SEATTLE and ORLANDO, Fla. — Oct. 26, 2026 — Chronus, a leader in enterprise mentoring, today entered the AI coaching market with the launch of Rumi by Chronus, a platform that brings together AI-powered coaching and human-led mentoring to accelerate workforce readiness.

Rumi by Chronus includes two offerings: Rumi Coach, the company’s first AI coaching product, and Rumi Mentor, its proven mentoring solution with AI-powered matching and guided conversations that keep relationships on track. Rumi Coach launches with Roleplays, which lets employees practice important conversations with an AI partner.

What’s New

• Coaching and mentoring in one platform: Organizations can offer on-demand AI coaching and mentoring from experienced colleagues in one place, with Rumi recommending a mentor when an employee would benefit from one.
• AI practice for high-stakes conversations: Employees can practice by voice or text across 30 ready-to-use scenarios or with custom scenarios built by their organization and receive a readiness level after each attempt.
• AI coaching grounded in organizational context: Unlike generic AI chatbots, Rumi Coach draws on the context each organization chooses to share, from roles and skills to goals and career paths.
• Readiness insights for talent teams: Administrators can see readiness across teams, measured against the organization’s own criteria, to know where people are strong and where to invest.

Why It Matters

Organizations are under constant pressure to keep their people prepared for rapid change. A World Economic Forum survey found that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to transform or become outdated by 2030. Traditional yearlong training programs can no longer keep pace. Coaching builds adaptability, but its cost has long limited it to senior leaders. Rumi by Chronus closes that gap by making AI coaching available to every employee, alongside mentoring from colleagues who know the business.

“At the pace work is changing, development can’t happen on a schedule anymore. Employees need coaching in the flow of work, but they still need a human mentor for the judgment and lived experience that AI can’t replace. With Rumi, we’re bringing together the best of both,” said Ankur Ahlowalia, CEO of Chronus.

What Sets Rumi Coach Apart

General-purpose AI tools can answer questions, but they don’t know the company an employee works for or what drives the person asking. Rumi Coach knows both. Each customer decides what organizational context the AI can use, from roles and skills to goals and career paths, and Chronus’s proprietary Purpose Assessment uncovers what motivates each employee: why they work, who they want to impact and how they solve problems. Rumi Coach brings these together with what two decades of enterprise mentoring have taught Chronus about which skills matter most and how people build them. The result is coaching that fits both the person and the company, and employees can choose to share what they’ve worked on with their manager, mentor or coach, so their next conversation picks up where the AI left off.

Rumi Coach: Roleplays Key Features

Every Roleplays scenario is based on a real workplace situation. Key features include:

• Realistic conversation partner: Employees rehearse high-stakes moments, from pushing back on an out-of-scope stakeholder request to giving difficult feedback to a direct report. Rumi Coach responds the way a manager, colleague or customer would. Employees can practice by voice or text.
• Feedback that measures readiness: Employees receive a readiness level and feedback on whether they applied the right approach, based on frameworks the organization already trains on, such as Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) or Goal-Reality-Options-Will (GROW). They also get tips on delivery, such as pacing and filler words, and can track their progress over time.
• A scenario library built for the business: Administrators can edit the ready-made scenarios, add their own and decide which ones employees can access.
• Guardrails and privacy by design: Administrators choose which profile information the AI can use. Results stay private to the employee unless they decide to share them; no audio is stored; and administrators see only aggregate insights, never individual transcripts or readiness levels.