How To: Coach Alongside the Ambition Agent

Introducing our “How To” series, where each week we’ll be bringing you helpful “how to” coaching content from our in-house Ambition experts.

Coaching is the highest-value activity a frontline manager can do — and also the easiest to let slide when you’re juggling pipeline reviews, forecast calls, and your own quota. Ambition's Agent is built to close that gap. It sits inside the platform, surfaces the trends and risks you'd otherwise have to dig for, and turns "I should really prep for this 1:1" into a two-minute task.

Here's how to actually use it, step by step.

Why coach alongside an AI assistant?

Most of the time a coaching 1:1 goes sideways for one reason: the manager walked in without a clear read on what actually needs to be discussed. Pulling that read together manually means jumping between a goals dashboard, an activity report, and a pipeline view — and by the time it's assembled, the 1:1 is already starting.

The Ambition Agent shortens that path. It lives inside the platform rather than in a separate tool, it answers in plain language rather than a raw export, and it's built around the same categories a coaching conversation actually touches: coaching history, goals, metrics, pipeline, and challenges. The result is that prep stops being the thing that gets skipped when the calendar is tight.

1. Access the Agent from anywhere in the platform

You don't need to leave the screen you're on to get a read on a rep, a goal, or a deal. Access the agent from the center of your homepage or by clicking the sparkle icon along your bottom navigation. Type your question — you've got up to 5,000 characters, so there's room to be specific — and submit it by hitting Enter or clicking the arrow button.

A quick tip on getting better answers: specific, two-part prompts outperform single, broad ones. "How is this rep tracking against goal" gets you a number. "How is this rep tracking against goal, and what's driving the gap" gets you something you can actually coach on. See our “5 Prompts and Best Practices for Using Ambition’s AI Assistant” blog post for more tips. 

2. Build your pre-read before the 1:1 even starts

This is where managers will get the most immediate value. Before a coaching session, open your session's AI Pre-Read, or ask the Agent directly to summarize the rep's recent performance. Either way, you can surface coaching themes, session effectiveness trends, and even a 90-day summary without digging through separate reports. Take two minutes to note one or two data points that stand out before you walk into the conversation.

Instead of spending 20 minutes pulling numbers from three different reports, you're spending two minutes reading a summary that's already been pulled together for you.

3. Ask it about coaching themes and effectiveness, not just numbers

The Agent's coaching category goes beyond raw metrics. Ask it what patterns show up across a rep's recent sessions, whether a particular coaching approach is landing, or what a 90-day view of a rep's development looks like. These are the qualitative questions that are hardest to answer from a dashboard alone, and they're exactly what the Agent is designed to help surface.

4. Let it do the digging on goals, metrics, and pipeline too

Coaching conversations don't happen in a vacuum. They're grounded in whether someone is pacing toward their number, whether their activity is trending up or down, and what's actually sitting in their pipeline. Here are examples of what to ask the Agent directly:

• Goals: Is this rep pacing toward attainment, and where's the risk?
• Metrics: What's improved recently, and who are the top performers to point to as examples?
• Pipeline: What does this rep's pipeline look like, and how does it roll up for the team?
• Challenges: How's a given competition tracking, and is it actually driving the behavior it was designed for?

Two-part prompts tend to work best for anything that spans more than one of these — for example, asking about pacing and the activities driving it in the same question.

5. Turn what you learn into action items with owners and dates

A good pre-read is only useful if it changes what happens in the room. Before you close out any coaching session, create at least one action item with a specific owner and a due date. This is the step that turns an insight from the Agent into actual behavior change, and it's what makes the next session's pre-read meaningfully different from this one's.

6. Use it for more than the one-off 1:1

The Agent isn't only a prep tool for a single conversation — it fits into the bigger coaching structure inside Ambition:

• Agenda items are used to build conversations in one-on-one Sessions, Group Sessions, Programs, Cadences, and coaching Templates. Try out the metric snapshot agenda item.
• Action items help you assign measurable follow-up tasks tied to a coaching Program or Session so employees know what to complete. 
• Private notes let you document what you observed after the session, building a record the Agent (and you) can draw on next time.
• Skills are preconfigured AI prompts that allow the Agent to do in-depth search and analysis quickly and provide a consistent, high-quality outcome. 

Used together, the Agent stops being a one-off lookup tool and becomes part of how coaching runs on your team every week.

The takeaway

Coaching alongside the Agent doesn't change what good coaching looks like: consistent 1:1s, clear action items, real follow-through. What it changes is how much manual digging stands between a manager and that conversation. Two minutes with the Agent before a session can replace twenty minutes of pulling reports, which means more managers actually do the prep instead of skipping it.