The Edge of Human and AI

What if the biggest barrier to AI in coaching isn't the technology — it's the coach? Jonathan Reitz has spent 29 years coaching leaders and building coaches. He has a wildly unlikely backstory — electrical engineering, stand-up comedy, radio, TV news — and an ADHD diagnosis just two years ago that finally explained all of it. Now a leading voice at the NYU AI Summit and ICF Germany, Jonathan joins...

What if the best way to be more human as a coach... is to use more AI? In this episode, Rebecca is joined by David E. Cooley — Director of Alumni Career Services and Executive Coach at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and founder of the David E. Cooley Executive Coaching Scholarship at NYU. David bridges two worlds: the strategic use of AI in coaching sessions, and the deeply human skill of...

What happens when a room full of coaches, researchers, and tech innovators gathers in New York — and the biggest question isn't about AI, but about coaching itself? In this special Guardians LIVE episode, Rebecca and Viva la Coaching community members who attended the 5th Annual NYU Coaching & Technology Summit reflect on what stayed with them, what made them uncomfortable, and what the coaching p...

Join Rebecca as she sits down with Neal Sundberg (Director of Care Programs at Brightline) and Nicholas Wooters (Co-Founder of Coya) during a Webinar for a deeply personal conversation about thriving as a leader both at work and at home. Discover how wearable technology paired with health coaching creates powerful insights for managing stress, setting boundaries, and showing up fully in every role...

Dr. Moain Abu Dabrh is a medical humanist, researcher at Mayo Clinic, and board member at the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching — and he's been asking one question his entire career:  How can we make care more intelligent without making it less human? In this conversation with Rebecca Rutschmann, he unpacks four real concerns about AI in healthcare — dehumanization, overconfidence, i...

Susan Caesar is the first-ever Chief AI Officer at the International Coaching Federation and founder of Humane Org. Her career has had one red thread: being human. And her message to the coaching profession right now? You don't have to figure this out alone. In this conversation with Rebecca Rutschmann, Susan makes a passionate case for community as the antidote to overwhelm — AI circles, chapter...

What if AI isn't pushing us away from our humanity but is forcing us back to it? Dr. Anna Tavis, co-founder of the NYU Coaching & Technology Summit, joins Rebecca Rutschmann to mark five years at the intersection of coaching and technology. From a handful of masked startups and early scale-ups in 2022 to CHROs from Netflix and IBM rethinking everything — the landscape has transformed, and coaches...

Health coaching is growing fast — wearables are tracking everything, AI is entering the wellness space, and more people than ever are looking for support beyond the clinic. But who's making sure any of it actually works? Deanna Fournier and the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching are. In this conversation, Deanna unpacks why a rigorous credentialing body isn't bureaucracy — it's protec...

There are 120,000 certified coaches on the planet. There are 4 billion people who could use one. And right now, it's tech companies — not coaches — who are deciding what coaching means for all of them. Lewin, founder of  CoachBot.ai , joins Rebecca Rutschmann for one of the most honest conversations in this series. A former Google engineer turned coach turned AI builder, he pulls no punches on the...

Woody Woodward has coached senior executives, built a Master's degree at NYU, co-authored  The Digital Coaching Revolution , co-created the NYU Coaching & Technology Summit in 2022 and is now Chief Coaching Officer at BetterUp, leading the world's largest coaching network of 4,000 coaches across 70 countries. In this conversation, Woody shares what four million coaching sessions and the world's la...

Nicky Terblanche is the world's leading researcher in AI coaching. He recently received the Anthony Grant Award for Research Excellence at the IOC Conference in Boston, named after the researcher who inspired him to care about evidence in the first place. A full-circle moment worth celebrating, A former software engineer turned coach turned academic, he started thinking about the possibilities bef...

The coaching conversation has been obsessing over one question: how is AI changing coaching? Pam Krulitz thinks we're asking the wrong one. The more important question — the one nobody's talking about loudly enough — is how AI is changing the leaders we coach. Because the people sitting across from us now aren't the same leaders they were three years ago. They're navigating constant change, managi...

As Program Director of the Headspace Training Institute — training the next generation of mental health coaches — Shelby sits at one of the most critical intersections in coaching today: where AI meets mental health, and where getting it wrong has real consequences. This conversation is about what getting it right actually looks like. At Headspace, that means clinical safety guardrails with human...

What if the most powerful coaching relationship in the future involves three parties — a human coach, an AI, and the space between them that neither could create alone? Jonathan Kirschner has been thinking about this longer than most. He built AIIR (Assessment, Insight, Implementation, Reinforcement) in 2009 to bring behavioral science and structure to what Harvard Business Review called "the Wild...

Coaching is changing. AI is here. And nobody has all the answers yet. The Edge of Human & AI is the podcast for coaches, leaders, and thinkers who want to go deeper than the hype — into the real questions about what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. Bold conversations. Uncomfortable edges. No easy answers. Welcome to the Edge. https://vivalacoaching.com/vivapodcast/