“I have zero intention of replacing me.”

Some of the most experienced coaches I know are quietly extending themselves. Their own frameworks, methodology, and point of view, made available to clients between and beyond sessions. New offers at price points that open the door to leaders who couldn’t afford them before. Practices that scale past the limit of one-to-one hours.

Joanna Lovering is one of them. She came to us a few weeks ago, onboarded last Thursday, and within hours had run her first session through CoachNova.

Joanna designs leadership development for women leaders. Through Copper + Rise she’s built and run programmes for Google, Microsoft, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, and lululemon, on the skills most formal training leaves out. Executive presence. Communication. Self-advocacy. She also coaches executives one-on-one.

Seven years of weekly newsletters, keynote scripts, workshop outlines, and LinkedIn posts from that practice are now feeding the foundation of what she’s building inside CoachNova.

By the evening of her onboarding she’d recorded her client Cynthia’s session, sent her the approved summary, scheduled reminders, and booked the next session. All in CoachNova. All on day one.

Then she sent us this.

She’s already running a waitlist for it. 14 sign-ups so far, with one LinkedIn post and a footer link. She calls it Joanna in your pocket.

Our partnership with ICF MCC assessor Judit Ábri von Bartheld is ramping up. Judit has chosen CoachNova as the sole AI platform she’ll work with on AI Labs across her 2,000-coach community.

Last week Nick and I co-hosted the first AI Lab discovery call together. We walked the room through three levels of AI adoption.

Level 1. AI as a smarter Google search. Ask a question, get an answer. Useful but generic. This is where most coaches are today.

Level 2. AI with content you’ve fed it. You upload your frameworks, your writing, your point of view, and the model starts sounding like you. You can build a basic version of this with any chatbot. There was real interest in this in the room. Achievable for most coaches inside a weekend.

Level 3. Agentic AI built on your knowledge garden. The system isn’t waiting for prompts. It acts on your behalf inside your practice. Drafting summaries, surfacing patterns, supporting clients between sessions, all in your voice and under your supervision. More complex. Also where the future-proof business opportunity lives.

What was clear in the room is that level 2 is the bridge. Once a coach experiences AI sounding like them, the conversation about level 3 stops being abstract.

Two more coaching communities are already in conversation with us about doing the same. If you know an L&D organisation, a coaching collective, or anywhere coaches convene, send it our way. We’d love to bring an AI Lab there, and have the conversation about where AI can be a force for good in coaching.

Two weeks ago Mārtiņš Meļķis, one of our early adopter coaches, said something simple. He said this group should talk to each other, not just to us. Why don’t you set it up?

So we did. Last week, 13 coaches from around the world came together for our first early adopter community call.

We walked the group through our product roadmap with four options on it. Nova AI for Clients came back by far the number one pick. It’s a chatbot trained on your coaching signature and the context of your sessions with each specific client, available to them between and beyond sessions. Coach visibility opt-in and toggleable. We’ll pilot it with a small, non-corporate cohort first.

We’ve also kicked off our coachee research to understand the best experience for clients between and beyond sessions. Current and past coachees get a short questionnaire and an optional 30-minute call. Not to evaluate their coach. If you’d like to contribute by forwarding our short note to your clients, reply to this email and we’ll send you the template.

One last thing worth saying out loud. The conversation we keep hearing in the wider market is binary. AI coaching versus human coaching. We don’t believe that. We believe in augmenting the craft. Last Thursday was a strong reminder of why.