Where AI can and can’t replace human coaching

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0:46 Thank you for listening. [Music] So it looks to me I mean with both executive coaching and with therapy what you have is a person sitting across from another person engaging in a conversation with them. And of course occasionally um like Gaston mentioned you get input from others as well but fundamentally it's a conversation where one person says this is what I want or feel and the other person asks some questions and they get responses to that right and you observe the patterns it's while there will be uniqueness to each individual conversation that you're having when you zoom out enough patterns

1:31 will start to represent themselves because right Like at the end of the day, we're all humans, right? If it's just conversations, it sounds like a chat. If it's a chat, I can see it coming. Yeah. If it sounds like a chat, it build good buildup. Exchanges of words between two sides which sound like tokens and there is a corpus of information which one side has access to. Uh it sounds like it could be something which is right up the alley for AIdriven LLMs and chat bots. Help me understand both of you. If fundamentally all we're discussing is back and forth conversations and let's say hypothetically I waved a wand and said Akriti all of the conversations that

2:19 therapists at Kaha Mind have had with the thousands and possibly tens of thousands of people over the years is stored in an LLM which is now accessible instantly to you in real time. And the same is true for Gaston and all his team and all their coaches as well. And if I waved another wand and turned both of you into AI chat bots, wouldn't you be able to offer an even better experience because you're trained on so much more than the individual conversations that you've had? [Music]

3:24 Welcome to 2x2 the Ken's podcast. My name is Pravin Gopal Krishna. Today's episode is about can an AI bot coach and counsel you. AI is getting better every day and bringing us closer to a scalable always on support and a model for both leadership coaching and mental performance. This makes it much more attractive to organizations because it's less expensive, contextual, personal, self-arning and scalable within organizations. And there are futures where this may become the default and one-on-one human coaching and therapy become the exception. In today's episode, I have two wonderful guests with me to help us understand what exactly is executive coaching, what exactly is therapy, what do they do? And in that process, while we have this

4:10 conversation, we'll go deeper into all their processes and all their activities and we'll try to answer the question, can an AI do what the two of you do? That's really I would also like to ask, so sorry, I forgot. Let me self introduce myself. I am Rowan Dharmmakumar the other cohost but I would love to ask like I I love your question that can an AI or a bot do therapy and executive coaching. I would love to ask the question which is a precursor to that. Do I need therapy? Do I need executive coaching? Fine. All right. Um so to answer both of these very deep questions I have two wonderful guests with me. My first guest is Gaston Schmidz who is a partner and executive and founder coach at the Asian Leadership Institute. Uh Gaston has

4:57 coached several of India's CEOs, CXOs, founders at multiple Indian tech startups. Um full disclosure, Gaston is also my executive coach. This is the first of several disclosures that I'm going to make today. Welcome to 2x2. Gaston, thank you Vine. Real pleasure to to be here with you and exciting topic. I'm eager to dive in. This is going to be fun. Okay. Fantastic. Gaston, I'm excited to discuss Pravin and his leadership journey today. That's a that's a different workshop, Rowan. It's a different one. Fine. All right. I'm going to start with you, Gaston, and just help me and help all of us understand what exactly is executive coaching. It's something that I think many people may have heard of.

5:44 Most people haven't heard of it. Can you just help us understand what it is? Yeah, there's many definitions and I think if you ask many different coaches you do get different versions. So I'm just going to share mine and just I think as context what's helpful for I've been a executive coach for over 12 years now and the first half of that was very much focused on corporate like big multinationals working in these big layered often matrixed organizations and helping leaders become better. The last six seven years have mostly focused on startup founders with a big emphasis on India and that would also affect a bit of my definition of what this means. Now in the most simplistic way executive

6:31 coaching is about helping leaders achieve positive behavioral change for the future and basically become better versions of themselves. But that keeps it quite focused on just behavior. Another way that I would like to define it is how do we help leaders reinvent themselves basically grow and grow even beyond the boundaries of their own personality so they can in the case of startups scale as fast as their company which is very often the challenge. Yeah. Got it. Gashin for our listeners can you just tell us a little bit about you said you have a focus in India can you tell us a little bit about that like who are are the founders whom you have done executive coaching for and the

7:17 executives apart from me of course are they people whom we all know can you tell us a bit about them yeah I I got introduced to this ecosystem in 20189 actually through x to 10x that some of you might know they were setting up x to10x at that time and we're looking also at founder coaching as one of the pillars for startup development. X210X is the organization started by Bini Bunil um uh after he left Flipkart, right? Yes. Correct. Correct. And then Psyche as well. Psyche used to be with Flipkart and other organizations. Ola and um they set this up as a kind of an incubator accelerator that would help startups with all the common challenges that

8:03 startups face. And at that time they developed 10 different pillars that they realized were really important to address and founder coaching was one of them. And so I got pulled in because Psyche knew us from some earlier work he did with us. And since then uh we've actually been introduced to and and working with over 200 different startups uh probably in the Indian ecosystem uh more than 150 of them and I personally have coached over 75 founders in India of which more than 20 have been unicorn founders. So my specialization is a bit late founders but I also have a whole team of coaches. We actually have more than 40 40 coaches in the institute that

8:51 work um with co-founders with CXOs or further down in the organization. So yeah, that's my my experience. So I've worked and India is the big market for for me. I'm almost every month or two in India. uh I love India and for some reason I ended up coaching a lot of people in this ecosystem and uh so I've worked with series A stage all the way up to u to IPOed companies interesting okay we'll come back to you Gaston joins us from Belgium today joins us from Belgium remotely and so he's not in India but he keeps working with Indian founders so I'll just go back to we'll go deeper into your uh

9:37 what executive coaching is and how does it work? But I think I'll just take the headline definition which you said was helping founders become better versions of themsel. Is that a fair way to put it for now? Yeah. And make real measurable progress on specific leadership growth areas. Yeah. Okay. Now, I don't know much about executive coaching apart from my experience. Wait, what? Okay. But this sounds a lot like therapy to me. It just seems like a much more fancier version of therapy where you're basically going and talking to somebody telling them all your problems and that person is you know telling talking back to you. So which brings me to my second guest. My second guest is Akriti Joanna who is the CEO and founder of Kaha Mind which is a leading mental health

10:22 organization for individuals and organizations in India. Kahamind has provided therapy services to tons of executives at several of India's top startups which comes to my second disclosure. One of them was the Ken as well. Welcome Akriti. Thank you. Thank you so much. Very excited to be here. Thank you. Now tell us does whatever definition that Gaston spoke about with respect to executive coaching does that sound like therapy? Yes and no. Um I feel like coaching is very specific. Especially what Gaston was saying it was it's extremely leadership specific very goal specific. Uh therapy on the other hand need not be so um so focused on goals. It is more an exploration of your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings. Um and then

11:10 working towards larger goals versus it being so specific. So more like you know I want to feel less anxious in life versus I want to nail every meeting I go for you know. So the difference or if I have a pitch with my investors I want clarity of thought. That is something a leadership coach would completely take in. Uh a therapist would work around the anxieties you feel around imposter syndrome or when I'm about to go and do something major because it means so much to me. So the difference here is essentially therapy is a lot of the exploration because through exploring you understand yourself better. Once you understand yourself better you can just lead a more confident life, a better life, a happier life. Got it. Can you tell us a little bit about Kaha mind and who you work with?

11:57 Uh of course so before that I've been a therapist for almost 15 years now. My specialization was in marriage and family therapy still is. Uh so I work a lot with um couples. I do a lot of relationship counseling. But 8 years back I started Kahammind with the simple goal of working with startups, working with the startup ecosystem essentially to sort of provide mental health solutions for them. And this happened because in my private practice prior to starting Kahammind, a lot of the clients who were coming to me, they were coming from startups and they all had very similar concerns and they didn't really know whom to go to and how to solve it and that's why I thought there was a space here and I could build

12:43 something meaningful and that's how kahind came about. So we work with a lot of early stage startups, growth stage startups, unicorns, um now even global companies and where their mental health partners essentially. What does it mean when you say you're a mental health partner? What does that mean? Let's say I'm a company. What does that mean? Anything under emotional wellness and I'm giving No, no, sorry. I I'll come to that. But I'm saying just talk about the mechanics of it. Let's say I'm a company. I come to Kaha Mind. What what do what do I come to you with? You can come in for therapy sessions. Uh we do a lot of workshops. So these are like awareness sessions. So a lot of people especially in India, they don't really understand um their mental health awareness is very low. They don't know how to label their emotions or understand their emotions.

13:29 They don't understand um why talking about these things are even important. So a big thing that we do is we create a lot of awareness. That awareness then leads to a lot of them coming in for therapy sessions. So we provide the therapy sessions for them as well. And then we do a lot of like provide research to them around this to the organizations essentially helping orgs um just manage the sticky bits because a lot of the orgs that we work with are they're building fantastic products but to build fantastic products you need your team to really be on it and we come in and help with all those the messy sticky bits essentially. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the kind of companies you work with? Just like how Gaston spoke about Sure.

14:14 those numbers are they like mostly startups in Bangalore? I mean I know you said there were other kinds of companies as well. It's all over. Yeah. So startups while I can't take names startups all over India um global orgs as well and we're essentially what's another word for uh genre not genre. I want to say genre agnostic but not genre. Sector agnostic. Sector agnostic. Yes. Yes. That's a word. Um yeah. So we're sector agnostic so we work with advertising companies financial um orgs a lot of um content ags can sure so and do you provide this across all levels hey sorry pravin could I interrupt yes can I ask both akriti and gastin both of them seem to be working largely with

15:00 Indian startups so my question is why are startups the the folks with the mental health problems or the leadership uh desire. I mean, is there something or are they the places where they they they're more concerned about it and willing to engage in interventions to improve it and therefore or or is it that larger they have the money to be able No, no, no. The larger author should certainly have money. So, I don't think it's the money issue. Sorry. Go ahead, Gaston. Yeah. I I love that question and my explanation is is twofold. I and once I started working with this Indian ecosystem I actually felt so excited um that I've started gradually delegating a lot of my corporate work and that was for two reasons one is in these often

15:47 younger startups there's a lot of growth mindset people are super eager to get better learn secondly they don't often have the time the luxury of time to figure all these things out for themselves and thirdly I think there's something around Indian culture because what I've seen is there's much more pull from in India compared to say Southeast Asia where I do a fair amount of work but even the Middle East I coach a few founders in in that region and what I see in an Indian context there's so much hunger for learning and there's also something about having support having a mentor to some extent having a guru if you'd like or at least people that inspire us to get better which is very

16:33 embedded. I think it's embedded in your educational system in even your spirituality and that is some of my explanations why there's a lot of pull for some of this. Yeah. Um actually I'm echoing everything Gasson just said but also I feel like mental health is very new in a place like India and because it is so new the eagerness to learn more about it the novelty around it still exists and I feel that's why people are excited by the idea of it. Yeah. All right. Sorry. Go on. And I I would I would add one more thing. I mean our our work um is very much also about helping leaders become more conscious and that's a whole term

17:20 right but become more mindful become um more aware of their own autopilot their own personality and I think in in a lot of Indian history and traditions spiritual traditions as well there's just an openness and receptivity to this type of work where there's more there's a lot of room for introspection um that I've just felt our type of work resonates very strongly compared to some other the from the outside I mean like you know one wouldn't be wrong if if if you read the popular press and it looks like startups are run by arrogant founders who don't care much for self-reflection or what the none of them are in this room but other than that

18:05 like right um and they don't really care uh what others think they know what's the best way forward etc. And yet you seem to be saying uh that no that's not true. There's a lot of founders who actually are looking for help who are looking for a mentor who are looking for a guru and these are not just small u you know uh startups founders you mentioned that you coach co close to 20 unicorn founders. So these are fairly companies worth multiple billions of dollars and the founders who've taken those companies there certainly know what they're doing. What brings them to a coach? What makes them realize one day that they need coaching? Because I'm

18:51 sure it isn't something that's always been there, right? I'm sure it's, you know, the first 2, three years of a startup, they're just going through a blur of just making sure they survive. And at some and I'm sure even if they wanted to, they probably couldn't afford the time or the money for executive coaching, but at some point something changes and they become more open to it and and they want someone to tell them how they're doing, how to improve, etc. What's that trigger from your experience? Yeah. No, it's a it's a great question. When I think of a lot of my founder clients, I have always two feelings that come up. One is inspired. I am very impressed with the courage, the boldness, the capacity to put yourself

19:37 massively out of your comfort zone and build something like this. I think it's just inspiring. I think it's a lot big part of the population just doesn't have that audacity, right, to to pull this off. But the second one is compassion. I mean, and this to your question, I I think what a lot of these founders are pulling off is just remarkable. It's massively again out of their comfort zone. So they have to push the boundaries um of themselves, right? What got us here won't get us there. And um even though some of these founders in the news and in the media look like heroes that kind of got some of this stuff sorted, I can guarantee you that every one of them is human and have their own anxieties, their insecurities, their

20:24 concerns, especially because they're constantly pushing the boundaries. And many times they're lonely. They're very lonely. It's still very lonely at the top. And who do you actually go to to actually share man I don't I'm stuck here. I actually don't know how to move here. They can't go to board members because there's yeah particular dynamics. Sometimes you have an occasional board member that can be that trusted sounding board where you can be vulnerable with co-founders. Depends spouses and partners that generally don't have the full context. So where do you go to with somebody that actually doesn't need to figure out their own zero to one on this ecosystem right where you need to give hours of context

21:11 of what life is like a founder but quickly gets you and where you can actually be unfiltered open and vulnerable with and explore some of these deeper issues. I I I get that. Can I can I interrupt you Gaston? Maybe I didn't phrase my question correctly. My question was what's usually the trigger point for this um I think moment or revelation um let's let's assume it's founder X and they started a company the first 2 three years they're just making it survive then they raised a massive round now it's worth 100 million 200 million at some point it's worth 500 million billion uh million dollars and then at some point there and they don't have a coach till now let's assume that

21:57 and at some point they realize I mean even with all the success from the outside that whatever it's lonely what got me here wouldn't get like what's usually what are the patterns of triggers that make people realize mid-career in a fairly successful setting where they're at the top of the ladder where nobody else will usually tell them you know what I think you need help so it has to be something within in that's making them realize and question their ability to go forward. So, usually what patterns have you seen? And is that email usually coming to you at 3:00 a.m. in the morning? Is that what No projection? All right. Oh, but or Belgian time or Indian? No,

22:42 no, but it's um uh I I think it's a great question and first of all, I call our work always we help successful leaders become more successful. So a very little of our work is remedial where somebody is completely lost, right? Or if they don't fix something, they're going to be, you know, basically not successful anymore. It's very often because it's driven by an ambition to grow faster. So a trigger point could be a new fundraising round where they just closed to series B or a C and they say, "Holy that just got pulled in. now I need to deliver and do I have what it takes? Do I fully have what it takes? And again, they often realize that their

23:27 autopilot, which is their natural default way of running things, often is not enough for this next big leap in terms of their company's growth. Now, in my case, probably 90 plus% of our clients are coming in through referral, like word of mouth. And the biggest type of referral is other founders. So they hear from other founders, wow, this was really helpful. And even if this founder, right, and I've worked with some really, you know, founders that are considered to get have everything sorted basically, right? Well, if founder X needs a coach or has a coach, then maybe, you know, I should consider this as well. The second biggest referral source is of VC firms.

24:15 So we actually work with a lot of we've worked with over a dozen of VC firms in India alone where we coach their partners and principles. This might be another podcast but they they also need I love to do that podcast. VCs are my favorite topic but but they also often see the benefit they've seen it with some of their portfolio founders and then suggest to some other founders hey have you ever considered this? And and that's where the chemistry call happens. But uh so it's either an event like a funding event or they hit themselves a wall. Sometimes it's because they had a really uncomfortable experience. So they maybe some of their champions or CXOs left the company and it was a surprise or they

25:02 realized they're almost burning out or they have massive anxiety. I mean I'm with Acriti on this one. It's still one of the most common emotional states. um which is not unusual if you're putting yourself that much out of comfort zone but uh so those are there's an emotional trigger a funding cycle trigger or an a push from a a founder or a VC got it what about you Akriti at what point do organizations reach out to you is it the founder who reaches out is it the HR who reaches out what usually happens uh it's mostly through referrals so in that sense it's a lot of founders who reach out to us, okay? Um because they've spoken to other founders about how something like this

25:47 has worked for them. And they'll usually reach out to us not really saying, "Listen, we need to take care of mental health, but it's always something very specific." So, it'll be something like um you know, trust seems really low or uh we've hired a lot of new people and we don't know how to make them bond or um attrition seems really high. You know, what do we do here? How do we fix it? Okay, I get. So the nuance is that for for you I guess what I'm hearing differently from what Gaston is saying is that for you it seems like what they're saying is here is a problem in my organization that I'm seeing and I'm helpless or I'm paraphrasing but I we don't know how to fix it. Yeah. Because it all sort of you know when they talk to the employees when they talk to team members HR it all sort of goes back to some mental health concern which is um you know they're

26:34 feeling burnt out they're feeling like no one's listening to them. they're extremely anxious and everything comes from a a work POV, you know, so say there's um an org has raised a lot of money and suddenly everything is on everything's moving really fast and then teams don't know how to handle something like that. So everyone's extremely anxious. Uh so things like that and so it all because it all goes back to some mental health concern they come to us to try and fix that mental health concern which will then fix things like attrition, culture, all of that. It it sounds to me that when founders feel that the org needs help, they go and sign up Kaha mind for therapy for the organization and when they realize that they need help, they go to Gastron and say I need

27:20 [Laughter] No, but I'm with with Acrity there. This can take a lot of bandwidth of founders, right? And if you have people down there that have all kinds of challenges and you're not, you know, nine or 10 out of 10 on the EQ and emotional mastery scale, you're like, "Wow, this could be a rabbit hole, right?" So, you want to Yeah. also get professionals in there. So, I I do think it sounds complimentary. I didn't know you worked that much before this call, but really interesting. Yeah. Can I ask what happens as someone who's never gone through leadership or executive coaching? Can I'm just curious what happens in uh without of course uh dulging. Of course, you've sent me the notes uh detailed notes.

28:09 I'm kidding. Of course not. Gastron would never do that and I would never ask that. It's completely unethical. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. Am I speaking out loud? Continue. No. No. But Gaston just my I I I posted that on LinkedIn at that time, right? So everyone can see. All right. But what happens? What h what's a executive? Yeah. What's the general process? Yeah. What do I mean? Yeah, exactly. What's the process? What do these conversations sound like? Yeah. Oh, great question. So, normally our process is six months to start with. Now, actually the majority of our clients decide to continue some work afterwards, but we start with a six-mon process where the first few conversations are really exploring like what does success actually look like?

28:55 What do we want to achieve at the end of the six months? And what is interesting even though Acriti said coaching is a lot about goals. One thing I've realized, people come in with an idea of what they want to achieve, but we quickly realize that's not the real goal or there's something much like to give you an example, last year I worked with a founder who was, you know, maybe 18 months from IPO and he says, I just want coaching because I want to IPO and that's my goal and I want to use the entire coaching for IPO. And one month later, we realized that's not the real issue here. There's two big patterns in the personality that really is yeah preventing him from firing at all cylinders and be the best version of

29:42 himself that we unpack. So, but back to the process. So, the first couple of conversations are really at least getting some idea about what great looks like at the end of the process. We're looking at some of the the rules of play like how do we do this best together and I've seen particularly with founders you need a lot of flexibility. So one process that works for one founder doesn't need to work for another. So I have clients where I sometimes have two three calls a week very short sometimes it's much longer calls every two weeks but roughly at least every two weeks a touch point but what is really important in the process is that in that first month I do an in-depth 360 exercise where I'm actually asking the founder to

30:27 think of seven around seven people that I can interview that could give valuable inputs to this coaching process. And so those generally include co-founders, a couple of investors on the board, um direct reports obviously uh but also spouse and partner and um last week I even spoke to parents of a particular new founder. He said these are so important people and I want them to give inputs that that was fun by the way. How do you get critical honest feedback from Indian parents about their founder son? It was a specifically was a stretch for my but I did get some really good things in the end. But uh it so that 360 is very

31:12 essential to reveal blind spots, right? It's basically potential limiting patterns that you're not aware of. And and especially for CEOs or founders, the higher you go in an organization, the less feedback you get, right, Rowan? You might recognize that even running an organization or or maybe you're It's one of my longest it's one of my longest running frustrations and pet peeves. I've just given up now. Yeah, I have some hacks we can talk about later, but it's it's and that's not because these founders don't want more feedback. They're often seeking it. They are eager because they have this growth mindset and and sense of ownership. So, we do the 360 and then there's a debrief of all these data

31:58 points, often an in-depth session of 90 minutes where the founder gets a full understanding of how am I being perceived by the people that matter the most to me and matter the most to my success and and that is really a critical part of the process. Then we nail down what are some of the key leadership growth areas based on the 360 and based on the work we've done before. And so generally I work on two three areas max not more. Less is more in any behavioral change process or you know personality enhancement if you like is less is more. Then uh and then after that it's again a a cadence of at least every two weeks a session. Now what

32:44 happens in these sessions you asked is basically a mix of checking in on the growth areas. So if the growth area was I need to get much better at conflict and having tough conversations or I need to learn how to let go of control and delegate better. We would obviously check in on such areas. What effort did you put in? What worked? What didn't work? Let's extract some insights from that. But we also go deeper. So we are looking at belief systems, assumptions, things that got embedded in their mindset that might hold him back in getting better either at these areas or in general. So I'll give you one example. I worked with a founder that had an extreme tendency to compare

33:30 himself with other founders to an extent where it was really energy draining and it would just make him insecure, less confident. So there we had to go deep, right? Then it's I'm venturing into Acrit's world where we have to understand somewhat where did this get programmed and and why to then eventually make make progress on some of that. I think the difference by the way with therapy and coaching is therapy correct me if I'm wrong spending a bit more time in that past story and understanding how things got conditioned and programmed. Well, at least in our executive coaching, we go there to give the pattern some dimension. So, he might

34:17 understand this. Oh yeah, this came from your parent or your dad or this came from, you know, I once had a a founder who had public speaking fear which really held him back and we understood where it came from, right, when he was that age, etc. But I wouldn't spend an entire session unpacking that past story and potentially reprogramming that story. Right? In some therapy approaches, you would do that. I would just use it as a way to anchor the insight, but then move fairly quickly to what are we going to do the next time this comes up. Yeah, that's actually really interesting because I was saying that's really interesting because a lot of the founders that I work with also have executive coaches

35:04 and it's very interesting how this works because exactly like Gaston was saying a lot of my work is around things like you know the higher you go we always joke about this um when you become leads and then you become a founder empathy reduces the higher you go. So then a lot of the the Elon Musk example. Yeah. So a lot of my work is actually to you know bring out that humanness again um and the softer sides and a lot of like spending time talking about things that they've buried away could be childhood trauma whatever um and then they work with executive coaches who do exactly what Gaston is saying which is a lot of like okay let's move forward let's get you to that meeting in the most confident way that you could be. Okay fair I have a question. So Gaston basically said, "Oh, it's a 6-month period. I have all of these things. It's

35:49 a 360 uh feedback that I do, then I give it back, then I have." So there is a certain structure to what he's doing. Do you have structure to therapy as well? Therapy? Yeah, absolutely. What kind of structure do you have? Um, I'm I'm just asking that question because the I'm sure as an outsider perhaps the perspective is well, I just show up once a week and I just talk and I leave. Yeah, of course. So, first of all, we don't put timelines like 6 months or whatever. So there is long-term therapy and then there's short-term therapy. So things like CBT would fall under short-term therapy. What is CBT? CBT is uh cognitive behavioral therapy. So it's essentially focusing on your your thoughts, your actions, your feelings. Okay. Um as opposed to and it's extremely structured as if like CBT will not focus on your childhood at all. You know, if you've had maybe a

36:35 really difficult time growing up, you've had a very bad uh breakup that has then uh resulted in you having trouble in future relationships, it will not focus on those things, but it will focus on things like um I feel anxious when I'm at work, you know, because there are a lot of demands on me. So things like that. So it'll focus on stuff that's a little more specific. It's more structured and that is short-term so that people come in for maybe six sessions, eight sessions and that'll be done. So the six or eight sessions has a certain kind of broad goal to it. Yes. Yes. There is a proper structure to it. Okay. And um but a lot of the other what happens in each of these sessions as an example. Let's see if you I mean there is so initially you come in and there's proper goal setting and you have homework for each session.

37:20 Oh you have homework. You give homework too. Yeah. I I don't follow CBT a lot but no but I'm saying I'm talking Yeah. So the therapist who do CBT they will give you homework after each session and essentially by the end of it you feel like okay I've made progress and this is where I wanted to make progress but a CBT therapist will also tell you if something cannot be worked through CBT like they will tell you okay this is not my area um but stuff that is longer so generally it's a similar structure in the sense that you talk about goals and then you sort of after every few sessions so a cadence that we follow is once a week so you come in once a week for therapy it's generally 50 minutes to an hour and after every few sessions you look at where the progress is being made. But in long-term therapy, therapists all often

38:06 change the kind of therapy that they're doing. It will not like in CBT it's six sessions of only CBT. In long-term therapy, that might change a bit depending on the intensity of the client, what's coming up, what's not coming up. So it looks to me I mean with both executive coaching and with therapy what you have is a person sitting across from another person engaging in a conversation with them and of course occasionally um like Gaston mentioned you get inputs from others as well but fundamentally it's a conversation where one person says this what I want or feel and the other person asks some questions and they get responses to that right now. Of course, I'm dramatically simplifying it, but at the end of the

38:51 day, it is a human conversation between two people. Yes. And I suppose that if you kind of zoom out from both executive what Gaston does or what you do Akriti and you observe the patterns it's while there will be uniqueness to each individual conversation that you're having when you zoom out enough patterns will start to represent themselves because right like at the end of the day we're all humans right which brings me to a very interesting um you know bend in this episode and I'm going to uh and if it's just conversations, it sounds like a chat. If it's a chat, I can see it coming.

39:36 Yeah. If it sounds like a chat, it build good build up. Exchanges of words between two sides which sound like tokens and there is a corpus of information which one side has access to. Uh it sounds like it could be something which is right up the alley for AIdriven LLMs and chatbots. And I'm going to read out um from a Financial Times article. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. It's dated March 17, 2025. It's called the AI chatbots offering workplace council. It says that virtual mentors offer cheaper but more limited advice to executives. I'm going to briefly read out from it. Conversing with one difficult abrasive male

40:23 colleague constantly interrupting made Vinda Boyin sweat. "I was angry," she says. Despite the discomfort, the senior program manager at software company HubSpot repeatedly returned to the discussion. For her interlocutor was not a human but a chatbot or coach bot. She had been asked to act like a vexacious co-orker so she could rehearse prickly workplace conversations. I was able to practice scaling back my responses so it was constructive. The rehearsals allowed her to pause and not be baited. I could think it through rather than saying, "That's rude." Amy, the chatbot, which is represented by a choice of avatars and options to communicate via text and speech, was created by CoachHub, a coaching platform, and is part of a pilot at HubSpot. Amy, which will go on general release this summer, is part of

41:09 a new breed of coach bots, including Valenc's Nadia and Ezra Kai. They draw on generative artificial intelligence offering a cheaper version of a service that has largely been reserved for senior executives. AirPod virtual coaches can provide advice on salary negotiations, suggest how a user's habits might shape their work or role-play conversations. Valance Markets itself has given managers an always on coach at 2% of the traditional cost. I'll stop here. I'll link in the show notes as well. Help me understand both of you. If fundamentally all we're discussing is back and forth conversations and let's say hypothetically I waved a wand and said Akriti all of the conversations that

41:55 therapists at Kaha Mind have had with the thousands and possibly tens of thousands of people over the years is stored in an LLM which is now accessible instantly to you in real time. And the same is true for Gaston and all his team and all their coaches as well. And if I waved another wand and turned both of you into AI chat bots, wouldn't you be able to offer an even better experience because you're trained on so much more than the individual conversations? I'll let Akriti answer, but I'll say that while Rohen pulled out his phone to read those notes, so did Akriti who also pulled out a phone and said, "I have notes of my own." I know. I know. I have so many notes. Yes. Go for it, Arkiti. Tell us. Very provocative question. Please tell us. Can you make your question a little more

42:40 specific? Yes. Yes. Um if if what both you and Gaston do is I mean essentially by you and Gaston I mean like Asian Leadership Institute and uh Kaha Mind is a therapist or a coach sits across either a telephone or a table and has a conversation another person and asks them questions and they give answers and you counter them. Why can't that be why does that have to be done by a human? Can it not be done by a chatbot which has access to all of the underlying theory CBT all of the various I mean the sum total of all therapy knowledge that has been created and all of the conversations that have happened in the past why do you need a human look also raise my hand and say I'm not the biggest of AI proponents in fact I'm

43:27 a huge AI skeptic but since I'm playing the opposite side in this PGKN friends episode, I will play the devil's advocate and say, "Why can't all of this be done at 2% of the cost by an AI chatbot made by a unicorn founder run by an anxiety stricken founder?" Yeah. Yeah. I think there's so many points. Uh G, please take, do you want to take that first? I I I'm I'm just bubbling to jump in here. And first of all, first of all, I I'm not an AI skeptic. I actually am an adviser in an AI coaching bot called Yuki out of Singapore that I've been, you know, supporting and

44:12 advising on since the beginning. So, I'm actually quite um into this. I even last week I gave a workshop in Sururik on applied AI to a big pharmaceutical company. So, I'm I'm quite clued into that reality. I think what's so and I'm not even seeing it as either or here. I do think coaches will have to really learn how to tap into AI but I think AI will even in its more developed evolved versions will be incredibly powerful and pattern matching that will be very powerful and tactical advice. So, if you need the five tips to be a better delegator and the three tips to have a difficult conversation, you'll have this at your fingertips much more efficiently than before. You would figure this out before, but now you have

44:58 it. And if you need indeed that quick tip to have a tough conversation with that bullying peer, absolutely. Now where it gets tricky is I mean we always say in every conversations there there are two conversations happening. One is the verbal conversation that we're currently recording but the second one is the vibrational conversation which is what's actually happening at the feeling tone and all the other nuances that are nonverbal. And if you look at some of the research behind this, the vibrational component of a conversation actually leaves the biggest impact of a

45:44 conversation. It's not the verbal one, especially in high stakes conversations. And over a period of time, that proportion becomes only bigger. So if I would ask you, Rowan, about a really important conversation you had three weeks ago, you will mostly remember how you felt about that conversation. not exactly what was being said. And so I think AI is doing a pretty impressive job in processing the verbal part of conversations, the vibrational part, I mean it's getting gradually better and even Yuki I mean Net the CEO just gave me an update this weekend and it's trying to sense right whether a pause is needed or when this is needed.

46:31 But there's something about that capacity to uh to include that vibrational component. But that is where the transformation happens in coaching. That's actually where the magic happens. It's not the incremental tactical prog progress, right? That actually I think will gradually more and more take over. But let me ask all three of you a question. When was the last time you really got touched, moved, or cried in front of AI? That's an unfair question because it's too early to get moved and touch this thing by AI. I mean, that's like asking I mean, it's been a while since I cried in front of a real human being.

47:16 So, you need Okay. No, no. I was just going to say, but let let me No, no. I was just going to say that what what you're really asking is a version of the question that somebody may have asked in the 60s saying that oh when is the last time you ever got moved or touched in front of a television when televisions just came out because at that time live theater etc was there and I'm saying that we just so early in the process I don't think it's in inconceivable that people will get more just FYI slightly triggering this thing but there have been instances of people committing serious self harm in conversation with AI bots so I mean it's completely possible and not just possible it has happened that AI can push people to much more than but it's usually not in the context of

48:01 executive coaching or therapy these are those I don't know that thought I want to just get it to a yes go on ai tell us AI so like Gaston was saying I don't think it's an eitheror in fact uh I've been thinking about this for a while since you brought it up and I I kept thinking I had to take a side and you know because I'm a therapist How can I be for AI and a lot of these questions and I am for AI and I am for therapist because I think they both have to somehow come together. Have you tried it out? Have you tried using AI to have a therapy like conversation just out of curiosity or are you considering offer AI services under that's the next step? I mean I'm just at the first step where I'm like have you

48:46 even tried it out? Have you used it at some level? No actually not really. I have done test questions like uh for example, I'm feeling anxious right now. What can I do? And it'll say something like here's how you can ground yourself and do this breathing exercise. And I feel like that is that's actually really good and that is CBT. And I feel like anything that would be really structured is something that AI would be amazing at. Um but anything that is not structured is something that might not work so well. And here's the thing, human beings aren't structured. And so it can be a little tough. I mean, because in this moment I might need help with anxiety, but that might not be something that I need cons continuous help with. And I feel like that could be that is

49:33 somewhere I feel like AI might not really come in. For me, the biggest thing in fact and the more I think about it is that human beings make mistakes and therapists are human beings and coaches are human beings. And so by nature of that, we all make mistakes. And LM make mistakes all the time. They're called hallucinations. True. But they're not going to forget things like um an important fact that you mentioned. They're not going to forget the date. They're not going to forget like these very human errors. You know, they might make bigger mistakes. That is something that you catch on to. Uh but the thing is when we forget these basic things or you know we don't catch on to a joke and we don't really laugh at something um it's actually in these

50:19 moments that you create trust because there's so much you know relatability that is created and that is what I think Gaston was talking about the vibrations because in that moment you're like oh my god I feel so understood like yes I go through that as well that aha moment which doesn't really happen will not happen the kaha moment Exactly. Yeah. Sorry. Go on, Gaston. I'm sorry for the Yeah, jokes. No, I uh No, no, no. That's I think that's um that's true. There's something that happens not at that verbal level. Um I mean, even the mirror neurons, right? Our capacity to pick up all these empathet nuances and be empathetic to each other. I mean, I think they're

51:05 trying to instill this now in some AI. And by the way, I use AI all the time. If my client has a tactical thing and what's the few tips, I think prompt engineering is very important. So, how do you prompt well? Right? I just gave a whole workshop around this last week and you get some really good tactical answers. But the feedback that I get from a lot of clients, it's not just the clever advice that I give clients or the insightful best practice that I heard somewhere else that creates a breakthrough. Those are helpful. Those are necessary. But the most memorable, impactful coaching conversations are the one that happen at a different level. It's not at

51:50 the mental, intellectual level. It's often at the emotional, intuitive, and embodiment level. There's something that changes in the body. And I think that's also where AI will still need a lot of time, right, to even go and play in that domain. Um, okay. But yeah, those are I was even Sorry. Go on. Maybe the last thing I would say because and this is so recent because I just rolled out of a 4-day meditation retreat and and your question Pine was popping up and disturbing my meditations regularly. I I apologize. No, no, but it was really interesting and and I was thinking the most powerful moments of insight and transformation in

52:37 my journey have been not nonver have been non-verbal. like it's when that in my case a Zen master that I follow or vaposa retreats that I've done or things and it's not about these intellectual insights that create the transformation. I think that's I think true for for all of us and that is a field right and a set of conditions that I think AI will struggle to to copy. Okay, fair. Now here is my much more skeptical viewpoint. I get what both of you are saying. Both of you are basically saying at some level that okay look I get that there are some things that AI can do but there is a certain deeper emotional connection that gets formed and that connection to be formed needs things to be certain needs to be

53:23 human needs to be emotional and that breakthrough that either an executive coach or a therapist can do cannot be easily replicated by AI let's I mean I'm still skeptical but let's assume that's true now here is the next step which is okay maybe that is true but Surely there are so many advantages that an AI can do. Now you're talking about what an AI can't do. Fair, noted. But look at all the things that an AI can do. And we're not even talking about an individual here. Let's talk about organizations like both of you like you work with organizations. Akriti and Gaston, you work with founders whom I'm sure if there was a way for organizations to get all the benefits that you are able to give founders, they would be able to do it. But as Rohin pointed out maybe cost, accessibility, all of those things are a

54:09 factor. I can imagine LLMs or AI software that work with like you work with organizations, let's say it's a thousand member organization. It's unrealistic that you would do therapy for all thousand of them. But I can imagine an AI LLM that is able to do therapy at scale, remembers what every individual person told it and at the same time is able to make connections between people. So if you're talking about let's talk about some of the examples that you said in the beginning you said that well one of the problems we have maybe it is attrition but it's related to low trust and anxiety. I can imagine an LLM coming in and saying this organization has anxiety and my goal my uber goal is to reduce anxiety in this organization by having individual conversations with a thousand

54:55 people 24/7 throughout the week and I can imagine in a few months it would make significant progress. Same for you Gaston. I'm saying you're saying that oh founders come through a moment and they go through a certain amount of realization and they want to get better versions of themselves. I imagine similar crisises happen at individual levels and individual goals. So I can imagine an AILM coming and imagine an ALM that works with an entire organization helping every single one of them become the better version of themselves. I would imagine this is very powerful. And does it not make the two of you nervous? No. Why? I mean it doesn't make me nervous. Okay. Why? I think AI can really um

55:40 first of all maybe maybe should start I should start by asking do you do you agree with this characterization that I just put or do you think it's too extreme that no it won't it won't be that far? I think it's a little extreme but I understand why you're saying this also because why is it extreme? I'm saying it's extreme because you are underplaying adoption. Just because something exists doesn't mean people are going to use it and you cannot make it mandatory. Say there are thousand people in an org and you have an LLM. How many people are going to actually go use it and say yes I'm feeling anxious tell me what to do. Uh adoption rates even in therapy we go and we're always preaching and we're always saying come to us come to us it's free for free of cost. Your founders are paying for it you know whatever. And we're talking about people who are actually very anxious. Even there you have like 10% 15% of the or coming in.

56:28 But don't underestimate the ability. Imagine if it's integrated into Instagram, WhatsApp platforms, etc. You don't have to schedule a therapy session. I may be feeling anxious tonight at like like the example that I said to Gastron which was a much more thing that oh at 3:00 a.m. in the morning I'm feeling anxious. I can't schedule a therapy session at 3:00 a.m. By the time I do it, by the time whoever the therapist is free, it'll probably be 2, three days, then I'll probably not show up. It's this there is like it's not friction, but it's real world stuff. It's like if Quickcommerce got adopted in India, then I can imagine this getting adopted as well. Yeah, I'm scared. I'm sounding like I hate AI. I do not. No, that's okay. You can hate AI. No, no, I do not. I'm not a skeptic. I'm not a skeptic at all. I feel like uh when it comes to scaling, when it comes

57:15 to providing help, when it comes to availability at 2:00 a.m. when therapists aren't really available, uh I think it can do a phenomenal job. Okay. Uh and I think it can partner with therapists really well. It can look at data, it can manage, um it can give you insights, it can do a lot of that that therapist might struggle with. At the end of the day, a therapist can only see what five to seven clients a day. Um AI will not have any of those concerns. So I feel like it could really manage a lot of um milder cases. Nothing too intense though because like Rohin was mentioning earlier there have been cases I don't think AI can manage anything that's critical anything that might require um higher care you know uh so I don't think AI could really come in there but I feel like AI could come

58:00 in where it comes where say in the middle of the night you're anxious and you don't know how to get through the night you're having a sleepless night it could come in there. It could come in with cases that are milder and you just need someone to, you know, sort of support you in that moment. It could come in where you need a reminder for therapy homework, for example, because a lot of people do not do that step. Uh, I feel like it could really help you in all those places or sometimes it can do the homework for you. I mean, yeah. I mean, sorry. Yeah. Uh Gaston, I I know you're kind of itching to answer, but imagine I had uh an app on my phone which was let's say called something whatever coach something and it's always there on my phone and every time I feel something I

58:47 can just talk to it. So it has my emotional state, it has my you know what I'm feeling on a continuous basis. It can communicate back with me over time. It starts with zero idea about me and about who I am or what I want but every subsequent conversation that I have with it uh I mean to use the example of I want to do an IPO to I'm feeling anxious to I have to unpack things etc. It it never loses all of that context so it builds up over time. Isn't that I mean is that is that something that you worry about? Frankly, I would never use it. But I Well, I and it's an interesting story. I had two weeks ago, I was in India and one of my ex-clients uh basically was

59:33 journaling for four years and he uploaded everything onto AI and say just pop it out what is your verdict basically and he was really blown away because pattern matching is something that AI can do extremely well better than I and others. So that's not where the yeah that's I think very powerful and then you can even do that at an organizational level even like I was doing a workshop with infido if you guys know like the HR um employee engagement company and they obviously track a lot of data across an organization and can see attrition and lower experience levels and there's a lot of these these solutions are in there I and I and I have perplexity on my WhatsApp and I got

1:00:19 a couple of uh apps and a lot of my clients have and we even team up. I said, "Listen, if you want to get build better connections or need conversation starters, these are some of my ideas, but check with GPT." And so I I really team up with AI and many of my clients are so techsavvy, they they're even more advanced in some of that. It's great, but they still really need somebody to speak to, I feel. And but it will push our profession, it will put my profession to a place where I need to be very clear what my added value will be which is much more of the vibrational transformational stuff that AI doesn't pick up. By the way, AI is

1:01:07 also very dependent on prompting which assumes that the person knows what they need. like the amount of times I've worked with a client that think they come with a problem but that's not the real problem. It's like giving AI the wrong prompt, right? So sensing what is not being shared, what is actually underneath like I I'll give you an example with these 360s that I do and interview stakeholders. The most important thing is what people are not saying. If if I speak I'll give you your example, Rowan. If we ever do a 360 for you, if I would speak to your your direct reports, hey, I'm an open book. All right. And all your direct reports, if your direct reports say Gaston Rowan

1:01:54 is outstanding, he doesn't have any growth areas. He's super ask them that. I can just send you that. I I can say that all one of his direct reports will not be saying that. I'll get them all to agree. believe me. But if if any if if all of them would say the nice things and I've worked a lot in Southeast Asia where people say a lot of nice things, it's hard to give feedback upwards. But if I can sense that there's no psychological safety there and they're holding back. That is the feedback. Now AI will never pick this up. Not yet. Maybe in the future they'll pick up what is not being said and vibration. But for now those nuances and the real intuitive coaching which I we call intuitive coaching

1:02:40 that is still and even if you look at the neuroscience how intuition works I mean AI is really great but at you know replicating intuition not yet right and and I would say the last thing I would add is that let's take the anxiety example yes you can get some good inputs from AI on tactics and do this breathing exercise or you know take that cold shower or do this. But we also know that if everyone in that organization that has anxiety is just relating to a device or a robot. I mean very often it's a lack of human connection. And we also know that our nervous systems attune to each other and

1:03:25 very often if you're anxious you just need to speak right to another person that's grounded or that's present. All these nuances are are not available yet through an app. Got it. I brought us to this bend in the conversation by uh talking about the rise of I was surprised both of you essentially said hey AI not a problem. We'll all coexist happily. So let me now switch to the other side back again and say maybe it's a bad thing. I'll go back to that article again. I'll read from it. But the rise of AI coaching also raises ethical concerns and some in the industry question its purpose. Is it a marketing exercise to stimulate demand for home human coaching, a helpful addition or cannibalizing the market for

1:04:10 real life professionals? Such criticisms were crystallized in a recent article by Tatiana Bachurova, professor of coaching psychology at Oxford Brooks University. She believes the AI coaching invasion represents an enitification of the trade and describes cheaper services as an ers not good enough for those at the top of the ladder. Organizations development offerings to their employees are degraded whilst keeping human coaching only for more important customers. I do believe this is a very real possibility in general with all of AI. What we'll see is in some senses true human interactions whether it's coaching whether it's therapy customer support whether it's customer support essentially will be reserved for those

1:04:59 which will become more expensive and more valuable and reserved so executive coaching which today is largely restricted to leaders founders CXOs heads of functions etc instead of being disrupted by AI I will continue to be for those and AI will essentially disrupt or eat into the rest of the pyramid. Same for therapy as well and stuff like that. That's my sense of it. Do you both agree or do you have a different like how will AI and human coaches and therapists coexist? who gets human experiences and

1:05:44 who gets purely tech experiences. I can't imagine any founder going to the Asian leadership institute and saying hey I would just like your uh chatbot now I mean every founder will say I mean I know most founders will say I want to work directly with Gaston. Yeah and Gaston will be like sorry I can only work with so many people you'll have to work with someone else etc. And and I also know Southeast Asia, right? Everyone is like, "Hey, but I heard about Gaston. I want to work with Gaston, right?" Yeah. So, how does this play out when it's tech and humans coexisting? I think it's going to be a fair mix of the both. I don't think we've derived at a formula yet. But for example, one of these uh one of my clients who is a very

1:06:29 successful founder and a huge uh follower and lover of AI, he sort of goes and puts down all our notes and uh you know cuz we meet just once a week and sort of AI will keep telling him okay fine here's what Akriti asked you to focus on or here's the homework or this is what she's asked you know like an everyday sort of a reminder but that doesn't mean that he does not come in for therapy and he still coming in and I feel I feel like that is such a nice blend of the both. Um yeah, I I I must make this quick observation that all of the people that both you and Gaston have mentioned have all been men, right? I'm sure one part of it is because there is an over representation of men among startups and among founders.

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