AutoGenAI put coaching at the centre of a performance-first People function
AutoGenAI ran a six-month coaching pilot with its engineering team, then renewed for a second year.
Industry
AI software
Products used
Coaching
AutoGenAI uses generative AI to scale proposal writing for enterprise and government clients. It grew from 80 people to 180, and it runs its People function on a deliberate contrarian bet: the person leading it is not an HR professional.
“It feels like often it’s perceived that the performance goals of the organisation and… the development of individuals are almost at odds… whereas our philosophy and view is that performance and development go hand in hand.”
Chris Blackwell
Chief People and Performance Officer, AutoGenAI
The challenge
Chris Blackwell’s diagnosis of his own field is blunt. “It kind of feels like most sort of HR orthodoxy in terms of how things are done add little value to actual business performance,” he said. “We’re not anti-HR, we’re sort of alternative HR.”
The specific thing he thought orthodox practice got wrong was the split between performance and development, treated as a trade-off where attention to one costs the other. His view was that they are the same activity described twice. Growing someone’s impact is how they progress, and an organisation full of people progressing is an organisation performing.
Holding that view is easy. Buying software that reflects it is harder. Doubling headcount in a company whose product is AI meant goal setting, development and engagement all needed to work at a scale they had not been built for, and the platforms on the market were organised around the split he had already rejected.
What they did
AutoGenAI ran a six-month coaching pilot with its engineering team, the function under the most pressure from the company’s growth, chosen because coaching was the capability its leadership believed would move performance directly.
Coaching pointed at engineering, the function carrying the most scaling pressure
A six-month pilot before any broader commitment
Found through the founder on the HR Heretics podcast, not through a procurement process
“From our perspective, we believe that coaching will make a difference to performance,” Blackwell said, “how people show up at work and how they perform.”
Coach matching run by the individual, not assigned centrally
Goals mapped to the competency model already used in reviews
Progress reported to the executive team quarterly
The result
AutoGenAI renewed for a second year and is evaluating SkillCycle as its primary people platform.
“We’re trying to create that kind of virtuous cycle that you get when you’re in that kind of growth phase,” Blackwell said. “People can do good work and then raise the bar.”
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