Workshop Responsible by Design | ZHAW Institute of Applied Psychology IAP

18 September 2026

What it really takes to build a safe and high quality AI reflection tool for leaders, learners, and teams.

AI can now act as a career coach's reflection partner, a leader's personal thinking space, an HR team's onboarding companion, or an L&D program's learning coach, but most of what's out there isn't actually good at it. This hands-on workshop gives coaches, leaders, HR professionals, and L&D practitioners a practical framework for building AI reflection tools that work: safe and ethical, yes, but also sharp enough to ask a real question, hold a silence, and help someone think better – not just faster. No coding or prior AI experience required. You should have used AI before.

Designing AI reflection tools for real-world coaching

This workshop equips participants with the knowledge, frameworks and practical tools to design AI reflection tools that are effective, trustworthy and ready for use in real-world coaching settings.

Foundations: what AI actually is, and the critical difference between AI Coaching and AI in Coaching.
What makes a reflection prompt actually good: question quality, pacing, and the difference between a tool that just validates you and one that helps you think.
Standards & responsible design: ethical boundaries, disclosure practices, and data compliance basics that keep a reflection partner safe to use with real people.
The 3 tiers of AI coaching experiences – from a single prompt to a full multi-stage platform and where to realistically start.
Practical design tools: a lightweight Strategy Canvas (who it's for, what it should and shouldn't do) and the IMPACT Framework for structured prompt-building.
Testing for safety: how to tell whether a reflection tool is actually good enough to put in front of a client, leader or employee.

Goals

Understand what genuinely separates an AI Coaching experience from AI in Coaching and what makes one effective versus generic.
Be able to design a reflection tool with intention: target user, scope, and the qualities – challenge, depth, real questions – that make it worth using.
Leave with a working, peer-tested self-reflection prompt built on a repeatable framework, ready to use in your own practice or organization.
How to evaluate any AI reflection tool – your own or someone else's – against clear, responsible-design criteria.

Target audience

HR or L&D leaders and coaches who are ready to move from experimenting with AI to designing, building or selecting and rolling it out with intentions safely, ethically, and in service of real human development.

Details

We look forward to a varied and inspiring day with you and invite you to mark the date in your calendar:

Date
18 September 2026
9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. – one hour lunch break

Cost
CHF 500.00 regular price
CHF 350.00 special rate (the special price is exclusively available to participants who attended the Coaching Perspectives 2026 conference)
Registration: last places available until 17 September

Please note that coffee breaks, beverages, and lunch are neither included in the workshop fee nor provided during the workshop.

Hint
Conference language is English (Workshop Leaders also speak German).
Please bring your laptop with you to the workshop.
Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Location
Toni Areal
Room 8.T73
Pfingstweidstrasse 96
8005 Zürich
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Event programme

Roughly 6 hours, built around a single thread: everything you learn gets applied immediately.

Friday, 18 September 2026

Block	Topic
1	AI & AI Coaching Foundations
2	Responsible Design
3	Designing the Experience
4	Advanced Prompting & the IMPACT Framework (build)
5	Test & Refine (peer-testing)
6	Where to Go Next

Workshop Leader

Rebecca Rutschmann is a pioneer at the intersection of coaching and artificial intelligence. As co-founder of Viva la Coaching Academy, she launched the first AI literacy movement for the coaching and learning profession in 2024. Her journey into AI coaching began in 2019 as co-founder of evoach, where she developed early AI coaching experiences and in 2023 created Alpina — one of the earliest generative AI-driven coaches, now central to multiple published research studies on AI coaching effectiveness. Today, Rebecca partners with global organizations to design conversational AI experiences that foster genuine self-reflection and growth, not just mimic human speech. An advisor to the NYU Coaching & Technology Summit and sought-after speaker, her work lives at the edge where human intelligence and artificial intelligence meet, driven by the conviction that as AI becomes a given, human presence remains the ultimate differentiator.

Rebecca will be supported by Lewin Keller (coachbot.ai)

Conference Team

If you have any questions about the event, please feel free to contact us by email coaching.iap@zhaw.ch.