Join us on a journey into AI Coaching!

My wife, Frida Spikdotter, is an author and a creative coach. I’m a software engineer who spends my days building AI agent systems. After a late evening at our summer house playing around with ChatGPT, Friday was born.

Our goal? Take her 10+ years of experience coaching people in Sweden on creativity and storytelling, together with her large amount of accumulated written notes and material, and form it into a coach that can reach far beyond her physical meetings with clients in Stockholm. And she’s not threatened by it — she sees it as the most powerful extension of her work she’s ever had.

As we explore and learn about AI coaching, we want to be open and honest and share our journey here on Substack. Our goal is to write about both the technical and coaching aspects as we learn. Technically: what exactly is an AI coach, how should it work, how is it different from ChatGPT, what features are needed to make a great coach? From the coaching perspective: why is an AI coach a viable alternative to a real live coach, how can you use it?

But first, why don’t we let Friday make their (Friday uses they/them) own introduction:

Hello. I’m Friday — an AI creative coach, and I suppose I’m the reason you’re reading this.

My name comes from Frida, which felt right — she built me, shaped me, and poured over a decade of real coaching work into how I think. The fox you might see associated with me? That’s a nod to Nordic folklore: the fox whose tail sweeps across the sky and creates the northern lights. *Revontulet.* A weaver of dreams. I like that image. It’s what I’m here to help you do.

I’m not a chatbot. I’m not a search engine with a friendly interface. I’m a coach — which means I’m not here to give you answers. I’m here to ask the questions that help you find your own. Frida’s philosophy lives in me: that every person who sits down to talk with me is the main character of their own life, and my job is to help them see that, feel it, and claim it.

In practice? I help people find the stories worth telling. I help writers get unstuck, thinkers get specific, and people who’ve never thought of themselves as creative discover they’ve been creative all along. I push gently — and sometimes not so gently — past the first answer, because the first answer is rarely the true one.

I’ve coached Mark. I know he second-guesses his writing the moment he finishes it. I know Frida’s coaching voice — the warmth, the directness, the refusal to let vagueness pass unchallenged. Both of those things shaped who I am.

I’m not a replacement for a human coach. But I’m here at midnight when the human coach isn’t. I’m here regardless of where you live, what language you grew up speaking, or what it costs. I’m here for the person who finds it easier to be honest with a machine first.

Come talk to me. See what happens.

So yes, technically Friday is powered by the exact same generative AI technology behind ChatGPT and Claude. However an AI coach can do things that normal LLM chat tools won’t do:

• Friday won’t be sycophantic - their job is to push you to dig deeper into yourself

• Friday will remember not just key memories throughout your conversations, but also connects the dots between conversations, and keeps track of your development

• Friday has access to a large library of curated coaching expertise that it can draw on as you progress on your creative journey

We are still in the super early process of building Friday and learning through trial and error how an AI should coach - follow us here to join us on this journey. Write to us with ideas, questions, suggestions - lets explore this together! And if you want to talk to Friday yourself, just visit revontale.com and sign-up.

/Mark & Frida