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Josh Blair

Impro’s platform enables executives, leaders and all employees to manage with clarity through an integrated and data-driven coaching, mentoring and consulting solution. Managers and employees adopt new work habits using Impro’s 5 minute per day, micro-coaching app while executives optimize their company’s overall performance by leveraging the organization-wide insights provided by the Impro platform.

Tell us about yourself?

Josh Blair and Opher Brayer
Impro.ai founders Josh Blair (left) and Opher Brayer (right)

I worked at TELUS for a great 25 years through 2019, starting out as an engineer and growing into various leadership roles such as General Manager – Technology & Service Development, Chief Learning Officer, Chief Corporate Officer and finally, Group President overseeing TELUS International, TELUS Health, TELUS Agriculture, TELUS Business Solutions and TELUS Ventures. As a person seeking continuous growth and new challenges, I wanted to do something quite different after reaching the quarter century milestone with TELUS, and I thus took a leap of faith and left my day job (while staying connected to this day as the Vice Chair of TELUS International). In 2020, I met my co-founders in Impro, Maya Liberman and Opher Brayer. Together, we envisioned a future where all employees at all levels could be supported by a performance coach – just like athletes experience – and by January 2021, we commercially launched Impro.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Don’t buy into hype/bubbles, always build a sustainable business – and we are doing this with Impro!

What problem does your business solve?

We provide executives, managers and professionals with clarity so that they can manage better. We provide team-wide consulting insights to executives that enable them to optimize the performance of their entire company or division. And through our micro-coaching, we help managers and professionals to develop new habits, strengths and power skills that take their careers to the next level.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

We foresee AI disrupting countless businesses and displacing millions of employees. Our purpose is to enable individuals and organizations to re-tool and adapt in an easier, faster and continuous manner.

What is your magic sauce?

Our human-led, AI-augmented micro-coaching enables managers and professionals to truly develop new habits, strengths and power skills. I have never seen any other solution that can consistently do this. We can do it thanks to the methodology and data science we deploy through Opher Brayer’s leadership (perhaps the world’s best methodologies, in my humble opinion) and thanks to the intuitive platform and user experience we offer through Maya Liberman’s leadership (our do-it-all COO).

Additionally, our methodologies and data science also enable us to help executives with actionable insights about their entire team. This consulting we provide enables them to amplify team-wide strengths, remediate team-wide weaknesses and address team-wide misalignments. In this regard our system and approach are unique in that we offer an integrated and data-driven coaching, mentoring and consulting solution.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We intend to help thousands of organizations and millions of individuals by providing them with the clarity they need to continuously elevate their performance in the hyper-changing world we all now live in.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Because our solutions are ground-breaking, we need to find business leaders who are innovative and who desire new competitive edges. When we find these business leaders, it is amazing what they and their teams can achieve with Impro’s help.

How can people get involved?

If you are a business leader looking to leverage an innovative approach to grow both your employees’ and your company’s performance, contact us at hello@impro.ai or visit our website at www.impro.ai.