If you’re buying AI coaching for your company, you’ll notice that almost every vendor now shows a Slack logo and a Microsoft Teams logo somewhere on its site. Nine of the twelve products in the table below mention both. The trouble is that the logo tells you very little. For one vendor it means a reminder that your coaching session starts in ten minutes. For another it means a coach that holds a full conversation with you inside the chat. That coach can also run a practice round of a difficult conversation and follow up later on how it went. Those are very different things to pay for, and the logo looks the same either way.
So this post goes through what each vendor says its coach actually does in Slack and in Teams. It also covers a second question that gets far less attention than it should, which is what the coach draws on to know about you. Some coaches read your calendar or your meetings, and one vendor lists your messages. Others know only what you tell them. That difference decides how much your company has to look at and agree to before anyone gets coached.
I run Risely. We make Merlin, which is one of the products below. Everything I say about the other vendors comes from their own sites, and I’ve linked each source so you can check it yourself.
What does a Slack coaching integration actually mean?
When a vendor says it has a Slack or Teams integration, it can mean one of four quite different things. It’s worth having them clear before you look at the table, because the table uses the same four labels. Roughly from lightest to deepest:
- Reminders. The app tells you when something is coming up. That might be a coaching session or a class or a deadline. That’s useful, but no coaching happens in the chat. The coaching happens somewhere else.
- Nudges. The app sends you a tip or a prompt, such as a technique to try in your next one-on-one. It only goes one way. If you want to reply or ask a follow-up question, you have to go somewhere else to do it.
- Chat. You type a question and an AI coach answers in the same window. Now it’s a real conversation, and you never have to leave Slack or Teams to have it.
- Chat plus practice or follow-ups. The conversation includes structured work as well as answers. You might rehearse a hard conversation before it happens, with the coach playing the other person. Or the coach might check in a few days later on the thing you said you’d try.
No single product owns that last level. Several vendors in the table describe it on their own sites, and Merlin is one of them.
The biggest jump is from a nudge to a chat, and the easiest way to see it is length. A nudge is one message. A Merlin coaching conversation averages about 30 messages, according to Risely’s platform data. That back-and-forth is where the coaching actually happens, because it gives the coach room to ask what’s going on. The coach hears your answer and can then ask something sharper. It’s what we mean by AI coaching, as opposed to sending people content and hoping some of it lands.
One caution about the labels. Each one in the table follows what the vendor says on its own site. So a vendor shown as “Chat” may well do more than its site describes. If that matters to you, the demo is where you’d find out.
AI coaching in Slack and Teams: what each vendor does (October 2026)
The table lists twelve AI coaching products. For each one it shows what the vendor’s own site says the coach does in Slack and what it does in Teams. It also shows what the coach draws on to know about you and which pages that information came from.
A few things help when you read it. The Slack and Teams columns use the four levels above, so you can compare depth straight across a row. Where a cell says “Not mentioned on vendor’s site”, that doesn’t mean the product can’t do it. It means the site doesn’t say so, which makes it a good question for the sales call. Most buyers skip the “What it draws on” column. But I’d read it as carefully as the other two, for reasons I’ll come to further down.
AI coaching in Slack and Microsoft Teams, as described on each vendor’s own site, October 2026.
| Vendor | In Slack | In Teams | What it draws on | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Risely (Merlin), our product | Chat plus practice or follow-ups, and daily nudges | Chat plus practice or follow-ups, and daily nudges | Only conversations with Merlin | Merlin AI coach |
| 15Five Kona | Nudges: morning briefs and meeting summaries; chat not mentioned | Joins Teams meetings; chat not mentioned | Meeting transcripts and calendar | Kona for Managers, Kona Meeting Assistant, 15Five app for Slack |
| BetterUp | Chat, plus coach messages and reminders | Chat, plus coach messages and reminders | Your calendar and upcoming key meetings | BetterUp Fall 2025 release, BetterUp’s Slack listing, BetterUp Teams help article |
| Bravely | Chat (arrives in your workplace messaging) | Chat | Signals from your meetings, with permission | Bravely’s Bea page |
| Cloverleaf | Chat and nudges | Chat and nudges | Your calendar (who you’re meeting that day), HR-system data, assessments | Cloverleaf integrations and security, Cloverleaf in Slack |
| Coachello | Chat and booking | Chat plus practice or follow-ups (role-plays, follow-ups, booking) | Your company’s frameworks and values; optional meeting analysis from 1:1 transcripts | Coachello in Microsoft Teams, Coachello’s Slack listing, Coachello PMI case study |
| CoachHub | Not mentioned on vendor’s site | Chat plus practice or follow-ups (role-play) between human coaching sessions | Not mentioned on vendor’s site | CoachHub AI page |
| Ezra | Not mentioned on vendor’s site | Chat and nudges (announced June 2024; nothing newer found) | Your responses and feedback | Ezra’s Teams announcement |
| Hone | Chat plus practice or follow-ups (proactive check-ins) | Chat plus practice or follow-ups (proactive check-ins) | Your role, experience, personality type and company context; meetings, calendar and messages not mentioned | Hone release notes, Hone AI Coach announcement |
| Tenor | Named as available; no description found | Chat | Your profile (its Teams app listing says profile data only) | Tenor AI coaching page, Tenor’s Teams app listing |
| Torch | Reminders and a private discussion channel | Not mentioned on vendor’s site | Not mentioned on vendor’s site | Torch Slack help article |
| Valence | Named as a place its coach Nadia “shows up”; no description found | Chat | Calendar (May 2026 post); its Nadia 2.0 preview page also lists meetings and Teams/Slack messages and channels | Valence May 2026 post, Valence preview page, Valence’s Teams app listing |
We also looked at five other products. Rocky.ai and Marlee had no Slack or Teams description on their sites. Microsoft Copilot is built into Teams, but it is a general-purpose assistant rather than a workplace-skills program. The other two were Boon and MyTeamBuilder.
Three things stand out when you read across the rows.
First, not every vendor works in both. Torch’s site describes a Slack app and doesn’t mention Teams. CoachHub’s and Ezra’s sites describe a Microsoft Teams coaching app and don’t mention Slack. If your company runs on one of the two, that alone narrows the list.
Second, a vendor that does both didn’t always add the two at the same time. The two aren’t always described in the same detail either. Hone’s release notes put its AI coach in Slack in December 2025 and in Teams in March 2026, with proactive check-ins added to both in April 2026. Valence names Slack as a place its coach appears, but describes its Teams app in more detail. If your company is on the one a vendor says less about, ask to see the coach working there before you assume it’s the same.
Third, these pages change quickly. So treat any comparison as a snapshot, and that includes this one. BetterUp’s October 2025 release added AI coaching in Slack and Teams, while an older BetterUp Slack page still describes reminders before a session and replies to your coach. If you land on the older page, you’d come away with a very different idea of what BetterUp does in Slack. Hone also added both of its apps within the last year.
What Merlin does in Slack and Teams
Here’s what using Merlin looks like from the employee’s side.
Say a manager has a conversation coming up with someone on their team, and they’ve been putting it off. They open Merlin in Slack or Teams and say what’s on their mind, in their own words. Merlin doesn’t jump straight to advice. It asks questions first so that it understands the situation, and then it works through it with them.
If they want to rehearse, Merlin can play the other person in a practice round of that conversation. That lets the manager try out what they plan to say and see how it might land. All of this happens inside Slack or Teams. Nobody has to open another app or log in somewhere else.
The conversation ends on one specific thing to try. When they come back next time, Merlin picks up from there so they aren’t starting over.
Merlin also sends daily coaching nudges to the same place. Each nudge covers one skill and one technique, with one thing to try that day. Not everyone wants to be coached inside their chat app, and that’s fine. People who’d rather keep it separate can use the web app, and the nudges also go out by email.
There’s one thing Merlin doesn’t do, and it matters for the next section. We don’t read meetings, calendars, or messages. Only the conversations with Merlin are known to Merlin. Whatever Merlin knows about a situation is what the person chose to tell it.
You can see how Merlin coaches, or try a conversation with Merlin on a situation from your own week.
What does the coach draw on, and does it matter?
Every AI coach needs something to work from. The question is where that something comes from. What vendors say their coaches use falls into three kinds of material from your working day. A fourth group of coaches doesn’t describe using any of them.
The first is your calendar, meaning who you’re meeting and when. A coach that can see your calendar knows you have a one-on-one coming up and can offer help before it, without you having to mention it. BetterUp’s October 2025 release describes calendar-based coaching tied to upcoming key meetings. Cloverleaf connects Google or Microsoft calendars to give insights on who you’re meeting with that day. Valence’s May 2026 post says its coach Nadia already draws on Microsoft 365 calendar data.
The second is meeting content, which goes a step further. It isn’t just the fact that a meeting happened, but what was said in it. Bravely says its coach Bea picks up signals in every meeting and joins with permission. 15Five’s Kona processes meeting transcripts. Coachello offers optional meeting analysis, where a manager invites its AI agent to a 1:1 to get the transcript.
The third is messages, the conversations people have with each other in chat. Valence’s Nadia 2.0 preview page lists Teams and Slack messages and channels among the things its coach draws on.
That fourth group of coaches works from what you tell them and who you are. Ezra says its assistant learns from your responses and feedback. Hone uses your role and experience, plus your personality type and company context. Tenor’s Teams app listing says it uses profile data. None of those three says on its site that its coach draws on meetings, calendars or messages. CoachHub’s and Torch’s sites don’t say what their coaches draw on, so that’s a question to put to them directly. Merlin knows only the conversations people have with Merlin.
So why should this change how you buy? Because a coach that draws on your calendar, your meetings or your messages takes that material out of your own tools and into another company’s app. An ordinary week of meetings and chat holds performance conversations and pay discussions. It also holds customer details and things people said in confidence. Someone inside your company has to look at that and agree to it before a single employee gets coached. The more the coach reads, the more there is for them to weigh up. So the review gets bigger too.
A coach that knows only its own conversations is a smaller thing to review. What employees tell it is still personal, and you should still ask how it’s handled. But you aren’t also signing off on every meeting and every channel in the company.
It helps to keep the two questions apart in your head. The four levels at the top of this post tell you how much coaching happens inside the chat window. What the coach draws on tells you how much material leaves your own tools. A vendor can be deep on one and light on the other. The first question shapes how useful the coach is once it’s running. The second sets how long your internal review runs before the first coaching conversation can happen.
When a coach that draws on your calendar and meetings is the better buy
The data question doesn’t only cut one way. Drawing on work context gives a coach things Merlin doesn’t do, and for some teams those things are worth the bigger review.
Calendar context without typing it
Cloverleaf shows who you’re meeting with that day, and Valence’s coach draws on calendar data. That means a manager can get help with their next meeting without first explaining who’s in it. But a coach that only knows its own conversations needs the manager to set the scene first. Skipping that step makes a real difference to someone who opens the coach a few minutes before a meeting.
Coaching on what actually happened
Bravely’s coach picks up signals from your meetings with permission, and Kona sends summaries after the meetings it joins. So neither depends on what the person remembers or on how they choose to tell it.
That matters more than it might sound. Merlin will not notice something the person did not mention. Say a manager talks over people in every meeting and doesn’t know they do it. They won’t bring that to Merlin, because they don’t see it as a problem. But a coach that hears the meeting might catch it.
So if the gap you’re trying to close is one people can’t see in themselves, a coach that draws on meetings is the stronger choice. The same goes for a company that already runs tools that transcribe its meetings. That company has already decided it’s comfortable with meetings being recorded and processed, so adding one more tool is a smaller step than it would be for a company starting from scratch.
When coaching in chat is the wrong buy
This one applies to Merlin as much as anyone. Putting coaching inside Slack or Teams works because people already have them open all day, but for some teams that’s exactly the problem. Microsoft’s WorkLab report on the infinite workday draws on Microsoft 365 usage data. It found that the most-pinged fifth of employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours, or 275 times a day. It also found that the average worker receives 153 Teams messages per weekday. A coaching app in Teams adds to that count, however useful each message is. Merlin also runs on the web and by email. That may be where it belongs in a team that needs fewer interruptions.
Some teams actually need a human coach. An AI coach in Slack won’t meet that need, however good it is. We’ve set out where each one fits in our comparison of AI and human coaching.
How to test any of this in a demo
A table like this can only tell you what vendors say. A demo is where you see what they do, and you’ll learn far more if you bring a real situation instead of letting the vendor pick the example. Something like a direct report who keeps missing deadlines works well, because it’s common and a generic tip won’t solve it.
Ask the vendor to coach that situation in Slack while you watch, and then run the same conversation in Teams. You’ll see whether the Teams version is really the same product as the Slack one. You’ll also see whether the coach asks questions before it tells you what to do. Watch what it already seems to know about you before you’ve said anything, because that’s the quickest way to see the data question from earlier in practice. Our guide to evaluating AI coaching platforms covers the rest of a buying checklist.
If you want to run that test on Merlin, book a 30-minute demo and ask for exactly that. You can also try Merlin free with a situation from your own week. What each Risely plan includes is on our pricing page.
Vendor details checked on each vendor’s own site, 1 October 2026.