Our Plan
We’re building Able, a unified AI-driven platform for the leadership development industry. An operating system and infrastructure to help organisations and providers develop millions of leaders.
The corporate leadership development industry is one of the most vital yet fragmented sectors in the world. Leaders and managers hold highly leveraged roles within society - they may be responsible for anywhere from 10 to a million staff, they manage projects that impact the culture and community around them, and can increasingly lead teams and systems that impact anything from hundreds to billions of humans across the planet.
Good leaders and managers across all levels and in all aspects of society are critical to a safe, healthy, happy and productive community.
Our vision
Our vision is to build a unified AI-driven operating system for the leadership development industry (Able). Able is a behaviour change platform for all participants in leadership & team development ie. leaders, organisations and providers:
Leaders: leaders and managers at all levels, from executives to individual contributors, participating in leadership & team development programs.
Organisations: leadership and L&D managers within organisation responsible for developing the leadership and management capabilities of their colleagues, and managing initiatives.
Providers: executive coaches, facilitators, trainers, learning experience design and Learning & Development (L&D) providers who are delivering leadership & team development programs for their client organisations.
The leadership development industry is highly fragmented and filled with inefficiencies and challenges. We’re building a single place to bring organisations, learners and providers together with the core tools and infrastructure needed to facilitate sustainable behaviour change and organisational outcomes.
Our mission is to develop leaders for the benefit of all.
There are approximately 130 million formal leaders and managers globally, and roughly half of these (50-80M people) will go through some formal leadership training each year. Each year about 5-10 million organisations collaborate with the 200 to 350,000 providers (these are facilitators, trainers, coaches and instructional designers) to design and deliver structured leadership & team development initiatives.
But ‘Leaders’ don’t just sit within formal roles, with titles such as Chief executive, president, director or manager. Leaders and ‘leadership’ exists at all levels of an organisation, from the board to middle managers, emerging leaders and individual contributors. Often the best organisations recognise this and engage all roles in leadership development, but often price and time is a challenge to greater adoption.
We’re building tools to democratise leadership development such as AI-driven coaching and bringing down the cost of one of the industries most powerful interventions - 1-on-1 leadership coaching, so it’s accessible for anyone in an organisation, not just executives.
Our aim is to to build tools and infrastructure for providers, organisations and leaders (at all levels), and develop over a million leaders by 2030.
Our Plan: practitioners > enterprise + AI.
We’re building the first end-to-end AI-driven platform and network for the leadership development industry.
Our plan is to start with Solo Practitioners & Small L&D Providers, this is the executive coaches, facilitators, trainers, instructional designers, consultants and other experts involved in designing and delivering leadership development initiatives. This is where we began and are strong.
We’re providing a program and practice management tool to help them; design, deliver and measure impactful programs for leaders and their client organisations; grow their practice by helping extend capabilities; and easily collaborate with their project team.
We are providing the platform free to practitioners to encourage wide adoption and create a large network of coaches, facilitators and trainers. We’re also aligning our financial incentives with practitioners - practitioners can bundle our Learner Plans with their programs and resell subscriptions to their client organisations. This helps practitioners grow their own ongoing revenue streams beyond the project based revenue that is common in the industry.
With a large practitioner network on-platform we will focus on building features for large Enterprise Organisations. We’ll build features such as compliance, security, payments and HR, integrations with LMS & HCM. With enterprise features and a large practitioner network Able will be in a better position to serve the client side of the industry - medium to large organisations - which manage about 70% of the spend in the industry.
Enterprise features and a large network will also allow us to serve large L&D providers such as universities, business schools and large consulting firms.
End-to-end AI
AI is transforming society, organisations, leaders and learning.
We’re building Artificial Intelligence into the core of our platform. We’ve currently deployed a message-based AI-generated coach that is aware of a leaders strengths & weaknesses, AI-generated nudges and AI-generated summaries across the platform. We plan to extend our existing AI services to voice-based leadership coaching, AI-content generation and AI-generated intervention design at both a cohort and individual level.
Our end goal is to use increasingly larger volumes of intervention data to build a fully autonomous, self-learning system that can design, deliver, manage and measure interventions. A system that understands both the cost and impact of intervention options and can orchestrate all components of leadership development - human coaches, learning content, behavioural measures and catering - to deliver the best return on investment for a client organisation and it’s leaders.
We’re building an AI-first company.
AI tools can help humans be more creative, do more with less and automate workflows and processes. Increasingly humans will manage both human teams and large swarms of AI-agents. We’re creating a lean organisation that has high-agency, deep domain experience, a passion for the creative potential AI and an ambition to help humanity.
If you’re passionate about how AI and people can play well together to create large scale human development reach out: support@helloable.co
Summary
In summary our plan is:
Create a small team of people with a passion for AI and large scale behavior change.
Build a free practice management tool for practitioners to deliver rich blended programs.
Use this to attract a large high-quality practitioner network of coaches, facilitators and trainers.
Create a best in-class ai-generated leadership coach that plays well with in-person learning & development experiences.
Build enterprise features and use the large network to provide compelling value to large enterprise orgs.
Use larger volumes of data to build an autonomous, self-learning system to orchestrate rich blended interventions.
With more people and programs on platform we’ll embed payment infrastructure for human services.
Use the large human network, intervention & financial data, and AI to drive better ROI outcomes.
Better outcomes for organisations and leaders, means more organisations will invest in developing better humans.
And more and better humans = a better world.