Dehurdle: Democratizing Executive Coaching Through Ai-powered Coaching App

Executive coaching is an expensive, time-consuming and intensely personalized process, limiting its accessibility in most cases to senior leaders within organizations. To make coaching more accessible, the founders of Dehurdle, Kasliwal and Verma created an AI-based coaching app and offered it as a B2B solution for organizations. The app began with a needs analysis of the coaching assessment and identified eight potential ‘hurdles’ that a user may want to improve. Similar to a human coach, the subsequent coaching journey included small reflection practices, meditation and awareness building. The app-based coaching was available for three months, and users could continue using it if they felt they still needed support or wanted to work on another ‘hurdle’. Buoyed by the initial satisfaction and demonstrated outcomes for employees, organizations were enthused with the app’s potential for self-driven employee development. Kasliwal and Verma faced challenges in demonstrating the Return on Investment (ROI) of the platform and maintaining confidentiality on individual-level hurdles identified while sharing platform usage reports and self-reported benefits of the users. Furthermore, some employees preferred coaching from a more ‘human’ coach, thereby limiting the adoption of online and app-based coaching.