One to one

AI coaching and mentoring for business leaders

You are expected to have a view on AI before you have had time to form one properly.

This is private, practical work with someone who has implemented AI in a real business: closing your own knowledge gap first, then turning it into a plan you can defend and execute. One to one, or a small group of leaders from the same company. Delivered online wherever you are, or in person in Ho Chi Minh City.

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Why a coach rather than a consultant

A consultant hands you a recommendation that you then have to carry, defend and update without them. Coaching builds the judgement, so the decisions are yours and you can keep making them once the engagement ends. That matters more than usual with AI, because the ground moves every few months and a recommendation ages faster than the ability to think about one.

We have been running AI inside our own business for two and a half years. Using it daily across research, drafting, analysis and client delivery, including the experiments that failed and were dropped. The useful guidance is rarely about what the technology can do. It is about what breaks, what people quietly refuse to use, what costs more than it saves, and what a realistic first ninety days looks like.

The coaching is delivered by Ivan Botha of International Business Coaches.

The landscape, without the hype

What these systems genuinely do, where they are strong, and where a confident answer is simply wrong. In plain language, with no assumed technical background.

The tools actually worth paying for

There are hundreds and most are noise. We work through what is relevant to your business, what it would cost, and what it would replace.

A plan you can put to a board

Where AI changes the economics of your business specifically, what to try first, the budget and the stop conditions, and how to scale what works beyond the first team.

How it runs

One to one

The usual shape. Private sessions built around what you actually have to decide, at a pace set by your diary rather than a course calendar.

Or a small cohort

Three or four leaders from the same business who can be candid with each other. Better where the constraint is alignment at the top rather than knowledge.

Wherever you are

Online across the region and beyond, or in person in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnamese or English. These are conversations, so remote loses very little.

What a first engagement looks like

Nothing about this is fixed, and a leader who arrives with one specific decision will skip most of it. This is the shape when someone starts from the beginning.

  1. 1A first conversation, free, to establish what you actually have to decide and by when. It is also where we say so if we are not the right people.
  2. 2A session on the landscape, aimed at your sector and your economics rather than at AI in general. This is usually where the fog clears.
  3. 3A working session on your own business: where these tools would genuinely help, where they would not, and what a first attempt would cost.
  4. 4A plan drafted by you and challenged by us. What you are trying, the budget, who owns it, and the point at which you would stop.
  5. 5Sessions alongside implementation, at whatever pace the work needs. Some leaders want fortnightly contact through the first quarter; others come back only when they hit something.

Who this is not for

It is not technical training. If what you need is for engineers to build with these tools, we are the wrong provider and will say so in the first conversation.

It is also a poor fit for a leader who wants a recommendation handed to them. The point is that the judgement ends up with you, and that takes participation. If what you want is a strategy document written by somebody else, a consultancy will serve you better, and we would rather tell you that than take the work.

Where it usually goes next

Once a leader knows what they want to do, the problem changes shape. The direction is settled and the organisation cannot yet execute it, which is a capability question rather than a strategy one. That is the point at which the work moves from one person to a cohort. Plenty of leaders take the coaching and stop there, and that is a perfectly good outcome.