Carol Braddick

Carol Braddick

Graham Braddick carol@carolbraddick.com UK and US

Carol is a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching, covering coaching technology for its members. She is also a member of the Disruptive Tech Workstream of the Future of Coaching Collaboration, a UK working group taking a systemic view on how tech affects all stakeholders in the business and executive coaching market.

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In 2023, technology is  playing a major role in shaping the professional service industry - coaching, consulting, training businesses. Advancements in areas such as digitalization of the operations, automation and artificial intelligence enables companies to streamline client experience, improve efficiency of the engagements, and reduce costs while unblocking growth.

Overall, technology is expected to drive innovation and growth in the professional service delivery industry in 2023.

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Webinar Agenda:

🔥Digitalization of coaching services to unlock business growth   

🔥Overview of 2022 Technology trends in the Professional Services Market 

🔥Current trends and new technology that shapes the market in 2023 

🔥What keeps coaching business owners up at night 

🔥How to choose the best tech enablement for your business 

🔥Profi platform overview  

🔥Q&A session

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Alina Trigubenko (00:12)

So, we are just starting out. We are preparing. Hello, Michael. The question is “What time did we start?” We’re just having a warm up conversation. Even though we've had several conversations with Carol, it always felt like we could spend hours conversing. 

So, welcome to our webinar about the technology that will shape the coaching and consulting industry in 2023. We, together with Carol, want to make it as conversational as possible. It’s a webinar, but it's called Fireside Chat to ensure that everyone's opinions are welcome. 

As coaches, we are always looking out for the blind spots. So, if there's something that you think we're not seeing, or some unique perspective that you have, please do share in the chat. We're super interested in everyone's opinion, because the coaching and consulting industry is a very exciting space to be in right now given everything that's going on in the world and the markets. 

So, thank you for joining. We already have quite a number of participants. Let's start with introducing you, Carol. What's your story? You just shared a bit, but let's start from the beginning.

Carol Braddick (1:50)

Well, thank you, everyone for joining the webinar. I appreciate that we're getting invitations to webinars all the time. Thank you for making time for this one today. 

I have worked as a coach for over 20 years. And in the last couple of years, through some colleagues in the UK, and a group called The Future of Coaching Collaboration. We have been taking a look at what kind of tech is available to clients that we coach via their employers, as well as what kind of technology is coming into the coaching market, whether that be something coaches use or people who are training coaches use, and bringing the different stakeholders from coaching, trainers, coaches, supervisors, the professional bodies together to look at how coaching is already changing and will continue to change our market. I do look at it as a market. I know coaching has spent a lot of time debating: Are we a profession? What is the profession? When we are really a profession? I'm taking a market look at this. This is a market where services are being exchanged in a commercial market, and we have a number of changes coming from technology that it is important to stay up to date on. 

We're very eager to hear your experiences with technology so far, and any of the concerns and questions you have about bringing technology into your coaching practice. So, thank you for joining us.

Alina Trigubenko (03:32)

Thank you so much. I'm Alina and I lead Profi.io. We are on a mission to make sure that the impact of coaches and consultants and trainers is unblocked, and our mission is to scale the impact. 

As a coach myself, I've always struggled with the tech enablement. I saw how many other coaches are struggling because we are here for the craft, for the impact, we're here to help people. 

Instead, unfortunately, we sometimes are forced to juggle multiple tools to play an engineer at night, and overall, think about things that are not native to us. For example, customer experience, client experience, etc. That's why I decided to go on this journey and build Profi, where we let coaches and professional service providers focus on their craft versus technology. 

So, thank you for joining. Let's go to our first slide.

Carol Braddick (4:42)

Okay, so we'll start out. 

This is an image of a very complicated interconnecting highway that I'm suggesting is a way that we can think about and visualize our coaching market. If there are other visuals that come to mind for you, please do share them via the chat. This highway actually used to be quite simple many years ago, as coaches connecting with clients. Then organizations started adopting coaching in much higher numbers, started managing coaching much more carefully, and watched more strategically. 

But we also have a lot of other vehicles and activity on this highway. We have the professional bodies, who are influencing the market by codes of ethics. ICF, for example, is also coming up with some standards for using artificial intelligence in coaching. So, the professional bodies are very much part of the highway now and part of the traffic flow. It's not as common in the US, but with much higher take up in Europe, coach supervisors are also active in this market, being professionally trained as supervisors for your coaching practices. 

Then we have a number of what I will call “providers” to the coaching market - something like Profi - that supports coaches with different sized businesses to manage and grow their practices. But the technology providers are also much more active in this market, whether it's something that is a simple app, or a much more sophisticated digital platform that we can use in delivering our coaching. 

If we don't exactly have a lane on this highway, that corresponds to the high occupancy lane - the lane that gets the benefits during rush hour, because they have a lot of occupants. That's an image that comes to mind for me of what I'll call the “mega scalars” - the very large digital platforms that are having a big influence on what happens on this highway. You probably know them by the names of companies such as Ezra, Pluma, BetterUp. They are scaling coaching to thousands of employees, typically via very large contracts with very large organizations. 

And since we've all been reading and hearing about ChatGPT non stop since about November-December? Yes, there are some self-driving vehicles on this highway. As a market and profession, we're starting to figure out: How can we bring those into coaching? How can we use them safely? How can we use them ethically? 

So, that's one way to look at the market. If there are other images that come to mind, please share those with us. But I think it's clear at this point what is business as usual: that we should all be expecting to operate this way in growing and managing our practices and delivering coaching. We have to be set up for 100% virtual, with in-person as an option if the client expects it. 

We're using transcription services, we might be using apps, some of which come directly from the consumer market that are about habit change, possibilities to use AR and VR within coaching sessions, and then a number of different platforms and tools that help us with scheduling with invoicing. 

So, when we talk about how technology will influence coaching in the future, let's keep in mind, we're building on a baseline that already has quite a bit more tech in it than previously. 

These few titles and events here are a representation of what's changed in terms of how coaching is covered in the literature. The first, how technology is transforming executive coaching. That article is about six years old at this point, but it covered several different tools that coaches could start adopting to use directly with your clients. But then going bigger picture than that, the middle article is an example of how a large organization that uses a lot of coaches - whether they're internal and external - also needs to think about, well, what of our technology might be useful for coaches? Would it be useful for them to see some data on our employees, the data we pick up on employee engagement for example? And what kind of technology might coaches be bringing into their client engagements? And how do our systems talk to one another? 

So, we went from looking at, okay, here's as a coach, you can bring something into your one on one session with a client. Now, we're taking a broader organizational look at it. Then to show an example of how much further it's moved on, this conference that NYU will be hosting in June, it’s actually the second one that's specifically about coaching and technology. That's a conference that will bring together providers from the mega scalars to the very small niche firms, it will bring together providers of tools and resources to the coaching market, as well as academia. So, we start to see a gathering of people from across all lanes in the highway, all focused on technology. 

So, what this highway will look like - it may not even be a highway over the next several years. But here's a couple of things I think will change it, and you may have your own image of what the market will look like. I think we will continue to see coaching at scale - whether that's by internal coaches inside organizations, external coaches, as well as tech-enabled coaching, that will be done via the coaching bots that we're hearing a lot more about, and that are undergoing some very active testing and hackathons right now, but by coaches. Clients - particularly those in large organizations that have access to a lot of sophisticated technology - will also be using different tools that we as coaches should be aware of, because those can bring useful data to our coaching sessions. 

For example, their Microsoft Teams has introduced the meeting assistant that tracks levels of participation in a meeting: Who was involved on what topic? Who signed up to follow up on what tasks? So, that gives us a different kind of baseline. 

Right now, we typically get someone to come to us for coaching, they've been nominated, we might get their latest 360 or their employee engagement report. There's many other sources of data that could be useful for coaching if we as coaches are asking about the kinds of information companies can share to enrich the coaching experience, because each of the clients that come to coaching has established a digital footprint that they add to every day throughout their daily work.

The mega scalars - which we typically associate with the democratization of coaching, getting coaching out to 1000s of employees that have never been eligible for a coach before - are slowly moving up to higher levels within organizations. CoachHub recently launched CoachHub Executive. Ezra, for example - which has always been a part of the parent company, Lee Hecht Harrison - Lee Hecht Harrison has moved its executive coaching into Ezra. So, while they may have started with very large contracts, that middle management or individual contributor level, we should expect them to continue to move up the ranks within organizations for the higher margin work, and to also be using different levels of coaches. You'll hear terms like: Master coach, fellow coach, distinguished, coached, etc. So, their pools of coaches will be differentiated by experience and the level that they work at. 

We've already seen through the pandemic that what companies are willing to pay for in a type of coaching has broadened quite a bit; they have paid more attention to well-being, mental health. I don't know yet how that will change, but what started out as trying to focus mostly on performance and developmental coaching has broadened out to a number of different types of needs that companies are recognizing as worth putting coaching resources behind. So, having opened that up, largely because of the pandemic, it remains to be seen whether that will ever narrow - whether that pendulum might swing the other way. 

I think we will also see some convergence between vendors and activities that are typically associated with learning and development, and those associated with coaching. At the previous NYU conference last year, someone raised the question: “Isn't coaching just going to replace the L&D department and L&D teams? So, I think we'll see some blending of those, and if you think about it, the companies that are pushing content out in a highly personalized way to employees and their customers are in a prime position. They have loads of data on those people, so they're in a prime position to add a coaching element to that content that takes someone from the ideas of the content to actions. 

The other thing I think we'll see - particularly the mega scalars are in a very good position for this - is to integrate very closely with human capital management systems. So, BetterUp, for example, has a partnership with Workday, where Workday is the source of information of what stage someone is at in their job: new joiner, first six months, just changed role. So, that identifies possible points of need for coaching that typically the HR department is gathering in a more manual way or just less efficient way. But now it's actually wrapped into via the workday system. So, that is served up: here are the people going through these types of changes. 

Speaking of change, I have recently been through a couple of examples where a large company that works with hundreds of coaches globally did a reevaluation of their coaching suppliers. They have previously worked with many independent solopreneur coaches that are managing smaller practices that would use a platform such as Profi. Their decision was to take a certain level of employees - say Director, Team Leader, individual contributors - and move all of that coaching over to one of the mega scalars. So, coaches who had previously worked with that level of employee were given the option to apply to affiliate with the mega scalar if they wanted to continue coaching at that level. So, we do see companies thinking through: What is the mix of suppliers that we want? At what level? Where do the mega scalars fit in? At what level? And there are some change management challenges in that - within the organization. How do they communicate that to leaders who are looking to work for a coach? How do they communicate that to HR business partners, who have built up strong relationships with coaches over the years and are suddenly told, “This is our coaching supplier for those people from now on.” So, I think we will continue to see that kind of rethinking of how we choose and engage suppliers. 

We will talk about Coach bots, ChatGPT a bit later on, but this is still being talked about as a complement to human coaching. So, the business model that we may need to be prepared for is one in which we utilize a coach spot perhaps in between coaching sessions that follows up on actions that prompts your coaching client to go further with the plans and steps that you and that coaching client have talked about. Aiir recently introduced that into their technology platform. 

So, what it could mean in the future is that coaches will be doing fewer sessions, because we have technology - not only just automating processes to be more efficient - but also engaging with a client in between sessions. So, the net impact of that is if you wanted to keep your revenue at the same level, we will all need to find more clients because we will be pricing our work differently, because it consists both of the sessions which have typically been the revenue generator, what we charge for, but there's also this adjunct piece, potentially, of using any one of the coach bots that will be coming onto the market. 

When we think about all this technology, obviously, this we need to integrate with our client systems, particularly if you're working with very large organizations that will have very heavy duty procurement processes. So, anytime that technology adoption starts to go up, and Alina and her team will know this very well, it calls for integration, management of permissions, understanding, clarifying via the contracts, who has access to what type of data. 

In terms of managing our practices, we already have options now to work with a service such as Profi, to help us with the admin, but also these services will increasingly offer - and we'll talk about some of the kinds of potential partnerships. 

So, those are some of the changes I think will happen. I don't know whether that translates into a different image - whether it's a highway picture, or maybe you have some other idea of what it's going to look like. Is there a change you're expecting that maybe we haven't covered? Would anyone like to jump in on that now? 

We will keep an eye on chat. If you'd like to make any comments or questions about other trends that you would expect to see. I think - as always been the case - that technology will move a lot faster than our ethics codes can catch up to it. So, we are building the guardrails for the ethical use of technology as we speak. I think we will always be chasing something that keeps moving.

Alina Trigubenko (21:42)

Yeah, technology is definitely fascinating. Technology is an amplifier, right? 

So, I really am hoping that ChatGPT is being excessively coached, not just trained, but also excessively coached to get rid of any biases, or at least minimize revenue, if it's possible to completely avoid any biases, to minimize biases, and help us be a better partner in our coaching processes. 

Of course, I don't think ChatGPT or AI will ever completely substitute humans, it will actually make a human-to-human connection a separate category and a lot more expensive and valuable, because AI and technology will just augment and optimize a lot of the journey, a lot of the not human-to-human interaction related tasks. So, I'm very excited to see what ChatGPT is going to do for the industry. 

What's your take? What do you think about ChatGPT specifically, and the implications of AI in coaching?

Carol Braddick (23:02)

Is that something you're asking our participants to comment on?

Alina Trigubenko (23:08)

I'm asking you and also the participants.

Carol Braddick (23:11)

Okay. Well, I'm very glad to see that it's being tested now by coaches who - as you say - are coaching ChatGPT to be a better coach, and setting out with those tests and hackathons using very specific questions like, “how well can it handle a conversation about - for example - coaching goals?” So, we're not just jumping into these tests seeing where it goes, but also trying to apply what we know about coaching to see how well it can respond and build up its understanding of the coaching model. 

For example, if someone's trying to engage ChatGPT in a coaching conversation that runs along the lines of the GROW Model, for example. I like what you said before Alina about how technology “amplifies” because there was a comment I saw recently on LinkedIn about how some of the use of this technology would lead to biases, and I paused on that for a minute thinking, “Well, all of us as users come in with biases.” So, yes, technology can amplify those biases. It can amplify the impact of those biases. I'm still thinking over what it would need for new biases, because, gosh, we've got enough. We all come in with biases. 

But, on the other hand, AI and data analytics can also pick up examples of how different groups are treated at work, what different groups experience at work. So, on one hand, obviously, it exposes us to some risks, but it can also reveal issues that we need to take action on. 

So, I'm glad to see coaches engaging and testing with it. I see that many are hesitant to allow something to be in the same room, so to speak, very concerned about the loss of human connection. But as you said, it may never fully replace the conversation one-on-one with the human coach, but it can complement. 

There are other organizations setting up, with it with a different mission, more of a social entrepreneurial mission of providing coaching via AI, digitally, to populations all over the world that would never have the potential to work with a human coach. So, in a way, that's a bottoms up approach, that they may start with an experience that's completely digital, and may at some point, opt in if they have the resources to to work with a human coach.

Alina Trigubenko (26:24)

I have some questions here. “Will this webinar recording be shared?” Yes. 

And Crystal, chat should be enabled. Please do share your question in the Q&A forum if that doesn't work for you. 

There is also a comment by an anonymous attendee. “There has been a mixed response, not only about the power of ChatGPT, but AI in general. What can we, as coaches who are having a hard time integrating tech in our practice, do to keep up?”

Carol Braddick (26:59)

Good question. It is hard to keep up. My colleagues and I who are very much trying to keep up also feel challenged by that. I think we should be asking our coaching professional organizations - ICF, Association for Coaching, EMCC - to assist us with that; to continue to hold webinars, to bring in providers, to discuss the ethics issues. They are in a position to gather large groups of coaches, which will create an even bigger incentive for vendors of the technology to share information about their products.

I have seen ICF hold sessions that are just for coaches, where coaches who have worked with some of the very large mega scalars talk about their experience working with the mega scalar, what it's like, what are the pros and cons. ICF New York, for example, is having a session on AI in early March. 

So, one is our professional organizations. Two is keeping in touch via LinkedIn, for example, the NYU conference that is coming up. 

Then, the other is the organization, the businesses that you're already working with, such as Profi, or you may be working with other solution providers that help you grow and manage your practice. Go to them and ask them to bring in some of those resources, some of those speakers, and also for you to be part of that conversation where you influence the roadmap. And they invite you into the conversations about what their product roadmap is, so you have a voice in shaping that. 

Anyone else have any thoughts on how to keep up with something that keeps changing?

Alina Trigubenko (29:10)

Yeah, while we're getting more questions, I just want to add that it's very important to partner with the right tech provider, because nowadays, given the state of the economy where we are basically forced to consolidate, it's a really good time that reminds us that we have to focus and you can focus on you have a single source of truth where you have everything that's related to your business, to your clients, in one place. So, it's very easy to spot any opportunities or challenges related to your client experience or to your business. 

It's our job, as tech enablers, as platform providers, to support you through the first sale to full scale, though down markets and up market opportunities, and to watch out and to integrate with partners like ChatGPT, or other players in the market to make sure you, as a coach or scaling coaching organization, is fully equipped to scale and focus on helping people instead of managing tech and thinking about how to integrate AI into your workflow to make sure that your client experience is cohesive. Overall, your service delivery process is optimized. 

That's what we at Profi are thinking about day and night. Personally, I have dreams about optimizing service delivery processes for coaching organizations. 

I love what you mentioned about what we call “design partnership” internally at Profi, but making sure that your voice, as a user, as a client of a platform, is being heard. I always say that it takes a village to build and scale a software product. So, that village consists of a community of users, a community of customers, and a community of clients.

Carol Braddick (31:26)

There’s a question: “How are you planning to integrate AI into the Profi platform and which features would have the most potential?” Is that something you want to comment on now?

Alina Trigubenko (31:40)

AI is definitely on top of mind for us right now. We integrate with different players in the market and we’re just waiting for enough of our clients to raise their hands and say, “Hey, Profi. We really need AI in our workflow. We can’t operate without it.” 

Right now, we’re solving more fundamental problems for our clients, which AI has not been a part of. I know it’s all over the media, but I haven’t seen any coach say, “Hey, I can’t service this account without AI” yet. I know those times are coming, but as everything in this life has cycles, I think some of them are more hyped than others. So, we’ll see. 

Our roadmap is primarily driven by our clients. We always listen and get solid feedback on the roadmap, on how we’re going to execute, and what we need to integrate with. So, if any of our clients say, “I can’t operate without it.” We’ll see. But also preventively, we’ll be checking out ways that AI - specifically ChatGPT - could make our coaches, our partners, and our clients’ lives easier. So, nothing solid yet, but again, whenever there’s an opportunity to make the coach's life easier, we act on it. 

Thank you for the question.

Carol Braddick (33:13)

The potential impact of AI, ChatGPT, bots, etc. So, purely digital coaching where the coach is digital. How will that affect coach fees? 

I think the impact depends on what your business model is as a coaching provider. For the mega scalers, like Ezra or BetterUp, I don’t see it having a good impact on coach fees that they would be charging clients because they’re already bringing technology to their coaching processes and are funded enough that they can build that independently or buy that technology. I would not see that having a big impact on coach fees. If it has an impact on the number of hours of human coaching, that might bring down the total costs of coaching for each individual. 

If you’re a small practice, I think it’s unclear on this point how we should price our bringing in some kind of bot for coaching, for example. But if you’re a small practice or a solopreneur, you probably work on a small network, your best chance is - at least initially, to use something like ChatGPT or AI - to sign up with a service, like Profi, or other provider that has partnership with a group that has specifically designed a bot for coaching. So, you would essentially be buying your subscription via a partner that you already deal with. 

I think it might take a while for market to see coaching as a big enough use case that any of us could sign up for a package with a coach bot that we could then white label to our own practice and use that with our clients, and the pricing that vendor of that would charge is a bit to be determined. 

So, I do think the biggest impact on fees will be how many hours you’re actually working with clients. But let’s also recognize that the mega scalers have already had a very big impact on coach fees because I think we all know that the hourly rate that they are paying to coaches is much lower than what coaches would be charging when they’re working independently. So, there’s more than one force operating on the market that has an influence on coach fees. 

Anyone else have a view or question about that? How do we price that additional piece we may bring into the coaching engagement? For example, we’ve all gotten used to including a Hogan assessment or an MBTI into our coaching engagement. You probably charge a markup on that, you might charge that at cost to your client, but you’re probably charging for the time it takes you to administer that or may have someone on your team working at a lower rate that handles that for you. 

Alina Trigubenko (37:11)

A while ago, we actually tested introducing a customizable and configurable bot into the platform. Its primary use case was to collect client information, to basically turn forms into a conversational format, and provide some sort of automated responses, and the interesting observation there was that our higher-ticket clients that were serving executive sectors didn’t want that bot, because by the client, it was perceived as though they were cutting costs and it was automatically creating a conflict. “Why, as a client, who’s paying a high price for an engagement that is partially automated?” 

So, it’s interesting. I think bots and ChatGPT will actually emphasize the value of coaching. I don’t think it can minimize the value or affect the ticket as much, because it is just a part of the journey. I don’t think it will be a substitute - maybe for the early stage of coaching engagement,  to collect data or perform certain admin tasks, it will be used widely - but not in coaching sessions. 

So, we have a couple more questions. Thank you so much everyone. 

Carol Braddick (39:04)

Yeah, interesting question about whether we think less coaches will be needed in the future. Well,  I think let’s first look at the current state. The study that Henley did looking at coaching during and post-pandemic - as well as survey data that was shared at the last NYU conference - did show that coaches really aren’t putting in a lot of hours. There are not that many coaches who are full-time coaches; they’re consulting, training, they have other sources of revenue. So, to a certain extent, one could say the market is over-supplied and perhaps it has been for sometime. 

By looking at it on the demand side, Sounding Board’s most recent research of learning leaders showed that those that weren’t using coaching, up until to this point, do plan to add coaching as an option to their employees within the next 2 years. So, if companies continue with that level of demand, then I think the current supply is more than adequate. I think it would be some time before - if ever happens - any kind of AI coaching becomes a full substitute for working with a human coach. So, it may have a small impact, but I would put the caveat on that the market already has very large supply that isn’t being fully utilized. 

There is a question from Michael. Hi Michael. 

“How do digital coaching companies like Ezra and BetterUp manage their coaches and make sure that they are experienced enough? Many of these companies have thousands of employees to manage.” Well, they all do vet their coaches, requiring some kind of certification and as a buyer of coaching, I would actually ask: Which certification do you require? What’s that certification needed? All of these different acronyms that we have for the certifications. For the digital provider to know what that certification means and to be very clear on the level and years of experience that their coaches have. If they’re using distinctions like Master Coach or Fellow Coach to explain what those mean. To be able to provide profiles that are representative and demonstrate the kind of experience and qualifications that are associated with those different levels. 

I think they are in a very good position to manage their effectiveness, perhaps much better or easier than a small group of coaches, because everything the coach and client do in the coaching interaction - when you're working with the large digital providers - every step you take produces data and it will add to your digital footprint. So, if they want to check if clients that have a coaching session on Tuesday afternoons are happier and more satisfied than clients that have coaching sessions on Wednesday, they have data that can help answer that question. 

Now that’s a very silly question, but I’m trying to make a point that they have an enormous amount of data. They have a huge team of data scientists, so they are able to capture data from coaches, from clients, blend in organizational data - by connecting to the people analytics teams - and create a rich picture of effectiveness and impact. 

Where I do have some questions is if most of the coaches are using some kind of drop down menu to report, “Well, I’m working with the client on influence skills.” or “I’m working with a client on executive presence.” and choose those on a dropdown menu. Now, if 10 coaches listen to my three coaching sessions, would we use the same choice on the dropdown menu? Maybe not, but that’s part of the data roll up that goes up to the corporate buyer that tells them “25% of our coaches are working on influence skills.” To me, there’s some softness in that data I question. 

So, I hope that it answers your questions about effectiveness, Michael and if there’s something else that we haven’t covered, let us know. 

Alina Trigubenko (44:28)

Thank you so much. Just to add a couple of notes. I know that, for example, BetterUp, Ezra, and other platform-first coaching service providers, have their own frameworks that have advantages and also it has its limitations to us, coaches, that have developed our own framework, and have their own unique experience, and specialty. 

So, actually, one of the top use cases that we serve with Profi is when a coaching organization comes to us and says, “Hey, I want to compete with platforms like BetterUp or Ezra, but I can’t because I’m a service-first company. I’m not a platform company.” That’s where we partner and provide all of the enablement they need to collect data, analyze the data, run all of the workflows efficiently, collect all of the forms, and communicate securely. 

Also, when the coaching organizations start selling to the corporate sector, there’s a lot that they need to figure out if they’re not tech-enabled. For example, additional security compliances, how is data stored? And as a service provider, you’re using multiple tools. It’s just impossible, because you can’t be sure that you’re signing an agreement on data security with all of the providers. 

On average, right now, we substitute or integrate with 24 different tools in our corporate plan and imagine how many people you will need running at the backend, pouring the data from one system to another. That’s why we decided to go on the journey to partner with scaling coaching organizations, because I saw the struggle. There are so many beautiful techniques and frameworks out there and our job is not to limit the coaching market, our job is to enable and to maximize. That’s what we are doing - providing an all-in-one platform holistically designed for the coaching use case, as well as, training and consulting too. 

So, those companies like BetterUp and Ezra are doing an amazing job of being able to sell to the corporate sector very efficiently, as well as, convert, engage, activate, and renew. That’s about what our Product team is laser-focused on - on making sure that we help coaches activate and engage their clients better.

It’s been very interesting actually. There are some insights that we’ve collected. For example, number one - clients also need all-in-one. One of the biggest struggles in the industry is client activation and client engagement, and especially if you, as a coaching agency, are running a full court base, hybrid coaching experience. If you’re not activating the clients the right way, that will come with expense and missed revenue in your opportunities. And that's what we think and design for. 

Carol Braddick (48:28)

There’s an additional type of adoption and take up challenge that some the large digital provider there’s a experience that their pricing models said that very effective and selling large contracts of hours of coaching but it’s up to the organization to activate that interest so people actually sign up for that is already paid for. Adoption is a challenge and I also do hear from coaches that I worked with some of the large providers that the employees signing into their coaching session haven’t really received much information about why coaching why now why me. A bit of very long days a long time ago when someone shows up on the training program and you will say how did you get. And I will say hey I got a memo at the time not an email and they don’t have any contact that is why they are on the training program. I think there’s some room for improvement so that it will be efficient. The client needs to login and you're up and running but for the client to be prepared for that. There’s a question on privacy and ethics you said about AI. Yes, absolutely anytime with dealing with people’s data that's gonna bring privacy and ethical concerns and adding AI on that picture graces the stakes evenmore I think the coaching are on to this and take it very seriously and are all doing different types of work in this area. I mentioned earlier ICF is coming with a set of standards to evaluate tools that use AI in coaching and they are going to look at it very closely and potentially rating tools. Now they will have to sell the value of the reading in the market so it becomes important to vendors. ICF said that their tools meet our standards. I think the professional bodies are taking the lead on that. When AI is used in coaching that your chief data officer or in the company will be the subject and the new one appointed such as although we may be engaging clients using AI we still want them to have choice and to be able to make decisions. Yes that might come up in the use of different types of technology but it’s critically important in coaching. There’s a resource that I can actually point you to. I will share it with Alina after the call. She might be probably doing some post communications to everyone so I see if that can be included in there.  

Alina Trigubenko (52:27)

Yeah I know that for example Amazon asked their employees to refrain from using chatGPT for now because they are also concerned about ethical and real world data mining and opportunities. I'm wondering since chatGPT and AI have been doing some interesting steps by augmenting lawyers too. If we were to ask an AI chatGPT to write code frameworks without having biases then. I think it’s a good test. But we’ll see right now everything is exponential technology scaling exponentially we will see rapid development. I'm sure there’s a lot of movement happening in an ethical framework space, especially coaching. I'm very excited to see what comes out of it. And I can’t wait to read this next. Do you want to add anything? 

Carol Braddick (53:27)

There’s a question about real-time language translation in video conferencing.

Alina Trigubenko (53:44)

But yeah, There’s one before let me translate to AI video translation. We don’t have single conferencing one is our native which hipaa compliant it enables you to facilitate health and wellness data kind of exchange so but we don't have real-time language translation and the second integration we have is ZOOM we are on the month and so we are adding microsoft integration and google meet integration those given zoom has huge emphasis on developing its market place and turning into a platform they will mostly suggest something or they already have but that’s not really our curious case. Our curious case is to facilitate the seamless and streamline professional service for coaching organizations. So we are optimizing for it but if there’s a partner that we find again there’s nothing our client suggests that we can’t operate, we can accommodate to that needs. There’s another question: Profi is one of the powerful, considerate coaching platforms you come across. Thank you so much. I make sure to pass it over to the team that works hard day and night on scaling profi and building profi. Are you considering a white label version or business corporate to their own website or customer dashboard? Great question. Depending what you mean by white label We do have a customer hosted white label version that means that on the certain screens you will see that the platform is powered by profi. Everything else your platform is hosted on your own domain and configurable into your needs. Why do we keep them powered by profi on a certain area? I don’t think that there’s a company that wants their platform developed by somebody else second because of a certain security for frameworks. Our mission is for the coaching organization to focus on our service and technology. That's why we work on a lot of lawyers, a lot of registrations and security data scientists. Leave it to us to work on these resources. So it’s fully integrated on the website and the customer dashboards too really depending on the use case customer dashboard of profi and vice versa. And we are a month or so from the release. We have accounts depending on how you set up and configure profi and we are not going to force some profi accounts on a guest mode. We are doing a client review on this functionality so good question. Our business focuses on remembering data and engagement and customer experience through our member area and we will ask them not to sign up on any other third party. Absolutely yes, we actually allow single sign out. Definitely it’s all about customer experience that how we can differentiate and provide top-notch customized professional service experience for coaching organizations. So only by streamlining the client experience and making sure that they don’t need to login to so many tools and keep them from asking why they are sending that link where was that note posted. Where did I fill out the intake form before engagement so I can track myself how I am progressing my engagement so these are everything that we work on. So thank you for the question.

Carol Braddick (58:42)

Okay, Thank you. The question whether the bot or AI engagement with group or team coaching too. Yes, It  depends on how you finding coaching but if you look at the latest from microsoft team for example but I do agree with Alina what she said about Zoom and other providers they are all building more sophisticated platform into their packages it’s going to be important to choose who you worked with for example to help you grow and manage your practice understand what partnership they have with those provider that they give you an advantage and being able to use their new technology sooner that you might be able to find out just on your own business. But back to this question, yes the microsoft team, their starting point just one example is to paride feedback data into the team and who is involved and part of the discussion who have what portion of air time who’s running with different tasks. I think they will increase the type of data to capture during group sessions.  And start to feed it back to individuals on the team either real time or post meeting to be able give  information on how we interact as a team and it will start with data for example insights data to and employee probability just to mine data on their outlook and calendar. So I think it will start on feeding back data and there’s a question about okay what does the group do with this type of data. Just to add a note to our coaches that’s part of our USPH coaches that we help people go from data to insight to actions and changes. So if nothing else we should pay attention to what kind of technology and data our clients have that we can leverage on coaching. 

Alina Trigubenko (1:01:26)

Thank you so much we’re running out of time. Thank you everyone, it has been full of discussion and I’m very excited to continue the conversation and please do reach out to me personally Alina at profi if there’s anything I can help you with your digital enablement or optimizing your overall infrastructure to make sure you can deliver outstanding professional service experience to your clients. Thank you so much carol it has been very exciting to learn from you.

Carol Braddick (1:02:15)

Likewise and thank you everyone for your question.

Alina Trigubenko (1:02:17)

Thank you. Bye.

Thursday, February 23, 2023
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