From Classroom to Client: Inside a Real AI Change Project with Aon
Imagine spending a term not on a hypothetical case study, but on a live project for a Fortune 500 company — presenting your team’s insights directly to executives, then watching your prototype shape how that company rolls out AI coaching to thousands of employees. That’s exactly what happened for students in Northwestern’s Leading AI-Powered Organizational Change and Designing for Organizational Effectiveness certificates, who partnered with global professional services firm Aon to help build a company-wide coaching culture powered by AI.
Three Aon leaders — Lucy Gee (MSLOC ’12), North America Training and Development Leader, Megan Schuette (MSLOC ’19), Global Performance and Talent Management Lead, and Tina Ruredzo, Global Talent Development Lead — partnered with students completing “Designing Solutions for Organizational Effectiveness,” a capstone-style course co-taught by Ryan Smerek and Kim Bayma in Northwestern’s M.S. in Learning and Organizational Change (MSLOC) program.
A Real Business Challenge, Not a Case Study
Aon was already investing in its internal coaching capability. The open question was how to scale it — using AI coaching to reach every colleague — without losing the trust and connection that make coaching work in the first place. Student teams spent the term exploring change management and readiness for AI and human coaching, guided by questions such as:
- How might we build comfort and trust with an AI coach?
- What behaviors need to shift for colleagues and leaders to embrace coaching?
- Where does AI coaching add the most value — and where is a human coach still essential?
- What does a strong coaching culture look like in day-to-day behavior?
From Discovery to Prototype
Working with Aon employees across North America and globally, student teams conducted nineteen interviews spanning multiple levels of the organization. They then presented their work to Aon leaders three times — first sharing discovery and analysis insights in-person at Northwestern’s Evanston campus, then a suite of solution options, and finally a prototype paired with change management recommendations.
This progression follows the MSLOC Design Methodology, the program’s core approach to developing organizational change solutions. At its simplest, student teams move through three phases: discovery, ideation, and prototyping — the same cycle they’ll use to lead change in their own organizations after graduation.
AI as a Teammate, Not Just a Topic
Fittingly for a project about AI coaching, students didn’t just study AI — they worked alongside it. Throughout the project, teams used AI as a “teammate,” relying on it to help synthesize interview insights, generate additional solution options after co-creation sessions with their teams and the client, and build out more detailed prototypes to test with end users.
The Solutions
Client Conversation Coach: One team designed a tool to help employees prepare for high-pressure client conversations, including a feature to “build the room” by surfacing key stakeholder information ahead of time.
Conversation Catalyst: A second team built a prototype to help employees navigate sensitive and cross-cultural conversations, complete with a pilot plan for rolling it out across the organization.
As Lucy Gee (MSLOC ’12) at Aon states: “The project gave us the benefit of a fresh perspective and a team with the time to thoughtfully explore both the opportunities and barriers. Their ability to propose multiple options and iterate with us throughout the process helped broaden our thinking and strengthen the resulting solutions.”
Build This Kind of Experience for Yourself
Projects like this are part of Northwestern’s Leading AI-Powered Organizational Change and Designing for Organizational Effectiveness certificates — and they reflect the hands-on approach that runs through the entire M.S. in Learning and Organizational Change program. Students complete the certificates having already led a real organizational change initiative for a real employer, with a portfolio to show for it.
If you’re ready to design solutions like these for your own organization, explore the MSLOC certificates or learn more about applying to the full MSLOC program.