The Existential Crisis Behind Productizing AI

Before we built our AI coaching tool, we had to confront a harder truth: we hadn’t defined what coaching was.

From the Confessional.

Designing our "Agentic" Coaching tool was a near existential crisis for me.

As in: laying on the floor of my office for hours pretending to "meditate." Six-mile runs that solved nothing. Bottomless cups of coffee that became a personality disorder. All the while secretly wishing someone would either make a decision or put me into retirement.

And then it hit.

The question wasn't "what do we build?" It was "what do we actually believe coaching should become?"

Oh shit. Anything but that.

More coffee. More meditation.

It's easy to build software that does what we've always done, just faster. The problem with AI is it makes it even easier to generate more noise under the guise of intelligence.

Call-by-call recommendations. Agent rankings. Performance analytics that look impressive in meetings. None of it actually changes anything. Just makes the chaos prettier.

Pig, meet lipstick.

So we went back to the beginning.

We were handing decision-making over to something that doesn't understand context. We were automating coaching without defining what coaching actually was.

AI doesn't just follow instructions. It amplifies assumptions. Every bias you don't address becomes a feature. Every value you don't define becomes a blind spot that scales.

We had to define Operational Excellence on a blank canvas. Not what the technology looks like but what the outcomes look like. What it feels like to be coached toward your potential instead of managed toward compliance.

We don't need guardrails. We need doctrine. We don't need more data. We need direction. We need to bridge the chasm between possibility and practice.

Define objectives. Map trajectories. Know your destination before you plot the pathway.

AI isn't the coach. It's the pathfinder.

But first, you have to know where you're going.

The tool that nearly broke me taught me this: Most companies are building solutions to problems they've never actually defined. They're automating workflows they've never questioned. Adding intelligence to systems that were fundamentally stupid to begin with.

Define your Ethos first, and let the tools follow.