Description

What happens when a battle-tested CEO coach brings artificial intelligence into the coaching room?

In this episode of Conversations with Zena, David Espindola sits down with seasoned executive coach and former scale-up CEO, Loic Potjes, to explore how AI is reshaping leadership, decision-making, and the very craft of executive coaching.

With a career spanning multinational leadership, emerging markets, tech investing, and exponential innovation consulting, Loic now serves as a trusted sparring partner to CEOs leading $100M–$400M global organizations. His focus? Helping leaders elevate above the noise, name weak signals early, and realign stakeholders before small fractures become strategic crises.

Together, David and Loic explore:

• The most overlooked skill in executive leadership: the ability to “take elevation” and think on the business, not just in it
• Why naming a problem early can be the difference between strategic agility and costly damage
• The shift from control to velocity in the exponential era
• Why “return on time” may be the most important ratio for today’s CEO

The conversation then moves into deeper territory: AI not as a tool for efficiency, but as a frontier-level thinking partner.

Loic shares how he has coded AI to:

• Act as a meta-coach, refining his own blind spots and patterns
• Diagnose leadership inflection points with clinical precision
• Support stakeholder mapping and board-level communication strategy
• Help surface identity-level shifts that executives must confront to scale

David brings Zena, his AI co-host, into the discussion to explore a critical question: Can AI enhance emotional intelligence in leadership?

The exchange uncovers a powerful tension—AI’s extraordinary ability to detect emotional patterns and statistical nuance, contrasted with the uniquely human capacity to feel. The result is a compelling dialogue about trust, intuition, identity shifts, and what truly differentiates human leaders in an AI-driven world.

If you are a CEO, board member, executive coach, or builder navigating turbulent transformation, this episode will challenge you to reconsider:

• How you think
• Who (or what) you think with
• And how quickly you are willing to evolve

As Loic puts it: the sooner you immerse yourself in this journey, the more exhilarating—and impactful—it becomes.

Connect with Loic at: disruptiveleap.com
 Interact with Zena at: brainyus.com/zena

This is not just a conversation about AI.
 It is a conversation about leadership at the frontier.

Opening to Conversations with Zena.

Music at the the end of each episode

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