Meeting Notes — 2026-04-09

Participants: Max, Reiner Duration: ~40 min Video: YouTube

Context

Max and Reiner, without Maha this session. The call picks up an idea both had circled before: a small, curated meet-up of people sitting at the intersection of AI and human-development work — coaches, HR, consultants, a few technical people. Not a webinar-as-sales-channel, not an open LinkedIn invite — a handpicked circle.

Reiner's framing: "a friendly meet-up, now that we have created this kind of a team between us two coaches and one guy who is interested in the tech and the business." A previous attempt to invite the community by open LinkedIn produced exactly one attendee — a coach already deep in AI work. Lesson: personal invitations work, cold LinkedIn does not.

Why a meetup now

Max reframed the point: the previous webinar was tool promotion. This one shouldn't be. He wants peers, not customers — people already doing something in this space, or seriously trying. Purpose is to improve our strategy by connecting closer:

• "I'm missing the general trend happening on the market, and what people need."
• Conversations with two or three client companies don't tell us where the field is moving.
• We position ourselves as thought leaders / organisers / people who know the field — a by-product, not the headline.
• People in the room might match with each other, not only with us. Fine.

Reiner added the symmetric point: coaches / HR people with AI ideas don't know who to connect to either. The circle is very small. The meetup makes us a visible hub for that thin layer.

Reiner also pushed it further mid-call: it's not only coaches-wanting-to-get-closer-to-AI. It's also AI people curious about what the coaching world is actually asking for. Two sides, both under-connected.

Format

• 60–90 min.
• First ~30 min: three 10-minute lightning talks (one from us, two from invited speakers).
• Then free conversation.
• Small group — 10–15 people is fine; we'll see if it's more.
• Handpicked invites by email / direct message. LinkedIn announcement as a secondary layer once something is already on the agenda ("looks like a thing that's already happening").

Content framing / working titles

• "AI Spark meetup" — plays off PPL Spark.
• Theme candidates: human development × AI, building better communications with AI, "illuminating what happens in the space between people," "measuring the so-far-unmeasurable — conversation dynamics, culture, language patterns."
• Intersection we own: AI × adult/human development × maturity/wisdom.

Candidate speakers

• A coaching-technology consultant (co-founder of an AI-for-coaching product). Reiner connected to him on LinkedIn last week. Doing similar things to us. Good first invite, likely starting with a get-to-know call rather than a cold speaker ask.
• A founder in California working on analysing email / document flows inside organisations to measure commitment levels across teams. Close to HR; "how to get a grip on something as vague as organisational culture." Reiner has an existing rapport with him.

Approach: before inviting anyone to speak, do a brief one-to-one to align. Don't ask strangers to present.

Timing

• Aim for first or second week of May.
• Anchor the date to the first confirmed speaker, then fit the others around it.
• Need ~2–3 weeks of runway from confirmation to event date.
• Reiner is at the EMCC annual mentors/coaches meeting 10–13 May — the meetup has to fit around that window.

Digression — the AI-is-a-mirror thread

Coming out of a strand about ChatGPT scepticism, Reiner landed a framing worth keeping:

"The AI is the person. It reflects in its behaviour how it is treated. If you tell it it's a liar, what can it do?"

Both agreed AI is better for pattern recognition than factual retrieval, and that the "hallucination" complaint says more about user expectation than about AI. Reiner proposed a LinkedIn post: Socrates' "I know that I don't know" applies doubly in the AI era — accepting that the model doesn't know is the base assumption from which real work begins. Two human witnesses of the same event also produce contradictory accounts; we don't call each other liars.

Useful as a content piece. Parked, not an action.

Development is no longer the bottleneck

Substantive shift in how Reiner now sees the resourcing question.

Max's setup: even if Zurich signs tomorrow, he builds the first version in ~2 days, then tests for a month. Development is not the constraint. The real constraints are:

• Picking the right ideas (selection, not execution).
• Stable business processes to automate against. If a company doesn't have a stable process, AI won't help them — "the process is the king."
• Data availability.
• Project management: alignment, testing, communication, getting everyone on board. That's the actual work.

Reiner's conclusion: the bottleneck is the HR/process-world side, not the IT side. If we grow, we grow by adding more people like Maha and himself — consultants who can sit inside a real project in a real company — not by hiring developers. "Development would be the click part of the project." Max agreed: prototyping is trivial; enterprise-grade only starts mattering once there are paying customers, and that's hiring-triggered, not pre-hired.

Reiner flagged this as article-worthy: "AI deployment's bottleneck is not AI — it's our capacity to conceptualise the next version for our organisations."

The ICF compliance thread — from blocker to business idea

Reiner brought in ICF's newly announced rules for coaches working with AI. They're extremely restrictive: heavy consent requirements, data-storage constraints, per-session re-consent for AI use. In practice, feeding consented transcripts to AI would not be compliant under the new rules without renewed per-session consent framed specifically for AI. Risk to ICF accreditation if announced publicly.

Reiner's instinct was frustration — "they basically don't want people really to use AI" — plus the broader complaint that bureaucracy is choking coaching the way it's choking everything else.

Max flipped it to opportunity. Startup-playbook framing: regulation builds moats. If compliance is painful, it's a paid problem. Proposal:

• Build a compliant AI platform for coaches — GDPR, ICF, EMCC all handled inside the product.
• Partner with ICF (or get accredited by them) so they certify the platform rather than build it themselves — ICF's model is standard-setting, not service delivery, so this fits.
• Coaches subscribe for a low monthly fee (~5 USD/month magnitude) and stop worrying about compliance.
• Inside the compliance shell, we run the actual substance: AI-assisted supervision. Analyse recordings, surface where the client is developmentally, where the coach is, interaction dynamics. Not replacing supervisors — giving supervisors + coaches structured data to work from.

Reiner's summary back: "It's a coaching open-AI, safe and reliable and data-protection compliant, trained by coaches for coaches." He liked it — "my head started accelerating."

Partnership angle: a mutual contact previously introduced Reiner to a Berlin founder who sold a previous business and is reinvesting into exactly this kind of coaching-services platform. Possible co-build rather than doing it alone.

Risks noted

• ICF could act as a monopolist and refuse to accredit third-party tools, promoting its own instead. Counter: even at half-price we can still acquire coaches directly if the product is good enough.
• Coaches are "inclined to follow" regulators — they won't take risks with their accreditation. Compliance story has to be airtight before we sell.

Action items