Beyond the Known. Notes from Zagreb.

Louise is not a coach. But last week she was in a room with 200 of them at the EMCC Global Annual Conference 2026 in Zagreb. The theme was “Beyond the Known: Ways of Being, Becoming and Leading.” The kind of title you suspect was written by a committee and then meant by every speaker on stage.

Louise co-hosted a 90 minute AI Lab with Ozlem Sarioglu, who leads EMCC’s Centre for Excellence on Digital and AI. Over 100 executive and leadership coaches in the room. When she asked who was already using AI in their practice, almost every hand went up. This is not the room from a year ago.

Alongside the AI Lab, three keynotes stayed with us. Prof David Clutterbuck unveiled his AI avatar live on stage, trained on his own books and in his own voice. A founder of the field in conversation with a version of himself that does not sleep. The IP and legacy question every founder of a discipline will face next: whose voice, whose books, on whose terms. Prof Akihiko Morita made a passionate plea about partnering with AI and walking into the unknown anyway. Dr Lisa Lewis told the room to stop assuming the older generation lacks the appetite for it.

Underneath every keynote was the same thread. One of the speakers put it like this.

Augmentation is becoming the preferred way of being for coaches. Not because AI replaces what mattered. Because it makes more room for what does. Presence. Attention. Dialogue. Sense-making. The capacity to sit with ambiguity without rushing to collapse it.

While Louise was on stage at the EMCC AI Lab in Zagreb, Nick was building what comes next. Two new events for coaches, both shaped around one arc: from AI curiosity to AI confidence.

A free discovery call is where curiosity gets a first answer, with a look at what AI-augmented practice actually looks like in your own day. A paid three-day masterclass starting in June, in partnership with Judit Ábri von Bartheld, ICF MCC assessor and founder of the BCC community, is where confidence gets built.

Both formats are run with our full team in the room. Deep AI and advanced agentic AI knowledge to handle any question coaches bring. Laura on the privacy and data side, which is also part of the masterclass curriculum.

We would love to see you there. And if you have already joined us, share the events page with a coach in your network who would benefit. The discovery call is free. The masterclass is priced to be accessible. We do it this way because we care about coaches landing on proper AI understanding, not paying excessive fees for generic courses.

Next week Nick and Louise are at the Panathenea Festival in Athens. The speaking window had closed by the time we asked, so we are showing up the other way. Visually. On t-shirts. With a landing page.

The campaign is called Still Human. The audience is founders and operators surrounded by AI tools, who increasingly want to know what stays human about leadership. Our answer is coaches. That is who we are promoting in Athens.

This is a sneak preview, just for you. By the end of this week, the full Still Human campaign goes live with videos from three of our coaches and their calendar links. Please do not share it yet. We wanted you to see it first.

If you are in Athens next week, come find us in person.

This campaign is the first move to test a new direction for CoachNova: making our coaches visible to the people who need them, and helping them grow their practice. More on this in the issues ahead.

Rainer von Leoprechting and Maha Alusi at People Spark AG published a thoughtful piece the day after the conference on coaching as relational presence. The line we love: “AI not as just another productivity tool to make us faster, but as a relational infrastructure for human conversations and learning.” Beautifully said, and very much aligned with our strategy.

We locked our brand tagline this month: Coaching that compounds. It captures what the coaches we build for actually do, session after session, client after client.