By: Natalie Johnson
“This is just who I am. I just blow up, and then I apologize.”
Mariana Merritt, CSO and co-founder of NuriEdge, uses that line to describe how people talk about habits they assume are fixed. Her answer: “You don’t have to.”
The harder question is when someone gets the chance to hear that. Many organizations wait to offer serious coaching until a person reaches the executive level, after years of handling conflict, feedback, and pressure in whatever way they worked out on their own.
Merritt’s co-founder, Lacey Mathews, NuriEdge’s CEO, has spent more than 18 years building products across three ventures, and she sees that timing as backward. Coaching has historically been too expensive to offer people at earlier stages of their careers, she notes, so companies reserve it for executives who have already spent years building habits, some of them bad ones. The easier window for building positive habits comes much earlier, before the bad ones become a problem.
For learning and development leaders, that timing has a cost. A new manager facing a first difficult performance conversation, or an individual contributor learning to push back on an unrealistic deadline, is forming patterns they may carry for years, often without anyone to rehearse with. Workshops and leadership programs reach those people, but they happen at a fixed point in time and compete with the workday the moment they end. “You get back to your desk, and you’re like, OK, now I’m back to my job,” Mathews says.
Their AI coaching platform is designed to give those people the kind of practice once reserved for executives, available to every member of a team, leaders and individual contributors alike, at the moment they need it.
Turning a Program Into Daily Practice
NuriEdge draws on a broad library of coaching strategies and methodologies, including approaches from behavioral psychology. Organizations and coaches can also upload their own material, so sessions reference the frameworks a team is already learning.
“If you have your team working on something, you can load that into the system, and the coach will keep that content and that concept going,” Mathews says.
The second piece is structure. A leader, program administrator, or coach can schedule practice sessions directly into a person’s calendar, along with a short description of what to work on. When the person starts the session, the platform opens the conversation around that assignment. Mathews describes how a coach might map out a sequence: “week one, practice this, Week two, practice that.” Each session ends with a summary of key insights, takeaways, and action items to carry into the next conversation.
For an L&D team, that changes what a program can look like. A workshop on giving feedback no longer has to end when the room empties. It can continue as a series of short, individual practice sessions, each shaped by the organization’s own material and by what that particular person is working on. Some coaches are exploring the platform for the same purpose, giving clients a place to practice between sessions instead of waiting two weeks to pick up where they left off.
Personal Means Remembering the Person
Scale usually forces sameness. A module delivered to an entire workforce has to work for everyone, which means it cannot account for the manager who avoids conflict or the one who escalates too quickly. The platform keeps a memory of past sessions, which lets it point out patterns over time, the kind of insight people often associate with working alongside an executive coach.
Merritt, a social worker by training, has spent more than 15 years observing how leaders, individual contributors, and organizations navigate the gap between theories of change and the realities of changing behavior. She sees awareness as the starting point for meaningful growth. “Nuri helps bring awareness, which then I think gives people the opportunity to work on things that are otherwise unexamined,” she says. The patterns people carry on autopilot are exactly the ones a single workshop rarely reaches.
The guidance is grounded in the science of nervous system regulation, which Merritt describes as what separates NuriEdge’s coaching from good ideas or common sayings. In practice, much of it is brief. People can talk or type, and the platform leans on short micro-practices that help someone settle and refocus before the next meeting, since few people have room for a long exploration in the middle of a workday. Merritt wants support that is “not only on demand, but immediately empowering and immediately actionable.”
Why Privacy Is a Condition for Scale
Once development reaches an entire workforce, organizations naturally want to measure it, and measurement can quietly undermine the honesty that makes coaching work. If people believe their manager is reading along, they rehearse the version of themselves they want the company to see.
NuriEdge addresses that by keeping sessions private by design. Leaders and administrators see progress, such as the goals people are working toward and how often they practice, so a manager might see that a goal of staying calm in conflict was practiced five times. They never see what was said in the sessions themselves.
Mathews explains the reasoning in terms of what happens without that protection. “It will just be a front if they’re trying to remain impressive, which could be the whole reason they need Nuri in the first place,” she says. Merritt puts the principle more directly: on the platform, “your growth will never be weaponized against you.”
For L&D leaders, that design choice may matter as much as any feature, because progress data means little if people were performing for it.
Why Coaching Should Start Sooner
Timing and privacy turn out to be connected. Someone early in a career, still working out how they handle a hard conversation, needs a place to practice that will not follow them into a performance review. That is the kind of space NuriEdge has built: personal enough to change a habit, and private enough that people will practice honestly.
The real test of any development program is what people do weeks later, in a conversation no facilitator will see, and the habits that shape that conversation are easiest to build early. If the support once reserved for executives can reach people at every level, shaped by an organization’s own content and available in the minutes before that conversation, the question for L&D leaders becomes how quickly they can put it in everyone’s hands.
More information about the platform is available at nuriedge.ai.
