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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Digital Boost 3.0 Helps New Brunswick’s Vision Coaching Scale Leadership Development with AI

CYBER, DATA, AI
June 10, 2026

Challenges

  • Developing coaching skill takes repetition, and repetition depends on scarce, expensive mentor time.
  • With no shared standard, feedback quality varied, and progress was hard to track.
  • They needed to scale without eliminating the relationships that make coaching work.

Services provided

  • AI opportunity assessment and problem definition.
  • Value stream mapping across Vision Coaching’s core workflows.
  • Strategic technology advisory and execution planning.
  • Design and build of a voice-based AI coaching practice platform.
  • Automated transcript capture and a standardized evaluation engine.
  • Evaluation rubric developed to score practice sessions against Vision Coaching’s proven coaching standards.
  • HubSpot workflow improvements to smooth handoffs, strengthen data quality, and increase automation.

Results

  • From concept to working platform in approximately one month, accessible on any device, without requiring mentor coach time for every practice session.
  • Each session delivers consistent, objective feedback tracked over time.
  • Unlocking a new standalone assessment offering that extends the program's reach and creates a new revenue stream.
  • A globally scalable product with licensing potential and strong early market interest.
From Bottleneck to Breakthrough

For more than 20 years, Vision Coaching has helped leaders across North America build the skills that good work alone doesn't teach. Headquartered in Saint John, New Brunswick, the firm delivers executive coaching, team coaching and other leadership development services, including its proprietary Using the Coach Approach™ program – a structured approach to building coaching skills inside organizations.

With a roster of International Coaching Federation-certified coaches and clients spanning healthcare, manufacturing, technology and professional services, Vision Coaching's challenge was scale: coaching mastery requires hours of realistic practice, and mentor coach time was the bottleneck.

The answer was the Vision Coaching Lab. Built in partnership with NorthBound Advisory through Digital Boost 3.0, a New Brunswick program funding practical digital transformation, the platform delivers on-demand practice and consistent, detailed, feedback on every practice session.

You don’t have to be a technology company to innovate. You need a clear problem, the right partners and the willingness to experiment.
— Pete Stoddart, COO, Vision Coaching
 

 

Assessment Phase

NorthBound Advisory led the assessment by first mapping how work moved through Vision Coaching, using its value stream approach to identify where technology, automation, and AI could create the most practical value. The work looked across client acquisition and onboarding, coaching delivery, and coach onboarding, identifying eight AI and automation opportunities.

The Vision Coaching Lab emerged as one of the highest-value opportunities because developing coaching skill requires repetition, and repetition depends heavily on mentor coach time. Because of its strategic importance and near-term value, it was selected as one of the priorities for the first release.

That first release also included improvements to Vision Coaching’s HubSpot flow, helping smooth the coaching engagement pipeline, strengthen data quality, improve handoffs and notifications, and add automation to reduce manual coordination as the business scales.

Implementation Phase

The team began not with technology but with a clearly defined business problem, scoping the smallest version that could deliver real value. An early prototype, internally called the AI Mentor Coach, confirmed that a realistic AI coaching conversation paired with structured feedback was both possible and useful. Through discovery and testing, it evolved into the Vision Coaching Lab, with a sharper focus on building coaching skills at scale. Concept to a working MVP took approximately one month.

The Lab guides a leader through four steps: choose a persona and scenario, hold a realistic voice-based coaching conversation with the AI, receive an automatic transcript, and receive a structured feedback report scored consistently against an evaluation rubric developed around Vision Coaching’s own coaching standards.

The AI does not replace the mentor coach. It removes the bottleneck, scaling practice while keeping the human relationship at the centre.

The goal was never to replace coaches. Great coaching is built on human connection, trust and insight. What excites me about the Vision Coaching Lab is that it allows leaders to practice, receive meaningful feedback, and accelerate their development in ways that simply weren’t possible before.
— Dave Veale, CEO, Vision Coaching
The Results

The result depended on more than technology. Digital Boost 3.0 reduced the financial risk of experimenting. Vision Coaching brought the methodology, coaching expertise, and deep understanding of what good coaching looks like. NorthBound Advisory acted as a trusted strategic and technical partner, helping Vision Coaching clarify the path from opportunity to execution while leading the technical build.

That combination allowed a non-technical organization to move from idea to working AI product in approximately one month. It also helped Vision Coaching make practical choices about where AI belonged, how it should support the business, and how to preserve the human relationships at the centre of the coaching experience.

Today, Vision Coaching stands apart as a deliberate, coach-centered adopter of AI, in conscious contrast to organizations rushing to deploy technology without understanding client needs. The Vision Coaching Lab keeps the coaching relationship at its core and integrates AI in service of the firm's mission: to build the kind of leadership that is creative, resilient, and compassionate.

Digital Transformation Digital Boost NorthBound Advisory Vision Coaching