Meet Calvin, Lumenalta’s AI coach assistant
FEB. 11, 2025
2 Min Read
Meet Calvin: Lumenalta's AI coach revolutionizing developer growth through personalized, adaptive support.
Our vision embraces AI-powered coaching to unlock developers’ fullest potential through meaningful conversations. We don’t just teach technical skills—we foster a mindset of continuous growth and adaptability. By focusing on powerful communication and self-reflection, we empower developers to push beyond conventional boundaries and thrive in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape. This approach enables them to meet their commitments, discover new possibilities, and excel in ways they never imagined.
We believe that cultivating the right culture and developing coaching skills creates a foundation for self-determination—enabling individuals to pursue freedom in their choices, mastery in their craft, and purpose in their work. Through coaching conversations, people discover their own path to growth and excellence.
However, traditional person-to-person coaching has limitations. It’s challenging to scale personalized guidance across an organization, and coaches can't be present for every critical moment when their insight would be valuable. Without consistent, timely feedback, behavioral change often progresses slowly.
That’s why we built Calvin, our AI coach. Built in Slack, it provides personalized support for developers, offering coding help, goal tracking, and career development advice. Calvin doesn’t replace human coaches—instead, it complements their work by providing immediate, accessible guidance whenever needed. By combining AI technology with our coaching frameworks, we’re creating a more responsive way to support our team.
What’s an example of using an AI coach?
Most people don’t like being told how to change. That’s why Calvin starts with a weekly check-in. It asks developers about their week: What was challenging? What went well?
Calvin helps developers:
- Log their weekly accomplishments
- Track progress against performance goals
- Share insights with team managers
- Discover new learning opportunities
It enables users to create a log of their accomplishments for the week and track them against their performance goals, keeping our culture coaches updated on each developer’s progress. Calvin also shares new content periodically, with compelling thoughts with room for discussion. The developer’s feedback is then sent to management.
How do you scale this kind of coaching?
With 50-100 developers on deck at any given time, our human coaches can’t have fruitful 1-2-hour conversations with each one on a regular basis.
We’ve trained Calvin using our existing content, frameworks, books, and courses so our developers can have conversations backed by consistent, personalized guidance. Much of our courses and materials are linked to understanding our moods and our narratives. Two ways we do this are enneagrams and gamification.
Enneagrams categorize users into major personality types. They help developers:
- Understand their distinct ways of viewing the world and their blind spots
- Interpret why they react in certain ways in different situations and recognize when they’re falling into unproductive patterns
- Discover appropriate solutions and how to improve
Gamification evaluates how a user behaves in certain situations. Users learn:
- How assumptions drive actions.
- How, through adjusting assumptions, developers might find a better approach for coordinating their commitments with others.
- How they can create trust by demonstrating that they care about the concerns of others.
What are the business outcomes?
The future of high-performance teams isn’t about replacing human expertise but amplifying it through intelligent, adaptive coaching technologies.
By integrating AI coaching, we've improved:
- Developer productivity
- Onboarding speed
- Team communication
- Professional development
Calvin represents more than an innovative tool—it’s a strategic approach to talent development that directly translates to competitive advantage. By combining AI-driven insights with personalized coaching, we've created a scalable, continuous personal and professional development model that aligns individual potential with organizational objectives.
