Valence, creator of the most widely deployed AI leadership coach for enterprise, 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).
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“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.
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