Avery Dennison Achieves 78.7% Consistent Activation and Daily AI Coach Engagement as Early Adopter
- 78.7% of eligible managers consistently active with nudges
- 70% average nudge view rate in first six weeks
- Daily AI Coach interactions since launch, with 65.6% returning for second conversations within the first month
When CEOs talk about cultural compatibility during mergers, it can often be overstated. There are invariably going to be differences in cultures, regardless of similarity.
What Was the Opportunity?
Avery Dennison sought to close the gap between collecting employee feedback and driving meaningful action at the manager level. With a global workforce spanning 50+ countries and diverse business units, the organization needed a scalable approach that could provide personalized guidance to people managers based on their specific team dynamics — ideally without overwhelming HR with manual intervention for each of the company's hundreds of managers who are responsible for survey action plans.
As an early adopter of Perceptyx's AI-powered activation capabilities, Avery Dennison aimed to test whether technology-enabled nudging and coaching could create sustained behavioral change rather than one-time engagement spikes.
What Was the Solution?
Avery Dennison deployed Activate with two integrated components:
AI-assisted action planning supported over 600 people managers with personalized action plans generated from their team's survey feedback. Rather than receiving generic recommendations, each manager received targeted guidance based on what their specific team reported, thus making the path from data to action concrete and relevant.
Nudges reached over 600 people managers with ongoing behavioral prompts aligned to organizational focus areas, including Change Management and Career Growth.
The AI Coach provided on-demand conversational support, allowing managers to explore development topics and receive personalized guidance.
What Was the Impact?
As an early adopter, Avery Dennison's results demonstrate that AI-powered activation can generate sustained engagement rather than novelty-driven initial interest that fades over time.
Strong consistent activation. 78.7% of eligible users remained consistently active with nudges — a participation level that indicates the content resonates with daily work rather than feeling like an additional burden.
High early engagement. An average of 70% of nudges were viewed during the first six weeks of the program, establishing strong engagement patterns from launch.
Daily AI Coach usage. People managers have interacted with the AI Coach nearly every day since launch, suggesting it has become an integrated part of how people seek development support rather than a tool they tried once and abandoned.
Repeat coaching conversations. 65.6% of AI Coach users returned for a second conversation within the first month, indicating the experience delivered enough value to prompt continued use.
For a global organization with 35,000 employees, these early adoption results indicate that AI-assisted activation can scale personalized manager support without proportionally scaling HR resources.
By employing a listening strategy and leveraging a platform that gives you objective data, it’s invaluable to informing your people strategy,” says Miller.
The Impact
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The employee listening strategy delivered significant benefits:
Discovery of Engagement Hotspots: The data revealed previously unanticipated issues across different business units that leadership had assumed would be more insulated from M&A activity. “We thought our people challenges, such as retention, were only in our wholesale banks, but the reality is they were in our frontline and branches as well,” notes Miller. This insight allowed for more targeted action planning and interventions.
Identification of Cultural Misalignments: The surveys exposed important differences in how each organization interpreted the bank’s core values. While both banks considered themselves people-centric, their practical approaches differed significantly. “[Some of the people from American National Bank] perceived us to be more process-oriented... they really didn’t understand why we had all these ‘hoops’ to jump through,” explains Miller. “They saw that as an example of, ‘Hey, we can be flexible and nimble when we need to service a customer.’ But for us, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really risky proposition.’ We leveraged the data and insights to then go and have conversations with those leaders and action plan around it.” Subsequent surveying showed that this “values gap” had indeed narrowed.
Acceleration of Technology Investments: Insights from the survey revealed significant technology gaps that negatively impacted productivity and employee experience. For example, American National Bank, the acquired institution, had implemented innovative tools like DocuSign to streamline loan administration. However, these capabilities were lost during the transition to Atlantic Union Bank, creating frustration among employees. “For your job to be easy, and then to come to Atlantic Union Bank and have the thing that makes it easy go away... that degrades the experience all the more,” explains Miller. This degradation in the employee experience also risked reduced productivity and retention.
Recognizing this as an acute pain point, Atlantic Union Bank acted swiftly. They worked cross-functionally with their technology and operations teams to reprioritize the DocuSign project within their existing roadmap. This decision was driven by the understanding that reinstating such tools was essential for retaining talent and improving engagement. The initiative had a meaningful impact on teammate work experience, engagement, and retention. “The most powerful thing we heard is, ‘You listened. You leveraged this information and did something with it. That reaffirmed the commitment to the combined organization and retention in the long term,’” says Miller.
Expansion of Leadership Visibility: Listening data showed that new markets without an existing Atlantic Union leadership presence struggled more during the transition. “It felt like the blind were leading the blind,” says Miller. This led to a strategic change in their integration approach, ensuring the physical presence and accessibility of legacy leadership in new markets.
Lessons for the Future
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The insights gained have now become part of Atlantic Union Bank’s M&A playbook, directly informing their approach to future growth. “The lessons learned from our listening strategy have literally been written into our playbook for future state M&A,” Miller explains.
The impact extends beyond immediate integration concerns. The data now informs executive goal-setting and accountability measures as well, with leaders being evaluated on their contribution to successful integration outcomes. “Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.”
Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.
Looking ahead, Atlantic Union Bank continues to refine its employee listening strategy, particularly as it manages the challenges of back-to-back acquisitions. “Merger fatigue is real,” acknowledges Miller. “We have to prioritize our investment in time to ensure that we are not losing momentum around teammate engagement and actioning on the insights we had, amid a lot of different distractions. In the instance of back-to-back mergers, we have to be mindful of the future integration but also continue attending to the teammates who have joined in the not-so-distant past.”
Objective data has been instrumental in helping the company interpret feedback and insights, explains Miller: “It is imperative to run pulse surveys during a merger and respond to that data before going into the next merger.” This approach provides valuable lessons learned as they prepare for their next acquisition. Another focus area for Atlantic Union Bank moving forward is leveraging features that support action planning: “[Perceptyx has] made [action planning] so easy, it’s so seamless.”