during pilot rollouts so operators can see the differentiation in performance. Raúl Valentín added that leading indicators matter as much as lagging ones, and that getting executives hands-on with the tool is critical to building enterprise support.

Alex McMurray [41:23 – 42:33]: As you guys have grown up as CHROs and leaders, have you found, not just with AI but generally, that the pressure for you guys to deliver true ROI has grown as there's just so much more data available, that regardless of what you do you're being forced to show ROI in tighter time horizons than you previously have? This is something a lot of our partners deal with. We're rolling out Nadia across a pilot group of a few thousand people. What's the impact in two months and three months? I wonder, a) if you found this, and then b) what advice you might have to people on how to bridge that gap and explain that sometimes these behavior changes of a new way of coaching, you're going to see some turnover reduction or store sales improvement, but it's not gonna happen overnight. I'm just curious how you guys might coach other people on bridging that gap with those executive teams.

Tim Hourigan [42:33 – 42:50]: For me, the key is a couple thoughts. First, begin with the end in mind. And with the end in mind being what you just said, Alex, how are you going to prove the case? Really not to prove it to others. Prove it to yourself.

Alex McMurray [42:50 – 42:50]: Yeah.

Tim Hourigan [42:50 – 44:04]: If you say, this tool is going to help us drive revenue. I think it's gonna help us reduce attrition. I think it's gonna drive retention. It's gonna drive customer service scores because we get scores immediately in stores based upon the customer's reaction to how well they were served. You take those key metrics and put them in a format to say, these are the ones I'm going to affect. Then when I implement the tool, I can track it, and I go in with eyes wide open. This is what I hope to achieve, and I get real-time feedback. Retail's a little different. If we get feedback, you buy something at 12:00, you can fill out a survey at 12:01, I'll know that we provided a better level of customer service. I've also built systems to determine that good customer service drives sales. So I've got the entire profit value chain linked to the ability to drive customer service. In that example, you'd say, here's where Nadia can help provide coaching to that frontline sales leader. I'll see results pretty quickly.

Alex McMurray [44:04 – 44:04]: Mhmm.

Tim Hourigan [44:04 – 44:37]: The secondary piece, and for me that's really important, is you get that business part. And I mentioned it a couple times, but when you get your operators to say, I see how this works, and whether you did it in a pilot where you have a testing control group, so you implement Nadia in one group and you have a control group and you show the differentiation of performance, that tends to drive a lot of adoption with numbers-driven operators, has been my experience.

Raúl Valentín [44:37 – 46:50]: What I'd add there, and we touched on it before, and I learned the hard way as you know, Alex, we did a pilot. The pilot results from my perspective are really good, and I went in thinking it was a done deal and realized it wasn't a done deal. Candidly, at the end of the day, I own that. I didn't advocate at the executive level because I thought it was a no-brainer, and that was silly of me. When I reflect, there are a number of things. We are increasingly data-driven, metrics-driven. So you've gotta think, as Tim said, with the end in mind. But often when we do that, those are lagging indicators. In a world where we're measuring things by month, by minute now, you need to think about what are the right leading indicators for your organization that give you directionally, hey, this is showing the promise of what will deliver, before maybe that lagging indicator shows up depending on your life cycle and your business model.

Hands-on experience. One of my aha's was, if I'm honest, the executive team wasn't using Nadia. They knew of it, but it was happening three levels, four levels, six levels below them. So that experience, they didn't have. Shame on me. We actually had Parker, one of the other cofounders, sit with my CEO yesterday for an hour to walk through a one-on-one personalized session, and then we have a meeting with the executive team next week. They each get hands-on keyboard experience of here's what Nadia can do, here's how you can be using Nadia. When you think about some of our colleagues on the executive team, if they're rolling out a new CRM or another tool, they would come in and do a demo and be flashy. We don't often do that. To Tim's point, it was, oh, it's in my budget, it's fine. They don't wanna see the HR tool. That's soft. So we've gotta think differently about, no, no, it's a tool, and now it's gonna be compared to other tools. So are those the right benchmarks around usage, adoption, ROI? Sometimes it is squishier on the human element. So how do we do that? Those are all learnings that you've gotta go in eyes wide open as you purchase. Any other investment you're asking for, I try to say, can you make it an investment versus an expense? That's how I think of it.

Why Purpose-Built AI Coaching Beats General-Purpose Tools

Alex addresses a question that every CHRO hears: why a specialized AI coaching application when the company has already bought Copilot? Raúl and Tim both emphasize that purpose-built means built with guardrails, including escalation paths to humans for sensitive topics like mental health, and the depth of expertise that general-purpose tools lack. Alex closes the section with Valence's stance on data privacy, and Raúl reframes privacy as a foundation for trust at a time when institutional trust is at an all-time low.

How Does Purpose-Built AI Coaching Differ from General-Purpose AI Tools?

Purpose-built AI coaching is designed for a specific job, coaching leaders, with guardrails that general-purpose AI tools like Copilot or ChatGPT do not have. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, said purpose-built tools include escalation paths for sensitive topics like mental health, where the AI directs the user to a human. They also incorporate company-specific compliance considerations such as state employment law and union contract requirements. Tim Hourigan added that purpose-built tools bring depth and breadth of coaching expertise that general AI tools simply do not have.

Alex McMurray [46:50 – 48:16]: There's pressure on these decisions from many angles, both, like you said, is this an expense that is going to have the right return? And then the big one right now: there's a couple of questions in the side chat, why a specialized application tailored to a specific audience versus using Copilot? Like you said, Raúl, we are working deeply with Microsoft, and they have addressed this to say that building a coach is not on their roadmap, and these are complementary applications. That said, when you have bought something already, it does beg the question: do we really need this other thing? If either of you have any insight on why it does feel so important to have this development focus tailored to that role and tailored to your priorities, be that delivering on certain learning principles, making sure that certain SOPs are available, maybe you are changing the culture, maybe you've increased the targets for certain audiences on retention of clients, maybe speak a little bit to that. That is something that I would say 100 percent of the people we're chatting with are being asked. So it's a really important thing for people to be able to articulate well.

Raúl Valentín [48:16 – 49:36]: For us and for me, it was: it's purpose-built. So it's built with us in mind. Even though we wanna make sure, and I love Tim's point always going back to the chief operator and is it on the top of their list, absolutely. But at the end of the day, we also then have that responsibility. There are tremendous compliance issues, legal issues when it deals even with the basic attendance issue, especially depending on what state you are in and other places. Are they part of a union contract? So I think being purpose-built and having the ability to put in the guardrails for when is it like a mental health concern that you want that person to say, hey, I want you to go talk to someone now, back to go talk to a human now. That's really important. We've seen question marks in other providers that are more general-use AI agents or tools that don't have those same guardrails. So that is important. From a value correlation, that becomes incredibly important for us around maintaining the human element in how we do it. Even if the delivery is partly automated or through AI, there's still a huge human component that for me today, Valence provides that balance and that appropriateness, and it's built for purpose. As it's growing, it's built for more purposes and add-ons that help the business but also help us. So that's important in how I look at it.

Tim Hourigan [49:36 – 51:05]: Raúl, I think you hit on a couple things there that are critical. It's company-aligned, but to quote Alex's previous comment, you've got the guardrails built. There's a question in the chat on data privacy, and that's another opportunity to say we can build into, or it is built into, the system now that Nadia has those consistent guardrails that help us to ensure we're doing things in the way that we want them done. I love the purpose-built concept, and Raúl, you hit that. When someone has a tool that is gonna be used for coaching, it's going to be the best in class in coaching. The other tools, whether it's Copilot and some of the others that are out there, ChatGPT, etcetera, yes, but they're not purpose-built. They don't have the depth and breadth of expertise that have gone into the development of the tool. With Valence's recent affiliation with HBR, that's another opportunity to further expand upon the expertise in the field. You get top-tier responses that I would say probably aren't as available in the more general applications.

How Does AI Coaching Protect Employee Privacy and Trust?

AI coaching protects employee privacy by keeping every individual conversation confidential to that person, with aggregated insights surfaced only to the organization in non-identifiable form. Alex McMurray, cofounder of Valence, said no Valence conversations are used to train large language models. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, framed privacy as the foundation for trust, and noted that at a moment when institutional trust is at an all-time low across society, AI coaching cannot deliver value if managers don't trust that their conversations are confidential.

Alex McMurray [51:05 – 52:05]: There's a question in chat about data privacy, and I think you guys addressed this a little bit. For those of you on the chat, this is one of the most important things we think about. As we build this application, we're not reacting to new privacy principles and new privacy laws. We are building thinking ahead of what is going to happen with AI and how are we thinking about privacy. Every conversation that an individual has is completely private, owned by that organization, but never ever shared. Nothing's going into these large language models to be trained. There's more information than I could possibly share in a snippet, but it is one of the founding and guiding principles, because without that, we really have no credibility to be offering this type of intervention. So it's something that we take incredibly seriously.

Raúl Valentín [52:05 – 53:21]: Alex, if you don't mind me jumping on that, we pushed you pretty hard on wanting more insights and data at the beginning. That was part of our challenge to the data, because as Tim said, we wanted to understand: what are you hearing? What are people, what are the themes? How do we turn that into training content? How do we trade that into bigger things? We couldn't get the level of detail we felt we wanted. It continued to improve, which is fantastic. But there's two ways to look at privacy. One is what we know, all the legal requirements, whether it's in the UK or California. There's just, it's just legally mandated. And important. The other bigger picture that I hadn't fully appreciated until just now: we know trust is at an all-time low across the world on organizations, on the church, on government, on you name it. As we do this with AI, if we can't honor that level of privacy that leads to trust, as Tim touched on earlier, when a manager uses it and trusts that it's in confidence that I'm getting this coaching, that I'm doing this role-playing, I don't know where else we could go, but that foundation of trust is so critical that we shouldn't lose sight of that as we think of the privacy conversation and the impact given where we are as a society today.

Tim Hourigan [53:21 – 53:24]: Great points. Great points, Raúl.

The Two-Year Vision for AI Coaching on the Frontline

Alex closes by asking Tim and Raúl to paint their vision of what AI coaching could mean for the frontline two to three years out. Tim envisions AI becoming "part of the fabric", embedded enough in HR work that no one talks about it as a novelty anymore. Raúl goes further: he sees AI coaching as a way to close the skills gap for frontline workers and unlock socioeconomic mobility, citing the YouTube tutorial as a small-scale example of the larger pattern.

What Will AI Coaching for the Frontline Look Like in Two to Three Years?

In two to three years, AI coaching will be embedded in everyday workforce infrastructure rather than treated as a novel HR add-on, according to Tim Hourigan, former CHRO of The Home Depot. He compared the trajectory to how laptops and mobile phones became invisible parts of work. Raúl Valentín, CHRO of ABM Industries, added a more ambitious vision: AI coaching could close the skills gap for frontline workers, helping people in lower socioeconomic positions access development that previously was out of reach, the way YouTube tutorials taught a generation of non-mechanics basic car repair.

Alex McMurray [53:24 – 54:24]: We have about five minutes left, and I would love to turn it over to each of you to paint your vision. Your organizations are still in early days. Raúl, you've crossed the year mark. Tim, The Home Depot's a little bit behind that. But if you think about two years, three years, what would you consider to be a huge win for the frontline? What's gonna be possible for these individuals, both in terms of their AI fluency inside and outside of work, how burnt out they get at work, how fulfilled they are at work? I'm talking about really kind of idealistic implications of what we're doing, but I'd love to just hear from you. If everything goes great and we're able to deliver this at increasing scale across many companies, what do you think is possible?

Tim Hourigan [54:24 – 55:57]: Let me start off, Raúl, since you've got the more contemporary feel, being able to step back and look, what would you expect in two years or what would you hope? First, the promise of AI is to reduce some of the non-value-added tasks that have to be done. The ability for people to become comfortable with the technology and use it in a way that actually achieves that, that would be a great reduction in stress and a great unlock so people could focus on the bigger value-added activities. I never had an HR person tell me that they've had enough time to finish everything they needed to do in a day. I don't think that will happen even with the advent and the adoption of AI. But what I do think is they'll say, I get more satisfaction out of being able to tackle these big issues, which historically I always knew were there but I didn't have the time, I didn't have the bandwidth to address them. What I would hope two years from now, instead of saying, well, we're still trying to figure out how AI helps us, that it becomes embedded in the vernacular. It's not something that's added. It is part of the fabric, and people are working on bigger, more impactful issues that'll drive the business forward.

Raúl Valentín [55:57 – 57:51]: Tim's point: it redefines what the future is. I was thinking similarly, you wouldn't hear AI in the sentence. We don't talk about laptops or mobile phones. It's just, I'm texting someone. That's no longer a novelty. It's just the way it is. For me, my super idealistic state, and someone had a question around all the conversations around upskilling and reskilling, I think it closes that gap, especially for our frontline folks. In a way that, if I think of it in a goofy way, if you think of The Matrix and you think about when the guy's in the helicopter and he's like, download the manual for x, y, z Apache thing, and automatically he knows how to fly the helicopter. You think about all the things we say we have shortages of. We don't have enough engineers. We don't have enough crafts tradespeople. We have, we don't have enough, it goes on and on. Yet we have all these frontline people that are at a lower echelon of socioeconomic terms that, could AI bridge that gap? Could it make it like, we use YouTube. I'll often say I'm not a mechanic, but YouTube helps me do basic things on my car that I couldn't do until YouTube gave me a little vignette. The vignettes are five minutes or ten minutes or fifteen minutes based on my competence, candidly. I need fifteen minutes because I don't even know which screwdriver to use, and I go back and forth to The Home Depot, which Tim likes, to buy the right one. So that notion of what would it mean if we could unleash that support, that you see it with the glasses and the hearing thing, how does that change the workforce and their opportunities and the skills gap, so that that enables a whole other generation of people to move forward in a different way? That would be the future Nirvana for me in terms of how we're living differently and how this has impacted us in a positive, and it's AI and humans, not one or the other.

Alex McMurray [57:51 – 58:34]: Raúl, I love how you brought up the ability to actually further yourself and maybe grow, whether that's socioeconomically or just within your organization. One of our favorite things that we always celebrate at Valence when we're doing user interviews is people sharing they got a new job because of Nadia. I really wanted to actually get into being a store manager. I really wanted to join field sales, and Nadia coached me on both how to talk to my manager about that, how I should actually do the job better, how to do an interview. I just love those stories so much, and it always comes down to: I didn't have access to this before. I had no one to help me with this before.

Raúl Valentín [58:34 – 58:35]: Right.

Alex McMurray [58:35 – 59:02]: I'm glad you brought that up. Thank you guys both so much. The comments in the chat are basically that everyone learned a ton. I always love to catch up and hear you guys chat about your very different workforces. Any closing thoughts? A big thank you from me on behalf of the 150 or so people who joined us today.

Tim Hourigan [59:02 – 59:23]: For me, Alex, thank everybody for taking time. Raúl, you started the conversation with everybody's busy and there's so much going on that taking an hour out of a day is a big thing. So thank you for that. If I could be of any help, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. More than happy to connect and provide whatever insights I could.

Raúl Valentín [59:23 – 59:58]: For everyone, thank you for the time. If you need help, call Tim. He's got more time on his end now. Just be courageous and learn. Learning comes with failure, and that's okay. The more you learn and the more you're doing, the better. I love the person who said YouTube University and changing a tire. I think what the next few years will take from us is to be comfortable being uncomfortable. So help your organizations and yourselves and your teams do that. That'd be my parting words.

Tim Hourigan: Amen.

Alex McMurray [59:58 – 01:00:01]: Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day.