Forget Generic AI Advice: This Leadership Coach Is the Edge Growth Leaders Have Been Waiting For
As one C-level exec says: “It’s not a tool I reach for occasionally when I’m stuck. It’s a regular part of how I think through what matters most.”
Managing a team and enacting plans that truly push the needle at your business isn’t always an exact science. It requires equal parts experience, smart strategy, inspiration, and luck. But even when some or all those elements come together, the path forward can still seem ambiguous. Where do leaders at the executive level turn when they need advice?
For Brittany Podolak, Chief People Officer at Boston-based athenahealth, the answer was to seek out a leadership coach. The one-on-one time with another leader who has decades of experience and expertise always proved enlightening, helpful, and invaluable. But she says the process of finding a coach, establishing a relationship, and coordinating schedules, requires time and effort that many busy executives don’t have.
Podolak started experimenting with a new tool called ALEX, an AI-powered leadership coach created by the team at Admired Leadership. What she discovered was instant access to real, nuanced leadership advice — not generic guidance anyone can simply find online.
“Leadership at the executive level is rarely about having the right answer,” Podolak explains. “It’s about thinking clearly when the stakes are high, and the information is incomplete. We’re frequently wrestling with challenges that have real complexity to them — competing priorities, competing perspectives, and the kind of paradox that doesn’t resolve neatly.”
Leadership advice like no other AI can provide
For nearly four decades, Admired Leadership has been researching what the world’s top business leaders actually do — not theory or personality frameworks, but specific, real-world behaviors and routines that drive growth and change. They realized that the keys to achieving growth in crowded and competitive industries aren’t found in platitudes or clichéd strategies anyone can find in a book or online. Successful leaders pull from a unique playbook with ideas your competitors have never considered before.
They used the proprietary insights they gathered to offer one-on-one, personalized business coaching to executives from around the world. Now, using a leading AI engine as its foundation, Admired Leadership created ALEX, an AI-powered leadership tool that pulls on that same research to deliver the same exceptional advice fast, and to anyone who signs up.
“ALEX democratizes executive coaching,” Podolak says. “Traditionally, this caliber of counsel has been reserved for the most senior leaders in an organization, and even then, access is limited and expensive. ALEX makes it possible to extend that quality of advice throughout an organization at a price point that’s actually feasible. That’s not a small thing.”
Growing with confidence
Podolak says she has sampled several other AI-powered leadership tools but keeps coming back to ALEX because of its advice that’s based on decades of proprietary research. Plus, after developing and refining her preferences (providing ALEX with details such as the type of work she does, the challenges she’s facing, the developmental goals she’s seeking) and how she wants ALEX to respond (longer or shorter responses, etc.), ALEX provides targeted advice that Podolak can trust.
“ALEX is my thought partner for complex leadership situations — the kind where the path forward isn’t obvious and where my thinking can get in its own way,” she says. “It surfaces things I’m not considering and helps me see around corners I didn’t know were there.”
She uses ALEX for everything from creating executive memos to scenarios planning to developing performance and coaching outlines for her employees. And she’s not the only one at athenahealth using ALEX—more than 300 employees use the AI coach regularly.
“ALEX is simply part of how I work,” Podolak says. “It’s not a tool I reach for occasionally when I’m stuck. It’s a regular part of how I think through what matters most.”
Click here to learn more about how ALEX can give you the leadership edge your business needs to get to the next level.