Still Human. After Athens.

In 566 BC, the original Panathēnea gathered athletes, poets and artists in honour of Athena. Last week the modern version gathered ten thousand people at the Zappeion in Athens. Eight hundred founders, investors, artists, scientists and policy people. The room currently writing what AI does next.

Nick and I walked it for three days wearing the Still Human t-shirts. CHATGPT IS NOT A COACH on the back. A QR code linking to a free thirty-minute conversation with a real coach. Three cities underneath: Cape Town, New York, London. Each city is a coach in our network. The point of being visible at Panathenea was making them visible.

Thank you to Joanna Lovering, Jayne Ruff, and Dr Roger Maitland, three of the progressive coaches working with CoachNova who co-created the Still Human campaign with us.

The Still Human campaign is for the startup founders building the next wave of companies, making sure they keep a real coach in the loop as the AI stack grows around them. Click here to watch their wonderful videos.

The reactions were the warmest we have had at any event. Founders stopping us on the staircase to ask what a real one looks like. Investors wanting to know what stays human when the rest of the stack is AI.

Panathenea put Greece on the map. The Still Human campaign put our coaches in front of the people building what comes next. We will be back.

Not every coaching session happens on a screen. Some of your best work is across a table, in a quiet corner of an office, on a walk in the park. For a long time those were the sessions that slipped through the cracks. The video calls got recorded and summarised. The in-person conversations left you scribbling notes from memory on the train home.

Nick wrote up the two simplest ways to bring an in-person session into CoachNova. Invite Nova to listen on loudspeaker between you and your client. Or upload the transcript from your own notetaker after the session. Either way, the write-up is waiting when you walk out of the room. You stay present. The capture happens in the background.

The debate in coaching right now tends to go one of two ways. Either AI is the great democratiser (scalable, always-on, affordable), or it’s a pale imitation of something that is, by its very nature, human. The evidence, it turns out, is more interesting than either position.

Jayne Ruff, one of the coaches walking the Still Human campaign with us in Athens, makes that case in her LinkedIn piece this week. She pulls from RCTs and systematic reviews to land on a sharper version: not all AI coaching is equivalent, and what is under the hood matters.

Forty-five minutes with our early adopter coaches on Thursday 4 June. The room was engaged, generous, and very specific about what they wanted us to keep and what they wanted us to cut. What landed:

• A voice-first interface confirmed for the next product iteration. A private voice reflection layer on each client, stored in your knowledge garden, separate from client-facing notes.
• A clear steer to keep CoachNova focused on the core product, not turn it into a lead-generation platform. We are folding that into the roadmap, not pivoting the offering.
• The 10% referral fee is live now. Three years, on every coach you introduce, from their first paid invoice.
• A community stock option plan for the active members shaping the platform, including a mentoring role where experienced coaches help new joiners get to first value fast.

CoachNova has signed a strategic partnership with Judit Ábri von Bartheld, ICF MCC assessor and founder of the BCC community (2,200 coaches working towards or holding ICF credentials). We are very excited about it.

The first format we co-host together is the AI Lab Discovery. Sixty minutes, free, where curiosity gets a first answer with a look at what AI-augmented practice actually looks like in your own day.

If a coach in your network would benefit, please send them our way. After 10 June, the next discovery sessions run on Thursday 9 July, Thursday 13 August, and Thursday 3 September. All at 16:00 UK.