Jeff Dalton has authored 100+ AI research papers and spent 20 years making search and assistants smarter. Now, he is joining Valence to oversee development of their AI-powered leadership coach—building deeper memory and context for hyper-personalized support that democratizes learning and development.
NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Valence, creator of the most widely deployed AI leadership coach for enterprise, today announced the appointment of Dr. Jeff Dalton as Head of AI and Chief Scientist. Jeff will lead ongoing development of Valence's AI coach Nadia, which is already deployed in dozens of Fortune 500 companies and used by tens of thousands of corporate leaders.
There are just a handful of people in the world with as much experience as Jeff when it comes to building conversational AI for complex problems. He is the author of more than 100 research papers and holds multiple patents in search, natural language understanding, and question answering. He played a key role on the Knowledge Discovery and Assistant teams at Google, developing language understanding capabilities for the Google Assistant and building next-generation knowledge graphs for Google search. At the University of Glasgow, he led the TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT), which, in partnership with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, created one of the world's first benchmarks of conversational search quality.
Today, Jeff holds a UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship on Neural Conversational Assistants and has received research awards from Google, Amazon, and Bloomberg. He is an Associate Professor in AI at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Informatics, where he leads the Generalized Representation and Information Learning Lab (GRILL).
"The conversational agents we have today aren't really personal and don't really adapt to us over the long term," Jeff explained. "LLMs are amazing technology, but still largely used for simple tasks like writing email or Q&A. How do we create next-generation AI agents that know us well enough to proactively help us with all of our tasks?"
Context is critical, and it's what sets Valence's Nadia apart as the only high-context AI work coach. Nadia has extensive context about each employee and the company and uses that to tailor expert guidance to individual employees and situations. At Valence, Jeff will lead development with a focus on building even deeper context and stronger memory for Nadia.
"What I love about Jeff's background is that his experience is very practical. It's about taking the research and delivering something valuable for users both immediately and for years down the road. Everyone deserves a great coach, and Jeff will help us deliver personalized, AI-powered support and guidance that creates better leaders and better companies," said Valence CEO Parker Mitchell.
"Where are you in your career? Where do you want to get to next? What career skills have you learned recently? Context like this will allow Valence's AI coach to learn about you with each interaction, become a seamless part of workflows, and provide world-class guidance that helps leaders grow. If we do this right, Nadia will evolve into a personalized AI coach that you can't work without," said Jeff.
ABOUT VALENCE
Valence is on a mission to unlock human potential across the entire workforce of any organization. Founded in 2018, the company began by offering software to support managers to improve team performance and help teams work better together. In 2022, Valence recognized the potential of LLMs to unlock the ultimate goal of personalized support at scale. They began offering an AI-powered leadership coach that provides individuals with guidance and support unique to their needs, and is affordable enough to scale to every single employee.
Two years on, Valence's AI coach, Nadia, is the most widely deployed AI leadership coach for enterprise. Nadia integrates seamlessly with company values and leadership frameworks and builds context about each individual employee for personalized learning and development at scale for every career stage. It is technology that puts the world's best executive coach in the pocket of every leader, manager, and employee.
The company raised its Series A in May 2022, led by Insight Partners.
Media Contact
Kira Luscher, Valence, 1 4154072994, [email protected], https://www.valence.co/
SOURCE Valence
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