How ABM Is Using AI Coaching to Support 100,000 Frontline Workers
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast On The Road, we sit down with Raúl J. Valentín, EVP & Chief Human Resources Officer at ABM Industries, live from Workhuman Live Orlando 2026, to unpack what it really takes to lead a frontline workforce through constant change, AI transformation, and rising employee expectations.
Raúl explains why the future of HR is not about choosing between people and technology, but designing systems where people and AI work together to make work faster, fairer, and more human.
He shares how ABM is building resilience across a workforce of more than 100,000 team members by focusing on fairness, recognition, manager capability, and helping employees feel seen, heard, and valued wherever they work.
Most importantly, Raúl reveals why HR leaders must stop waiting for perfect answers before taking action, and instead create safe ways to launch, learn, improve, and lead transformation in motion.
🎓 In this episode, Raúl discusses:
Why managers are the real unlock for culture, safety, learning, and workflow redesign
Why grit, resilience, and learning agility matter more than ever in the new world of work
How AI coaching can help managers build confidence and practice difficult conversations
How ABM creates fairness and opportunity across a highly distributed frontline workforce
How CHROs can balance experimentation, ROI pressure, trust, and transparency when adopting AI
What if the future of work wasn’t more artificial?
What if it was more human?
On May 20, Workhuman Forum London brings the UK and Europe’s most forward-thinking CHROs, CPOs, and people leaders together at the London Hilton Park Lane for one defining day on trust, recognition, psychological safety, and leadership in the age of AI.
Because as AI accelerates, the real competitive edge is not just better technology.
It’s stronger cultures.
It’s leaders who can build trust when pressure rises.
It’s recognition that connects people to strategy.
It’s psychological safety that helps teams speak up, adapt faster, and perform through uncertainty.
And it’s human intelligence that gives leaders a clearer view of what is really happening inside their organisation.
You’ll hear from world-class thinkers and senior HR leaders including Rachel Botsman, Eric Mosley, Susan David, Ph.D., Tom Lee, and more, unpacking the practical strategies people leaders need now.
This is not another conference.
It’s a reset moment for HR leaders who know the next era of work cannot be built on automation alone.
00:11
Well, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing? Very good. Thank you, Chris. Nice to see you. How's your day going so far? So far, pretty good. I got to see Angela Duckworth earlier. That was a really provocative discussion around grit, which I think is a really important characteristic for success. So it was great to hear her. I think now more than ever. Now more than ever. Yeah, I was talking to someone and I said, we've always said you have to be uncomfortable or you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Yes. That's never been more true than today, I think. Yeah. I mean, Shane, we talk about internally is seek discomfort. Yes. Like that is just the baseline. Yeah. Embrace it. Yeah, exactly.
00:46
I think like for us, like our superpower is resilience. Yeah. Right. And you're in this constant state of change that if that can become your baseline where most people would maybe break or, you know, find difficult, then also that's where the magic happens. That's right. That is where the magic happens. In the uncomfortable zone. That's right. If I don't feel that way, I kind of say to Shane and the team, I'm like, what's wrong?
01:07
You know, what am I missing, right? Stretch myself. What was the key takeaway you took away from the session?
01:13
I think it was that grit is different than, you know, just innate ability or knowledge or skills or intelligence doesn't do it alone. So it in some ways, I guess, confirmed, validated my thinking that think perseverance. She called it perseverance and passion were the differentiators that form grit. There's a lot more to it than that. Yes. So that was, I think, validating and important. And then how do you then look for that in people? How do you help them? She had some tips around how do you grow that and cultivate that, which is, I thought, important. there's a misconception that you can't learn it.
01:46
Yeah, that was the big thing. It was the growth mindset. Like, you can continue to learn, which is one of my favorite quotes is, we reserve to write to get smarter, which I picked up from someone else. It wasn't original, and I've not been able to find who originally said it, but it stuck with me, and I've used it always. And I think, for me, it represents, to your point, kind of a learning agility, right? You've got to be willing to learn. And learning means you're failing, right? Because you fail, then you pick yourself back up and learn something to get better until you get it right, but then you move on to the next thing. And I also think that allows for two things that I think are really important, especially today. Speed, right?
02:22
And also safety and security and where you are. So speed, I often find, whether it's HR or other teams, we don't always move at the pace of the business. So how do you move that quicker? And if you can get people to realize, hey, we reserve the right to get smarter, which means we're going to make mistakes, but we've got to get going. We can't keep working to make it perfect before we launch or before we roll something out. And that's HR typically, typically takes way too long. Everything needs to be perfect. Everything, yeah, that's right. And look, there's some things that need to be perfect. Payroll should be perfect. I was reading your mind now. Payroll. But a number of other things, if you do a contained phase one or pilot,
02:58
it's okay and you'll get better, you'll learn from it and it'll make the next rollout phase that much better. But I find when I've taken that approach with teams, we can get things done in half the time someone says a rollout should be or twice as fast because there's all this preparation and my boss sometimes says, getting ready to be ready.
03:17
He's like, are you getting ready to be ready? And it's like, are you taking long? Like, just go, let's go.
03:24
And for me, it's always the destination. Sorry, the journey, not the destination, which is the inspiring part. That's right. I kind of like, and that's where you learn the most. You fell forward, right? Yeah, that's right. I grew up playing ice hockey and a lot of sports. You fall on the ice, you get up and go again. You've got a coach that helps you along the way. You've got teammates around you. That's right, cheering you on. You lose some games. Yeah. You know, as well, and I kind of like that. It was quite a natural thing to walk into the workplace with that mentality. Yeah, well, sometimes you lose a lot, you learn a lot from losing. So much more, way more. And it enables you to win later, right? Exactly. Because of what you've learned, if you've got that right mindset. Yeah. I think one of the other things, I love that this wasn't planned, by the way, we're just talking about this, is that when you are going through a challenging time, which requires grit, if you have a clear why, a mission, a purpose, that's what keeps you going.
04:15
That's right. Absolutely true. It's difficult to go through a really difficult time. Right. but not have a clear vision or a mission or a purpose connected to that. Because that's what keeps me going. Things are really hard in our business or in life. It's like, oh, I've got my, you know, I'm doing this for my daughter. There's no stronger mission for me to see my family be successful. That's right. That makes a lot of sense. It's foundational. Yeah, right. And it does give you like the courage or the motivation to get back up and keep going. But as organizations, we can't say that to employees, but then not create the environment to be psychologically safe to take those risks. That's right. I'm a strong believer in like, one of the things for me around purpose is around creating an environment that allows for fairness.
04:59
And fairness, I would say, doesn't mean everything's equal. Because in an organization of 100,000 people where the bulk of them are doing frontline tasks that are critical to the business, they're why I get a paycheck every day.
05:11
But we've got all different types of skills from engineers to cleaners and everything in between and executives and frontline leaders and managers. And how do we create an environment where it's fair, which again doesn't mean everything's equal, But it's fair given their ability, given their desires, given how they've got to partner and collaborate together is really, really important. And that's what I try and strive for and try and look at how part of my purpose is can that frontline team member, which is what we call our employees, feel that they can show up and give their best every day and be recognized for that, be appreciated, and also have a chance to proceed, regardless of whether they went to school or not, regardless of English might be a second or third language for them. Those things make a big difference. Yeah, I never went to school. I kind of carved my own way that way. That's fair. That's great. And for the longest time, I thought that was like a... I was ashamed of that a little bit.
06:02
Does that sound silly? Because all my friends around me had degrees. And I was like... The five-year head start I got in the workplace because I wasn't in school...
06:10
That was so valuable. That's right. I was thrown in the deep end. Yeah. Life lessons matter. Exactly. And I saw a lot of people coming in with their degrees, and they still had to go through the same process I did. That's right. To really learn the hard way along the way. Practically though, when you talk about feeling seen, heard, valued, What are some practical things that you do, especially, for example, for frontline workers who are often overlooked? I mean, what's hard is getting that kind of face time there, right? Where 100,000 people split up over 20,000 sites in the US, UK and Ireland, right? So at all our customer sites and working. So one of the things we've done over the last few years, we've created this, you know, a lot of places have kind of employee recognition day. We have like team member appreciation week because we're so distributed. And we do it once a year, and it's a way that we go there, we talk to everyone, the executive team, the leaders, managers, everyone tries and rally around that and visit sites during that week.
07:07
We try and capture those moments that are really important. The other thing is kind of in terms of making sure we try and work with our supervisors and managers. Over the last couple of years, we've done numbers of what I'd call training on management skills, because I think there's been a gap there. So we've put 3,000 of our frontline managers through kind of a management one-on-one, which creates an environment then for those team members, right, that they're getting coached, they're getting supported, they're being sure that they're following our safety protocols, which are really important. In terms of the journey, in terms of with WorkHuman, are you already looking at some of the data from a skills perspective? Because I think that's an exciting area. We have not fully turned on WorkHuman yet, so we're looking forward to using data. I'd worked with GlobalForce, an earlier version of WorkHuman. So I was very impressed historically with their data and their insights. So I'm looking forward to when we'll turn it on.
07:56
Since we're doing some other transformation technology systems work now before we can turn that on, right? Before we can get that in and make the platform so everyone can get it, right? Yeah, so where are you on your skills first journey, in terms of skills first transformation? Early days, I think we've identified, I'd say, competencies for the company. Now looking at what are those skills, what are the critical skills in the company, what are the critical roles in the company. Early on to drive focus and prioritization, which I think in this day and age when there's so much going on, being able to prioritize what's most important, what's most critical is important. And then I think we're all learning with AI
08:32
about workflows and what does that mean and how does that then apply? So sometimes I still go back to some of those critical skills or critical thinking skills, right? Curiosity. Curiosity is huge, right? And I just heard that upstairs at a session, right? The notion of can you find people that are curious, right? Which is about learning, right? So it's learning versus training, which I think is really important to look at it that way. Yeah, it's like the more that we embed AI,
09:02
ironically, the more human we become, because if you are intentional about it and freeing up that time to focus on those, I wouldn't say soft skills, I don't like using that word, power skills. Power skills, there you go. Those are going to be the skills of the future, critical thinking, problem solving, all of that. And let's be honest, none of that was involved when I was a manager or a leader. That's right. So what's now required to be a leader right now is very different, even to a couple of years ago.
09:29
And it's so unknown, like when you think about the next two years, the next three years, right? I'm going to be managing agents, a team of agents here, a team of employees here, some in office, some hybrid, trying to deliver my own work at the same time. It's going to become a... And I think the focus there, to your point on the team, right, because...
09:47
I will be speaking and one of the things I'll talk about is we've undervalued the role of management in that. Because they ultimately, people always say all the time, people leave managers, not organizations. We've not focused on managers. We've gotten a little enamored on leadership. and leadership's got a place, and it's really important, but I think management is critical in terms of who ultimately creates that safe environment, who creates safety in failing and learning, and then who recognizes you, and who's likely most close to the work you're doing. When you think about redesigning the workflow, right, it's got to be someone who's in the trenches with you, and I think that's a huge opportunity. Yeah, that's the point. As we look at redesigning work itself, you know, as opposed to throwing AI on top of existing processes, which doesn't work, as we know, it's those managers that have their insights and their teams. Of course, we have an idea a little bit at the top, but really, they're the ones interacting with your customers day to day, really understand.
10:42
They know what's really going on. They know what's going on as well.
10:46
Of course we can't have a conversation these days about talking about AI. Right. So as a CHRO, what's kind of been one of the biggest challenges perhaps you're personally facing with this whole AI transformation that we're on right now? I think there are probably a couple of challenges. So one is,
11:03
I guess if I put on the enterprise hat is how do we balance the drive for ROI without it interfering with our ability to learn and grow, right? Because I think that chase, you see all the stats, so many AI projects fail, they're not really delivering the return. And I think we're still in early adoption phases. So we're still learning about what are the best use cases. And so I think, how do we continue to grow it while there's concern around the expense and the cost?
11:28
The other challenge is, and we've taken a pretty open stance with being transparent with our team members about job displacement. But that doesn't mean the job necessarily goes away, but it's going to require different skills, different toning. You might move to a different part of the company. Or, and we've said this very openly, if your job ultimately is eliminated,
11:48
Our goal should be that we've helped you so that you're more employable in that next place. Because it's not going to be unique to ABM. You're going to cross the street to another employer, they're going to be going through the same thing. So encouraging people to play with AI, learn with AI, not looking at it as an or, people or AI, but people and AI, right? So that's a really important piece. How do we maintain that transparency and that trust so that you get the real input and experimentation so that you can grow and learn?
12:15
Given how much is facing us right now, why did you think it's still important to come out to events like Work Human? I think you want to hear. I heard someone recently say, we're at the end of the beginning, which is a good way of saying it, right? Yeah. But when you talk to people, everyone's in a slightly different stage. It doesn't matter whether, so I get to talk to a lot of people, hear a lot of people now, different industries, different labor groups, whether it's skilled labor, hourly frontline team members or managers and what's working for them? What are they experiencing? So that's really important when you come to a venue like this. They also have some top notch researchers that are actually putting the facts behind some of this. There's a lot of anecdotes out there, so it's kind of being, make sure you get settled on what's really happening versus what the headlines are saying. Because I think some of that narrative, whether it's AI washing or other things, might be a little artificial, if that's appropriate to say.
13:08
No, no, we're seeing it. We're seeing it. I'm going to let you get back to the event. I appreciate you sticking with me. Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed this.
Raúl J. Valentín, EVP & Chief Human Resources Officer at ABM Industries.