Quiet for six weeks, for a very good reason.

I hope you are rested and rejuvenated after the summer break.

This newsletter rested too. The team did not. We worked the summer like it was the dead of winter, and it shows. Here is the season, in order.

In May, at the EMCC global event, Professor David Clutterbuck proudly presented Ask David, an AI built on his life’s work in coaching and mentoring, to a hall of 250 highly credentialed coaches. One of the most respected voices in the profession, showing his peers the AI he built on everything he knows. Nobody argued about whether AI was coming to coaching. The conversation had moved on to how.

We met there, kept talking through the summer, and a couple of weeks ago I sat down with his son, who leads the development side. I asked why they built it and how coaches use it. I told him what we are building: an AI that supports and augments the coach, truly private and highly personal to each coach and each client. Two very different animals, and the contrast made for the good kind of questions.

We ended where good first conversations end: keep exploring. Perhaps inside the coaching schools and education programmes his organisation runs. Potentially a very interesting partnership.

To be continued.

David was one of four top of the profession coaches we sat with this summer. The other three wrote the books, built or still run coaching schools, and are associated with the world’s top coaching universities. All four are drawn to the same idea: the transcripts of their last two years of coaching hold something the people they work with keep asking for. It is the same ask Joanna Lovering already showed us. Carry the context forward. Keep developing.

Nine practising coaches sat down with us this summer and said, on camera, where AI actually fits in their coaching. Joanna Lovering, executive presence coach in New York. Jayne Ruff, chartered psychologist in London. Nina Nannini, coaching in nature between Italy and the Netherlands. Mārtiņš Melkis, systems thinking coach in Latvia. Chris Perkins in Scotland, Eric Vallone in Palo Alto, Adger de Boer in Amsterdam, and Richard Black in Barbados.

Our four advisors are on camera too, on why they signed up for this. To everyone who sat in front of those cameras: thank you. The conversations have not stopped. That is the best part.

Every coach approves their videos before they go public. The first are live now, via the link below. More land as approvals come in, and they are coming in quickly.

While the videos were in the edit, the product team kept its head down.

First, the coachee app. The one so many of you asked for: it is here. Submitted to Apple in early August, a process they are notoriously exacting about. Approved on Saturday 29 August. Live in the App Store shortly. Google Play is in process as well and expected to launch in the coming weeks. So whichever phone your client carries, iOS or Android, it is covered. Desktop keeps working in the meantime. The communication plan, with tips for introducing it to your coachees, lands at the next coach community call.

The bigger step: your own AI, in beta with six coaches. Through July and August we worked with several of you to create a coach AI specific to every client. Not a generic chatbot with your name on it: private to each client you coach, grounded in your sessions with them, in your voice, and supervised by you. Your coaching, in the room when your client thinks something through between and beyond sessions.

Together with the coachee app, that is two unique products in the market, and one practice you could not run before: the extended coaching practice. Engagements that continue, clients who keep developing with your context, reach that grows without your calendar.

Under the hood, the summer went into accuracy and guardrails. With coaches, we define what a good answer looks like in real coaching situations, and every change is tested against that before it reaches a client. When a chat heads somewhere it should not, the AI hands it back to the human coach. And you see every conversation your clients have with your AI.

One more thing was long overdue: a brand new website. So much is new, the products above, the coach stories, all the videos, that the old site no longer told the story.

This week, everyone featured on it gets a feedback and approval ask. Then we launch. Maybe even before the weekend.

Every thread above ends at the same question: does coaching with AI between and beyond sessions actually work better? We intend to answer it properly, in public.

A proposal to present at the ICF Global Event in Berlin, May 2027: submitted. An efficacy study by Dr Roger Maitland, with CoachNova as the technology provider: proposed, and put forward for an EMCC research grant. Peer review. Real methods. Results that stand whatever they say. The first academic research is starting.