Berlin, April 23, 2026 — Sharpist, the enterprise coaching platform used by PALFINGER, IKEA, and Airbus, today launched the Sharpist AI Coach, an always-on career companion that sits alongside a company’s existing human coaching program and keeps employee development moving between sessions. The product has been in beta for four months, and is now available for broad rollout.
The launch comes as enterprise talent programs face a measurable credibility problem. Organisations spend an average of €1,300 per employee each year on learning and development, yet engagement is falling, top performers are leaving, and most HR leaders have little real-time data on why. In a Sharpist analysis of its client base, the core issue is consistent: development happens in sessions, then stops. Human coaching typically occurs once a month. Transformation strategy is revisited once a year. In between, there is no mechanism to keep either alive.
The Sharpist AI Coach addresses this by reading the summary of each human coaching session and continuing the conversation in between — reinforcing commitments, tracking action items, and adapting to the employee’s goals, their manager’s priorities, and the organisation’s strategic context. It is available via chat or voice, offers five distinct coaching styles, and is evaluated against ICF MCC standards — the highest benchmark in professional coaching — on every session through a 16-agent quality review system.
“From our experience, we learn that employees think about transformation once a year. Human coaching happens once a month. When you connect both with an AI coach that’s there every week — and the action items from there drive the behavioural change home, and strategy finally reaches how people show up every day.”
— Hendrik Schriefer, CEO, Sharpist
Unlike platforms that offer AI and human coaching as separate products, Sharpist runs both on a single timeline. Summaries from human sessions are automatically fed into the AI Coach’s memory, so context is never lost. Employee conversations are fully private — not visible to HR or management, never used to train AI models, and hosted exclusively within EU infrastructure under GDPR compliance. A new intelligence layer, rethought from the ground up and coming soon, will give HR leaders aggregated, anonymised signals across their employee population: where capability is building, where retention risk is rising, and where transformation programmes are or are not taking hold.
Early beta results reported an average session satisfaction score of 4.5 out of 5, including among frontline and shopfloor employees.
The Sharpist AI Coach is available now. For more information, visit sharpist.ai.
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