Executive coach automates LinkedIn outreach with an AI agent
Kristii Krugel is an executive coach at KSK Coaching who helps women executives navigate organizational AI adoption, leadership transitions and what she calls "relevance anxiety." She moved from facilitating high-stakes, contentious teams to one-on-one coaching and now runs an AI agent that delivers 3-5 tailored LinkedIn contacts daily while keeping all client-facing writing personally authored.
Automate routine, procrastinated tasks with small AI agents and iterate until their outputs meet your standards, but keep writing and other authenticity-sensitive work human. The value is in reaching the stage where you can critically evaluate AI output and use it to augment your judgement rather than outsource it.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started my career as a high-stakes facilitator for contentious environments and teams navigating organizational shifts. I became attuned to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that power and conflict present and impact group dynamics. Trained not only to sense and observe, but also to address and de-escalate, I was able to guide people through the discomfort, rather than allow them to continue the avoidance pattern. I have brought this fierce honesty into my coaching practice to have powerful conversations with my clients so they can see a situation clearly and move with confidence.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
I am fortunate that many of my clients are referred organically, mostly through recommendations from others who have worked with me. I specialize in supporting women executives through three specific career inflection points: organizational AI adoption, leadership transitions, and relevance anxiety. I am passionate about seeing female entrepreneurs succeed and would like to support more of them through coaching.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I heard a great piece of advice recently regarding AI: think of business tasks you regularly put off doing and see if your AI can do them for you. Something I’ve handed over to AI: I built an agent that scans LinkedIn and provides me with 3-5 people daily to connect with based on several weighted criteria, including potential similarities in ikigai. I iterated multiple times to refine its outputs and still add new instructions to its memory frequently, but it’s really cool. Something I tried but went back to doing the human way: Writing. Even all of my responses here were 100% written by me. Despite providing samples of my previous content, re-prompting with further direction to "match my voice, tone, use my exact verbiage," etc., it didn’t feel authentic.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I designed my website and other content to be generative engine/answer engine/LLM-optimized, but I haven’t explicitly asked new clients whether they used AI to do further research. That said, I advise my clients to make sure their websites and other collateral are AI search-optimized.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Practice with AI until you’re skeptical. If you started out skeptical, that’s not what I mean. You need to move through the initial discomfort to the phase of euphoria where you think that AI is amazing and that you’re really good at it. Keep using it! Keep using it and watch how more advanced users harness it until you reach the place where you’re very concerned about whether you actually know anything about AI, and you’re more concerned about the quality of its outputs. That’s the sweet spot because you’re augmenting your work rather than outsourcing your brain – and the difference will positively impact your business and reputation.
When it comes to the AI landscape, ignore the voice that keeps you awake, saying you’re behind. How can you be behind when nothing has stabilized, and the landscape shifts every day? Stay responsibly informed about what’s specifically relevant to your business and goals, and be curious. You can’t be judgmental (even of yourself) and genuinely curious at the same time. And if coaching with me seems like a good fit, let’s connect.
Thank you to Kristii Krugel and the team at KSK Coaching for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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