By Ben Rollenhagen and Ted Theocheung
Executive Summary
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Lao Tzu’s wisdom has guided educators and mentors for centuries—but what if you could extend that teaching beyond the moment, ensuring learners continue to grow long after a coaching session ends?
In this blog, you are the “executive coach,” the Subject Matter Expert. You’ve written a NY Times best seller and your client demand is overwhelmingly high. How do you take your “SME” skill and engrain this knowledge with your clients cost effectively, increasing your “scalability” challenge, while maintaining or better yet increasing the quality of imparting knowledge in your learning clientele. If only there was training in an Agentic AI agent like Mentor126 skilled with your expertise, helping scale your reach. you’re not just sharing knowledge in the moment—you’re creating a persistent, intelligent learning guide that supports your learners before, during, and after your engagements. Think of it as a scalable extension of your coaching, one that reinforces concepts, fills knowledge gaps, and ensures each learner reaches their full potential.
For an Executive Coach with Mentor126, your expertise doesn’t just stay with one client—it becomes a teaching and training tool you can take from client to client, engagement to engagement, amplifying your impact effectiveness while optimizing your time. You teach it once, and it keeps teaching—forever.
Introduction | Exec Coaching with Agentic AI
Executive coaches, as we define it, are highly specialized experts—thought leaders and subject matter experts who have distilled their expertise into methodologies, books, and consulting frameworks. Their mission? To educate, guide, and transform individuals and organizations through structured learning engagements.
But here are the main challenges that executive coaches face when designing an effective learning experience:
- Not every learner starts at the same level. Mixed-skill groups slow down the development progress, and may hinder learning.
- Traditional coaching is time-intensive and unscalable. One-on-one coaching doesn’t scale effectively.
- Learners need ongoing reinforcement. Once a session ends, knowledge retention declines.
Enter Mentor126’s Agentic AI—a learning companion trained on an executive coach’s material, designed to prime, guide, and reinforce learning before, during, and after coaching engagements.
Three Ways Executive Coaches Can Use Mentor126
Three ways Executive Coaches can use Mentor126, Before, During, and After an engagement.
1. Before the Session: Flipped Learning to “Prime” the Participants
Imagine walking into a coaching session where every participant is already familiar with the key concepts. No need to spend valuable time covering the basics—instead, you dive straight into application and discussion.
How Mentor126 helps:
- Uses Bespoke Learning Pathways to adapt to each learner’s level.
- Automates pre-session skill leveling so all participants reach a common goal we call PAR (Performance and Readiness) benchmark before the live session. Addressing coaching to the least common denominator.
- Nudges learners with micro-lessons, quizzes, and interactive prompts to ensure comprehension, supplements knowledge with multi-modal content, optimized for the learner, providing summaries, guides, images and videos.
- GAP filling to help learning gaps of prerequisite knowledge.
✅ Outcome: Deeper engagement, more productive discussions, and faster progress during live coaching sessions.
2. During the Session: AI as a Real-Time Learning Guide
Traditional coaching sessions often progress at the speed of the slowest learner. Mentor126 changes that by acting as a personal learning guide that fills knowledge gaps in real-time.
How Mentor126 helps:
- Learners engage with the AI to clarify key concepts without disrupting the group.
- Mentor126 tracks learning progress and suggests individualized learning reinforcements.
- Coaches can set “PAR targets” for learners—“By the end of this chapter, you will understand X, Y, Z”—and Mentor126 ensures each learner meets that standard.
✅ Outcome: A more personalized, engaging learning experience that supports each learner’s journey without slowing down the group.
Mentor helps the exec coach create learning activities and learning experiences, on-the-fly, some examples:
Below is a sample list of human learning science-based active learning exercises that can conducted during the Mentor coaching session:
- Think Pair Share: One of the simplest and most elegant exercises, could easily be written into almost any lecture. In this exercise, learners are given a minute to think about—and perhaps respond in writing—to a question on their own. Learners next exchange ideas with a partner. Finally, some learners share with the entire group. A think-pair-share engages every learner, and also encourages more participation than simply asking for volunteers to respond to a question.
- Case studies: In a case study, learners apply their knowledge to real life scenarios, requiring them to synthesize a variety of information and make recommendations.
- Collaborative note taking: The instructor pauses during the lecture and asks learners to take a few minutes to summarize in writing what they have just learned and/or consolidate their notes. Learners then exchange notes with a partner to compare; this can highlight key ideas that a learner might have missed or misunderstood.
- Concept map: This activity helps learners understand the relationship between concepts. Typically, learners are provided with a list of terms. They arrange the terms on paper and draw arrows between related concepts, labeling each arrow to explain the relationship.
- Group work: Whether solving problems or discussing a prompt, working in small groups can be an effective method of engaging students. In some cases, all groups work on or discuss the same question; in other cases, the instructor might assign different topics to different groups. The group’s task should be purposeful, and should be structured in such a way that there is an obvious advantage to working as a team rather than individually. It is useful for groups to share their ideas with the rest of the class—whether by writing answers on the board, raising key points that were discussed, or sharing a poster they created.
- Jigsaw: Small groups of learners each discuss a different, but related topic. Learners are then shuffled such that new groups are composed of one student from each of the original groups. In these new groups, each learner is responsible for sharing key aspects of their original discussion. The second group must synthesize and use all of the ideas from the first set of discussions in order to complete a new or more advanced task. A nice feature of a jigsaw is that every learner in the original group must fully understand the key ideas so that they can teach their classmates in the second group.
- Minute paper, or quick write: Learners write a short answer in response to a prompt during class, requiring learners to articulate their knowledge or apply it to a new situation.
- NB: A minute paper can also be used as a reflection at the end of class. The instructor might ask learners to write down the most important concept that they learned that day, as well as something they found confusing. Targeted questions can also provide feedback to the instructor about learners’ experience in the class.
- Statement correction, or intentional mistakes: The instructor provides statements, readings, proofs, or other material that contains errors. The learners are charged with finding and correcting the errors. Concepts that students commonly misunderstand are well suited for this activity.
- Strip sequence, or sequence reconstruction: The goal of this activity is for learners to order a set of items, such as steps in a biological process or a series of historical events. In one example, the instructor provides learners with a list of items for the students to sort.
- Polling: During class, the instructor asks a multiple-choice question. Learners can respond in a variety of ways like using Mentor126. A particularly effective strategy is to ask each learner to first respond to the poll independently, then discuss the question with a neighbor, and then re-vote.
3. After the Session: AI as a Long-Term Learning Partner
Once a coaching engagement ends, learners often struggle to retain and apply what they’ve learned. Mentor126 becomes a long term learning partner, helping learners integrate concepts into their real-world challenges. In order to maximize the impact of the training, contribute to long-term memory, and actually develop learning, learning experiences need to be used to follow up after the session. Learners typically don’t like homework, but when it’s done properly, it can be engaging, motivating and validating. The “post-session” activities don’t need to be disruptive and inconvenient. Learners should realize how necessary they are for learning to be long lasting. Opportunities to use recently learned content are required for learning to occur. This is a psychological theory that shows how memory declines over time. It’s also known as Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve. To prevent this, learners need to use, apply, and re-engage with the content periodically, and in meaningful ways. The most effective post-session learning experiences are those where the learner applies the knowledge they learn. We refer to this as upper level Bloom’s.
Mentor126 can deploy a variety of activities to assist with knowledge retention. Learners can ask follow-up questions and get responses tailored to their specific work scenarios. It can also develop application activities and track how each learner applies knowledge. It can also provide personalized reinforcement and keep learners accountable by nudging them towards continued skill development.
Examples of learning experiences at this level that Mentor126 could utilize include
- Role-Play
- Simulations
- Scenarios
- Case Studies
- Oral Debates/arguments
- Interviews
- Discussions
- Collaborations
- Conversations
- Presentations
- Proposals of new plans
As you can see, the options are endless, and with Mentor126, they truly are. Each of these items can be unique to learners, bespoke, and include feedback, accountability and adaptability. This is exactly what the learner and executive coach need to ensure the learning process is as efficient and effective as possible.
Executive Coach | Learning Science Based AI Assistant Technology
The Mentor Learning Science Knowledge Graph (mKG) is what sets our Agentic AI experience apart from conventional enterprise Agentic AI solutions built for verticals like sales enablement or customer support. Mentor’s unique vertical solution is using Agentic AI for human upskilling—deeply grounded in the science of how people learn and retain information. In upcoming blog posts, we’ll share examples of how the mKG fuses enterprise data with proven learning science to deliver personalized learning experiences tailored to individual learning styles. This is the essence of Bespoke Learning—true 1:1 personalization—made possible only through this new era of Agentic AI.
Bespoke Learning Pathways: A New Era of Personalized Development
Every learner is different. Mentor126 doesn’t replace the executive coach—it enhances their impact by building individualized learning journeys.
In AI tech this is the unique combination of three Knowledge Graphs:
The enterprise data knowledge graph or eKG, in this case, the executive coaches Subject Matter Expertise of content from documents, books, images and videos. Workbooks, FAQs, Guidebooks and securely stored in the enterprise grade cloud.
Mentor’s mKG, the learning sciences for optimizing human upskilling
Learner’s pKG, the ability in Mentor to learn the users’ most effective learning methods, effective approaches and bespoke personalizations that drive a higher level of engagement and personal self-directed drive
Key Mentor126 innovations enable innovative capabilities
- PAR Benchmarking: A Mentor126 curation process defining how good is good enough and ensuring learners meet that threshold through our Performance and Readiness (PAR) methodology.
- Gap-Filling AI: Identifies and fills knowledge gaps based on real-time learner performance using Mentor’s Multi-Disciplinary Upskilling (MDU) methodology, a patent-pending approach to bespoke learning leveraging goal driven Agentic AI that can upskill utilizing upper level bloom’s (Tier 2 & Tier3) methods we introduce in greater detail in the Bloom’s Taxonomy in the GenAI Age blog.
The Mentor126 Learning Science mKG based approach achieves Bespoke Learning through:
- Personalized Learning Pathways: Cater specifically to the learner’s prior knowledge, skills, and learning goals. This means that the content, pace, and style of instruction are adjusted to fit the learner’s individual requirements rather than adhering to a one-size-fits-all curriculum.Adapts lessons to a learner’s pace, style, and preferred modes of learning.
- Adaptive Process : the content adapts dynamically based on the learner’s progress and performance. For example, if a learner excels in a particular area, the program might provide more advanced materials or skip over topics that have already been mastered. Conversely, if a learner struggles, the system may offer additional resources, explanations, or practice opportunities.
- Personalized Feedback: ensures that feedback is tailored to the learner’s specific needs. This includes customized comments on assignments, targeted advice based on performance data, and personalized recommendations for improvement.
- Learner Preferences and Goals: Takes into account the learner’s personal preferences, such as preferred learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and career aspirations. This personalization might involve offering various types of content delivery, such as videos, readings, interactive simulations, or hands-on projects, aligned with the learner’s preferences. Goals of the learner and the enterprise are incorporated into a personalized knowledge graph, both factoring into the learner development and priorities.
- Learner Support and Resources: Provide tailored support and resources, such as one-on-one tutoring, mentorship, or access to specialized materials that align with the learner’s individual goals and challenges using the appropriate mentoring and coaching skills.
- Flexible Scheduling: The program may offer flexibility in scheduling to accommodate the learner’s personal life, work commitments, or preferred learning pace, thus enhancing the learning experience by fitting into the learner’s unique lifestyle.
🔍 Example: A leadership coach might set PAR targets on decision-making frameworks. Mentor126 tracks learner progress, identifies gaps, and reinforces weak areas over time, ensuring mastery. Mentor in our curation process enables the Exec Coach curator to use these learning tools to tune the learner’s experience.
The Business Advantage: Why Executive Coaches Should Leverage AI
Integrating Mentor126 into your coaching practice isn’t just about enhancing learner outcomes—it’s about making your business more scalable and efficient.
Key benefits for executive coaches:
✅ Scale Your Expertise – Serve more clients simultaneously without diluting the quality of mentorship.
✅ Save Time & Effective Utilization – Offload foundational training to Mentor AI, allowing you to focus on high-impact 1:1 coaching moments.
✅ Enhance Personalization – Provide each learner with tailored insights, progress tracking, and adaptive learning pathways.
✅ Improve Data-Driven Bespoke Coaching – Use AI-generated dashboard metrics to track learning efficiency and skill development.
Mentor has different learning science based effective up-skilling methods, Role-Playing is just one example that exercises the upper level Bloom’s skills, an capability that previously required humans to perform, now is effective with Mentor’s conversational experience, learn more in our three part academic series blog that highlights the science into effective role play, specifically part 3 of 3 is the Role-Playing in today’s Enterprise Environment: Bridging the theory into Practice and looks at the scenario of a Sales Development Representative (SDR) and ways Mentor provides impact.
Call to Action: Getting Started with Mentor126 Intake in Three Easy Steps
Experience the power of Mentor126 Agentic AI, the curation process is as easy as 1-2-3.
- Intake: Gather your content coaching materials (books, frameworks, training content, videos, FAQ, workbooks, assessments, etc).
- HITL Curation (Human-in-the-Loop): Fine-tune AI responses to ensure they align with your expertise in the mentor curator function
- Set PAR (Performance and Readiness): Define skill benchmarks for learners, and let Mentor126 guide them to mastery.
🔹 Ready to elevate your executive coaching with AI?
Start integrating Mentor126 today to maximize impact, scale your expertise, and transform the way your learners grow.
Follow our blogs for more details on Mentor126 Learning Sciences and the applications for executive coaching or contact us at info@mentor126.ai to experience mentor with your content.