From a cold message to Zagreb. In three weeks.

Most organizations buying AI in coaching are making the same mistake. Senior executives get a human coach. Everyone else gets a chatbot. They call it democratizing coaching. But substituting a chatbot for a coach is not democratization. It is substitution dressed up as access. The people who could benefit most from a real coaching relationship are the ones most likely to be handed an AI and told that counts.

I went looking for the people already thinking about this differently. In February, I sent a message to Erwin van 't Land, the newly appointed Chair of EMCC Global. He was deep in his first 100 days. I was aware of that.

I sent it anyway.

We are both Dutch. And we have both spent a considerable part of our adult lives outside of the Netherlands. I suspected that would make for an easy starting point. It did.

What I did not expect was how much space he made for the conversation. Not a quick call to say he had responded. A real exchange. Open, curious, unhurried. That is not nothing when someone has just stepped into one of the more visible roles in professional coaching globally. It is the kind of generosity that stands out.

We talked about AI and where it is moving into the coaching space. At the end of that conversation, Erwin told me I should talk to Araceli Canedo Bebbington, who leads thought leadership at EMCC Global, and Ozlem Sarioglu, who within that group focuses specifically on the impact of digital and AI in coaching.

A week later, I had a conversation with both of them. He was right.

The following week, Ozlem and I went deep. A proper deep dive on AI in coaching, and one insight from that conversation has stayed with me:

"Organizations aren't just buying coaching conversations. They're buying the entire digital coaching ecosystem around them."

Ozlem has been a professional coach since 2007. She co-founded SparkUs, a platform that combines AI-assisted self-reflective coaching with human interaction to help organizations scale coaching across their workforce. She was one of six ICF Young Leader Award honorees in 2019, and volunteers in the development team at EMCC Global. She does not talk about AI in coaching as a future possibility. She talks about it as a market she has been building and watching for nearly two decades.

The week after our third call, I received an invitation to host the AI Lab together with Ozlem at the EMCC Global annual offsite in Zagreb, from the 11th to the 13th of May. The AI Lab is a hands-on session for coaches and the organisations that hire them, working through what AI in coaching actually means in practice.

I said yes before I had finished reading the message.

Three weeks. From a first call with a newly appointed Chair in his first 100 days to an invitation to contribute to their annual conference. I feel genuinely honoured. And welcomed in a way I did not take for granted.

I have since been onboarded into the organisation of the event, and I have to say: what a group. Thoughtful, well structured, warm. The kind of people who take what they do seriously and also make you feel genuinely welcome from day one.

This is what I keep coming back to. One message sent during someone's busy first 100 days. A real conversation. Names shared generously. A follow-up call. Then another. Then an invitation.

If you will be in Zagreb for the EMCC Global annual meeting in May, do come and say hello.