OVI is the AI-native ATS where you chat to hire. Two AI agents — Sora for sourcing and Milo for screening — find candidates, score every CV, and run AI interviews, all controlled from a single chat.

What does "chat to hire" mean?

Chat to hire is OVI's AI-native hiring workflow: instead of clicking through a traditional ATS, you describe what you need in chat and OVI's AI agents source candidates, screen applicants, run AI interviews, and send outreach for you.

What is an AI-native ATS?

An AI-native ATS is an applicant tracking system built around AI agents rather than forms and pipelines. OVI's AI chat ATS lets recruiters source, screen, interview, and follow up through conversation — the agents do the work and surface only the candidates worth meeting.

Who are Sora and Milo?

Sora is OVI's AI sourcing agent — she scans LinkedIn, the open web, and your ATS history to find best-fit candidates and reach out in your name. Milo is OVI's AI screening agent — he scores every applicant against your rubric and surfaces a ranked shortlist.

How do OVI's AI interviews work?

OVI runs async AI interviews for every shortlisted candidate and returns scores, transcripts, and recordings — so your team only meets the people worth meeting.

5x Less Likely to Leave: How Twilio Used BetterUp to Turn 8,000 Employees Into a Retention Engine

2026-06-19

When Twilio was scaling through hypergrowth, leadership faced a problem that no amount of hiring could solve: keeping the people they already had. With a workforce surpassing 8,000 employees and attrition threatening to outpace recruitment, the communications platform needed a retention strategy that could move as fast as the business itself.

Their answer was deploying BetterUp's Whole Person coaching to the entire organization — not just executives, not just high-potentials, but every single employee. The results redefined what enterprise coaching can deliver at scale.

The Problem: Hypergrowth Without a Retention Floor

Rapid scaling creates a paradox. The faster a company grows, the harder it becomes to retain the talent that made that growth possible. At Twilio, the challenge was structural: thousands of new hires joining simultaneously, managers stretched thin, and a culture under pressure to maintain cohesion amid constant change.

Traditional retention levers — compensation adjustments, engagement surveys, perk expansions — weren't enough. Twilio needed an intervention that could reach every employee individually, address the root causes of disengagement, and deliver measurable outcomes the C-suite could defend to the board.

The Solution: BetterUp Whole Person Coaching for 8,000+

Twilio rolled out BetterUp's Whole Person coaching model across its entire workforce of more than 8,000 employees. Rather than limiting professional development to a select tier, the company bet on universal access — giving every employee a dedicated coach who could address career growth, well-being, resilience, and leadership development in a single engagement model (Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study).

The approach was deliberately holistic. Coaching sessions targeted double-digit improvements across strategic planning, focus, self-compassion, and overall well-being — the behavioral building blocks that drive sustained performance, not just short-term productivity spikes (Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study).

The Results: Retention and Performance, Quantified

The outcomes were unambiguous:

5x lower attrition: Coached employees were five times less likely to leave Twilio compared to their non-coached peers (Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study).
6.75x higher retention for managers and executives: The effect was even more pronounced among leadership — the employees whose departure is most costly and disruptive (Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study).
32% more high-performance ratings: Coached employees were significantly more likely to receive top performance reviews, translating development investment directly into business output (Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study).

For HR leaders evaluating coaching ROI, BetterUp's broader benchmark data shows investing companies typically realize a 3.5x to 5x return on their coaching investment (Source: BetterUp ROI Page).

Equity Impact: Coaching as a DEI Accelerator

One of the most consequential findings from Twilio's deployment was the outsized impact on underrepresented employees. Among Black and LatinX coached employees:

4.6x more likely to stay at the company compared to non-coached peers
79% more likely to receive a promotion
30% more likely to receive high performance reviews

(Source: BetterUp Twilio Case Study)

These numbers move coaching from a "nice to have" into a measurable equity intervention. When organizations struggle to retain diverse talent — especially at senior levels — the Twilio data shows that universal coaching access can meaningfully close retention and advancement gaps without requiring separate DEI-specific programs.

The Scale Play: BetterUp Grow Makes the Playbook Accessible

The Twilio case study is the proof of concept. The next question is: can every company replicate these results?

BetterUp's answer arrived on January 21, 2025, with the launch of BetterUp Grow — an AI-only coaching product trained on more than four million coaching sessions and 17 million human behavior data points (Source: BetterUp Grow Press Release; Source: Training Industry).

Grow is not a chatbot bolted onto a wellness app. It is a coaching product built on the methodology that delivered Twilio's results, now distilled into an AI experience validated through rigorous testing:

In a randomized controlled trial, BetterUp Grow outperformed ChatGPT on every behavior change measure (Source: Inc.).
95% customer satisfaction among users (Source: Inc.).
16% increase in confidence post-use, measured across participants (Source: Inc.).

For HR leaders, this changes the economics entirely. What Twilio achieved with human coaches across 8,000 employees is now replicable at a fraction of the per-employee cost. BetterUp Grow democratizes enterprise-proven coaching — companies that could never justify the budget for universal human coaching can now deploy AI coaching with the same behavioral science foundation.

The Takeaway for HR Leaders

Twilio's deployment is one of the most comprehensively measured enterprise coaching programs on record. The data is clear: universal coaching access drives retention (5x), leadership stability (6.75x), performance (32% uplift), and equity outcomes (4.6x retention for Black and LatinX employees) — all simultaneously.

With BetterUp Grow, the barrier is no longer budget or scale. The question for HR leaders in 2026 is no longer whether coaching works, but how quickly they can deploy it across the workforce before attrition costs them the talent they cannot afford to replace.

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