Translating at scale: Building a better client experience with AI on the team

Client challenge

Wellstar Health System, one of Georgia’s largest healthcare systems, had already invested heavily in leadership development for senior leaders. But as the organization navigated rapid growth, a major acquisition, and the demands of a shifting healthcare landscape, it became clear that the greatest leadership challenges were happening at the front and midline.

“Some of the greatest leader challenges are really at the front and midline levels… we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting more emphasis on our front line and mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes, said Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer at the time.

We’re not an organization who believes in just investing in high performers… you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”

Wellstar partnered with Sounding Board to bring a more scalable, flexible coaching solution to leaders across the organization.

The solution

Partnering with Sounding Board, Wellstar designed a scalable, personalized coaching program to extend leadership development across the organization while maintaining the quality of one-on-one coaching.

A proprietary 360 assessment, aligned to Wellstar’s leadership behaviors, served as the foundation for each coaching engagement. This ensured development was directly tied to how leaders show up and lead in practice.

“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development. ‍

“Helping our leaders create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”

Program goals:

• Develop leadership capabilities aligned to Wellstar’s mission, vision, and values
• Deliver personalized, relevant development for leaders at all levels
• Strengthen the leadership bench and support succession planning
• Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and engagement

Program overview:

• Personalized, one-on-one coaching for leaders at all levels
• Capability development aligned to Wellstar’s values
  • Serve with Compassion → Builds relationships
  • Pursue Excellence → Drives results, leads teams, and plans strategically
  • Honor Every Voice → Fosters inclusion and respect for differences
• Scalable delivery across frontline, mid-level, and clinical leaders
• Digital tools to track goals, capture insights, and measure progress

This approach made it possible to deliver consistent, high-quality coaching across roles and locations while keeping development relevant to each leader’s day-to-day work.

Results

As the program unfolded, Wellstar began to see a shift in how frontline and mid-level leaders showed up across the organization. Leaders in these critical roles had more consistent support navigating day-to-day challenges, and managers gained better visibility into how their teams were developing. Coaching became a more practical, embedded part of how Wellstar supports leaders in a complex healthcare environment.

Higher engagement and satisfaction

• 96% of participants said the coaching experience was worth the investment
• 99% said they could immediately apply what they learned to their day-to-day work

Measurable leadership growth

Participants reported double-digit growth across leadership capabilities including:

• Executive presence (+16%)
• Organizational collaboration (+14%)
• Strategic thinking (+13%)
• Time management and prioritization (+13%)
• Communication (+11%)

Stronger retention and mobility

• Coached leaders achieved a 90% one-year retention rate
• Retention for coached leaders was 31% higher than non-coached peers
• 3% of participants were promoted into new roles, exceeding organizational goals and industry benchmarks

Learn more about Wellstar’s leadership coaching journey with Sounding Board in this feature in Becker’s Hospital Review.

Client need

A large U.S.-based health insurance organization operating at the center of a complex national ecosystem had already made a serious investment in enterprise AI. Leadership was not experimenting at the edges. They were leaning in.

Capability and commitment existed across the organization, but unevenly. Some teams were already pushing boundaries. Others hadn't yet found their footing. Most of the gains had come in personal productivity. Valuable, but the core work itself had not yet fundamentally changed. The opportunity was to go deeper, to move from AI-assisted individuals to AI-reinvented workflows.

Across the health insurance landscape, pressure was intensifying. Medicaid and government program contracts were becoming more competitive. Decision cycles were faster and more analytics-driven. Clinical evidence was evolving rapidly. Regulatory scrutiny was high. Security risks were constant. AI was no longer a future conversation. It was a present expectation.

Inside the organization, world-class experts were still constrained by manual processes.

Specialized teams were synthesizing large volumes of complex, fast-moving information, working to keep pace with an environment where the inputs never stopped changing. The work required deep expertise and judgment, and it also demanded repetitive processing that consumed days when it needed to take hours.

Other teams faced pressure where speed and precision directly influenced competitive outcomes. Manual approaches were creating lag at exactly the moments when faster insight mattered most.

Across functions, the pattern was consistent. Highly trained professionals were spending valuable time on low-leverage tasks, stitching together data, transforming files, and correlating inputs that AI could handle.

Leadership understood that AI licenses alone would not create advantage. To compete in an increasingly analytics-driven insurance environment, expertise had to scale. Insight had to move faster. Teams needed to reinvent how core work happened.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to move from AI access to AI application.

Through a series of focused design sprints, intact teams worked on their highest-value workflows using our GROUNDING → EXPERIMENT → BUILD → AMPLIFY methodology. The structure was simple and disciplined. Set context. Experiment quickly. Build against real work. Create a path to scale.

Participants brought their actual work into the room. Analytical frameworks. Competitive and operational documents. Risk and intelligence inputs. Data pipelines.

No generic demos. No abstract hypotheticals.

The turning point came when AI began working on their actual content.

Research syntheses that previously took days began structuring themselves in minutes. Competitive analysis that once required manual review surfaced patterns instantly. Data transformation workflows streamlined in real time.

Skepticism shifted to possibility.

We positioned AI as augmentation, not replacement. In a sector defined by professional expertise and accountability, that framing was critical. The goal was to elevate expert judgment, not automate it away.

Some teams left with working prototypes. Others left with detailed blueprints aligned to enterprise privacy and security requirements. Another team took away a re-prioritized set of additional tools to incorporate into a HIPAA-compliant environment. Every team left with a redesigned workflow.

Results

In five days, more than 100 leaders advanced 30 priority use cases tied directly to operational performance and competitive growth.

Early outcomes included:

• Significant reduction in manual research synthesis and data preparation
• Faster, more structured competitive intelligence to support high-stakes decisions
• Clear implementation pathways aligned to security and regulatory constraints
• A scalable model for continued AI-enabled workflow reinvention

Just as important was the mindset shift.

Participants stopped viewing AI as a tool sitting outside their work and began treating it as embedded infrastructure for how work gets done.

“This showed immediate relevance to our work.”

“Now I understand what’s actually possible for my team.”

“We just accomplished in two hours what used to take us two months.”

In a U.S. health insurance market where insight, speed, and precision directly influence who wins and who grows, the organization moved decisively from AI access to AI advantage.

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When BTS invented business simulations in the 1980s, leadership development was mostly theoretical – case studies, lectures, and frameworks about what good decisions looked like. Simulations changed that. They let leaders learn by doing, stepping into a realistic version of their business to test strategy, make decisions, and see the impact before the stakes were real.

Since then, simulations have evolved from spreadsheets to digital platforms to immersive virtual experiences that capture the complexity of leading in today’s world. Now, large language models and agentic AI are opening a new frontier, one where simulations evolve as fast as the world they reflect and experiential learning scales with the pace of change.

Creating space for exploration

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Test quickly, abandon what doesn’t work, and share what you learn.
– Jessica Skon, CEO, BTS

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A handful of simulation experts were pulled out of their day-to-day work and given the freedom to set their own direction. They had the authority to shape the roadmap and the protection to explore bold ideas without fear of critique. The brief was simple: go figure out what’s possible.

They had cover to fail fast, freedom to explore, and permission to get a little messy. Early wins were interesting but small. AI could draft faster, automate a few things – helpful, sure. Transformative? Not yet.

The breakthrough came when we stopped trying to bolt AI on to what we already did. We rebuilt our simulation platforms, our processes, and tools from the ground up around AI. Suddenly it wasn’t just about micro-gains & efficiencies, the canvas of possibility was much larger.

From experimentation to acceleration

So, we tested. Some tools showed promise, others, not so much. Every experiment taught us something. Each “failure” made us sharper about where AI could actually help, and where it would just get in the way.

What began as small experiments turned into a new way of working, a process and platform working as one.

AI now accelerates the first 80% of the work, the structure, synthesis, and early drafts, freeing BTS consultants to focus on the high-impact moments that drive behavior change: dilemmas, trade-offs, and conversations that build conviction.

Our new AI simulation platform and AI-First development process operationalizes that process:

• Enabling live co-creation and branching edits with clients
• Applying light guardrails for quality and security
• Integrating with enterprise systems for compliance and control

AI accelerates, people transform. That combination is what makes BTS… BTS.

Clients feel the impact in four ways

1. Fast spin-ups for focused needs
   For targeted challenges like coaching a customer conversation, debriefing a safety incident, aligning a sales team, we can now stand up bespoke simulations in days, not weeks. Teams co-create live; scenarios adjust in the room; relevance is immediate.
2. Enterprise simulations for strategy alignment
   For multi-round, high-fidelity simulations, AI accelerates the structure without compromising quality. BTS experts still craft the dilemmas and trade-offs that drive conviction.
3. A broader platform portfolio
   Beyond enterprise simulations, we now support conversational practice, skill drills, workflow redesign, and company or market modeling, helping clients choose the right tool for each need.
4. On-demand, without the risk
   Clients can use our AI platform for self-authored micro-sims, where speed and iteration matter most. Our toolchain scaffolds the flow, enforces guardrails, and keeps quality high.

The best model is flexible: enable where DIY shines, co-build for complex challenges, and experts lead end-to-end when outcomes matter most.

What clients are already seeing

• Weeks to hours: Work that once took six weeks was delivered as a high-fidelity experience in just 13 hours, specific enough to engage a CEO on first pass.
• Lean, agile teams: Projects that required seven consultants now take two, with no loss in quality or impact.
• Live collaboration: Simulations are built with clients, not for them, adjusted in real time during design and delivery.

The result: faster delivery, deeper relevance, and experiences that scale across an enterprise without losing the human touch.

The bigger picture

BTS simulations have always given leaders a safe place to wrestle with real dilemmas. AI hasn’t changed that, it’s expanded the canvas. By rebuilding how we design and deliver simulations, we’ve removed the trade-off between speed and substance.

Focused needs can now be met in days. Complex transformations can move at the pace of business. Clients can engage however they choose, DIY, co-create, or end-to-end, with BTS expertise guiding every step.

We’re still early in this chapter, just like our clients. But the direction is clear: faster, smarter, more scalable experiential learning, anchored in human judgment, strategic alignment, and the craft that defines BTS.

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Client challenge

Wellstar Health System, one of Georgia’s largest healthcare systems, had already invested heavily in leadership development for senior leaders. But as the organization navigated rapid growth, a major acquisition, and the demands of a shifting healthcare landscape, it became clear that the greatest leadership challenges were happening at the front and midline.

“Some of the greatest leader challenges are really at the front and midline levels… we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting more emphasis on our front line and mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes, said Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer at the time.

We’re not an organization who believes in just investing in high performers… you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”

Wellstar partnered with Sounding Board to bring a more scalable, flexible coaching solution to leaders across the organization.

The solution

Partnering with Sounding Board, Wellstar designed a scalable, personalized coaching program to extend leadership development across the organization while maintaining the quality of one-on-one coaching.

A proprietary 360 assessment, aligned to Wellstar’s leadership behaviors, served as the foundation for each coaching engagement. This ensured development was directly tied to how leaders show up and lead in practice.

“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development. ‍

“Helping our leaders create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”

Program goals:

• Develop leadership capabilities aligned to Wellstar’s mission, vision, and values
• Deliver personalized, relevant development for leaders at all levels
• Strengthen the leadership bench and support succession planning
• Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and engagement

Program overview:

• Personalized, one-on-one coaching for leaders at all levels
• Capability development aligned to Wellstar’s values
  • Serve with Compassion → Builds relationships
  • Pursue Excellence → Drives results, leads teams, and plans strategically
  • Honor Every Voice → Fosters inclusion and respect for differences
• Scalable delivery across frontline, mid-level, and clinical leaders
• Digital tools to track goals, capture insights, and measure progress

This approach made it possible to deliver consistent, high-quality coaching across roles and locations while keeping development relevant to each leader’s day-to-day work.

Results

As the program unfolded, Wellstar began to see a shift in how frontline and mid-level leaders showed up across the organization. Leaders in these critical roles had more consistent support navigating day-to-day challenges, and managers gained better visibility into how their teams were developing. Coaching became a more practical, embedded part of how Wellstar supports leaders in a complex healthcare environment.

Higher engagement and satisfaction

• 96% of participants said the coaching experience was worth the investment
• 99% said they could immediately apply what they learned to their day-to-day work

Measurable leadership growth

Participants reported double-digit growth across leadership capabilities including:

• Executive presence (+16%)
• Organizational collaboration (+14%)
• Strategic thinking (+13%)
• Time management and prioritization (+13%)
• Communication (+11%)

Stronger retention and mobility

• Coached leaders achieved a 90% one-year retention rate
• Retention for coached leaders was 31% higher than non-coached peers
• 3% of participants were promoted into new roles, exceeding organizational goals and industry benchmarks

Learn more about Wellstar’s leadership coaching journey with Sounding Board in this feature in Becker’s Hospital Review.

Client need

For a 175-year-old technology company, competitive advantage isn’t just built on technical innovation: it’s built on leaders who know how to get the best thinking from every person around them. That culture of drawing out ideas, developing people, and driving innovation through engaged teams had been a defining feature of the organization for generations. And it depended on having the right infrastructure to keep developing frontline leaders at scale.

In 2020, that infrastructure was disrupted. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the organization to pivot its in-person development to virtual almost overnight, risking the erosion of frontline leadership capability while simultaneously needing to navigate the broader shocks of the pandemic: supply chain volatility, shifting materials costs, and a workforce managing profound uncertainty.  

Stalling frontline leadership development meant risking productivity, employee engagement, talent retention, job performance, and downstream impacts on quality and operating margin, at a moment when the organization could least afford it.

The question now was how to reimagine frontline leader development to equip thousands of global leaders to continue supporting their teams through disruption, and to ensure the next generation of managers could help their people do their best work under any conditions.

Solution

The client partnered with BTS to reimagine frontline leader development from the ground up, equipping leaders globally with the practical skills, tools, and mindset shifts needed to support their teams in doing great, innovative work.

The partnership began in 2019, and over five years has reached over 1,600 frontline leaders capturing 700+ documented behavior change actions. In 2022, BTS collaborated with the organization to refresh the program to reflect their evolving strategy and develop a sharper focus on supporting a culture of continuous improvement and innovation with coaching and feedback.  

The blended program experience combined the following elements:

• Immersive leadership simulations: Scenario-based experiences placing leaders in realistic situations, surfacing Multiplier and Diminisher tendencies in real time and making the learning immediately personal and actionable

• Multipliers and Diminishers framework: A structured exploration of how leaders either amplify or diminish the intelligence of those around them, including specific “experiments” leaders could use to better understand their own leadership approaches

• Custom leadership frameworks: Including a structured, step-by-step process for having significant feedback conversations, a tool to understand and flex to communication preferences, and a coaching approach designed to help leaders guide team members toward their own solutions, building capability and long-term ownership.

• Structured application sessions — on-the-job practice components designed to bridge the gap between the program experience and day-to-day behavior, giving participants specific frameworks to apply immediately with their teams

• Peer networking and breakout groups — cohort-based learning that participants identified as a standout feature, both for deepening the learning and for building cross-functional relationships that extended beyond the program

• A commitment-capture platform integrated into the program to log participant actions and reinforce behavior change after the program ended; over 670 participant actions were captured across the program’s delivery

Throughout the program, leaders examined the impact of their own behaviors, recognizing where they were unintentionally diminishing their teams, and built new habits around challenging, creating space for mistakes and learning, listening, questioning, giving developmental feedback, and creating ownership. The feedback model gave participants a practical process for the positive and constructive conversations that actually change performance.

Results

More than 1,600 frontline leaders and individual contributors have participated in the program—the population closest to daily execution, quality, and operations. A recent impact study told a clear story about the effects of the program across participants:  

100% of participants reported actively applying what they learned. 59% reported producing significant, measurable business impact, with concrete evidence to describe it.

The results weren’t theoretical. One engineering leader restructured how his team developed project plans, creating space for debate and ownership instead of coming in with the answer. His team exceeded their quality target by 10 percentage points and accelerated the project timeline by +4 months.

One production leader used the feedback model to coach a struggling supervisor and cascade the process across his entire leadership layer. His unit reached #1 performance in its division, improving a key quality KPI by more than 18% year-over-year. A department head with over a decade in leadership set new production records after learning to flex his communication style and draw out quieter team members. And a development lab supervisor used the program to clarify her leadership identity, earn a promotion, and coach her direct report to one as well.

The study also confirmed that when managers actively supported participants post-program, the likelihood of significant business impact increased substantially, shaping the organization’s next phase of reinforcement and cohort follow-up.

For an organization whose competitive advantage rests on the innovation and intelligence of its people, the program gave its leaders something technical training rarely delivers: the confidence, the tools, and the self-awareness to make everyone around them better.

Testimonials

“The program gave me greater confidence to try new things as a leader. It helped me realize what I do and what I don’t do.”  - HR Leader

“The skills I learned in the training helped me be more efficient. It helped me do the right thing, right away.” - Production Manager

“Feedback is very important to create a positive environment; and how to [give] feedback is a specific skill I learned from this training and how to share constructive feedback.” - Production Leader

Client need

A large U.S.-based health insurance organization operating at the center of a complex national ecosystem had already made a serious investment in enterprise AI. Leadership was not experimenting at the edges. They were leaning in.

Capability and commitment existed across the organization, but unevenly. Some teams were already pushing boundaries. Others hadn't yet found their footing. Most of the gains had come in personal productivity. Valuable, but the core work itself had not yet fundamentally changed. The opportunity was to go deeper, to move from AI-assisted individuals to AI-reinvented workflows.

Across the health insurance landscape, pressure was intensifying. Medicaid and government program contracts were becoming more competitive. Decision cycles were faster and more analytics-driven. Clinical evidence was evolving rapidly. Regulatory scrutiny was high. Security risks were constant. AI was no longer a future conversation. It was a present expectation.

Inside the organization, world-class experts were still constrained by manual processes.

Specialized teams were synthesizing large volumes of complex, fast-moving information, working to keep pace with an environment where the inputs never stopped changing. The work required deep expertise and judgment, and it also demanded repetitive processing that consumed days when it needed to take hours.

Other teams faced pressure where speed and precision directly influenced competitive outcomes. Manual approaches were creating lag at exactly the moments when faster insight mattered most.

Across functions, the pattern was consistent. Highly trained professionals were spending valuable time on low-leverage tasks, stitching together data, transforming files, and correlating inputs that AI could handle.

Leadership understood that AI licenses alone would not create advantage. To compete in an increasingly analytics-driven insurance environment, expertise had to scale. Insight had to move faster. Teams needed to reinvent how core work happened.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to move from AI access to AI application.

Through a series of focused design sprints, intact teams worked on their highest-value workflows using our GROUNDING → EXPERIMENT → BUILD → AMPLIFY methodology. The structure was simple and disciplined. Set context. Experiment quickly. Build against real work. Create a path to scale.

Participants brought their actual work into the room. Analytical frameworks. Competitive and operational documents. Risk and intelligence inputs. Data pipelines.

No generic demos. No abstract hypotheticals.

The turning point came when AI began working on their actual content.

Research syntheses that previously took days began structuring themselves in minutes. Competitive analysis that once required manual review surfaced patterns instantly. Data transformation workflows streamlined in real time.

Skepticism shifted to possibility.

We positioned AI as augmentation, not replacement. In a sector defined by professional expertise and accountability, that framing was critical. The goal was to elevate expert judgment, not automate it away.

Some teams left with working prototypes. Others left with detailed blueprints aligned to enterprise privacy and security requirements. Another team took away a re-prioritized set of additional tools to incorporate into a HIPAA-compliant environment. Every team left with a redesigned workflow.

Results

In five days, more than 100 leaders advanced 30 priority use cases tied directly to operational performance and competitive growth.

Early outcomes included:

• Significant reduction in manual research synthesis and data preparation
• Faster, more structured competitive intelligence to support high-stakes decisions
• Clear implementation pathways aligned to security and regulatory constraints
• A scalable model for continued AI-enabled workflow reinvention

Just as important was the mindset shift.

Participants stopped viewing AI as a tool sitting outside their work and began treating it as embedded infrastructure for how work gets done.

“This showed immediate relevance to our work.”

“Now I understand what’s actually possible for my team.”

“We just accomplished in two hours what used to take us two months.”

In a U.S. health insurance market where insight, speed, and precision directly influence who wins and who grows, the organization moved decisively from AI access to AI advantage.

‍