Fredericksburg, Virginia – August 19, 2026 – Flatter Leadership Academy today announced the completion of the first live cohort of AÇAI, the AI Champion Leadership Coaching Seminar, held from May 20 through July 31, 2026. The program combines ICF-aligned coaching education, responsible AI literacy, and practical workplace application to help leaders approach AI-related challenges with greater clarity, risk awareness, and accountable human judgment.
AÇAI represents Team Flatter’s AI Workforce Development and Upskilling program – it stands for AI Champions to Accelerate Innovation. Across live instruction, coaching demonstrations, peer practice, case studies, AI labs, applied workplace exercises, and a final functional-team practicum, student-coaches learned to slow down broad requests for AI and identify the underlying work problem before recommending a tool, automation, or technical solution. This discipline supports workforce readiness and responsible modernization by keeping mission needs, people, policy, data, and human control points at the center of adoption decisions. During these labs, student-coaches also used Flatter, Inc.’s PersonaOPPs conversational AI platform to practice coaching with AI-enabled personas and scenarios, creating additional opportunities to strengthen questioning, listening, and coaching discipline before applying those skills in live workplace settings.
This internal Team Flatter cohort practiced distinguishing coaching from consulting, mentoring, teaching, advising, and technical solutioning—all within the parameters, systems, and processes of Team Flatter. This customized cohort will have an immediate positive impact on Team Flatter’s AI adoption, process improvement, and literacy for modern applications and computing practices. Participants established clearer coaching agreements, asked clean and non-leading questions, listened for the next useful question, and worked to interrupt the natural advice reflex.
Students also used the 9 Block AI Opportunity Canvas to examine the leader’s challenge, current work, pain points, desired future state, data, tools, risks, stakeholders, and next safe step. Applied exercises addressed source trust, data planning, cybersecurity, human review, prompt discipline, and the conditions under which an individual AI tool, enterprise GPT, agent, or more integrated system may be appropriate. The program’s consistent posture was that AI should augment human capability, not replace accountable human judgment.
Case studies and learning labs grounded the material in recognizable workplace situations, including an overloaded senior leader seeking a rapid AI answer, inbox and delegation challenges, employee-support use cases, custom GPT design, and data-quality planning. In later sessions, functional teams applied the methods to real organizational challenges by clarifying requirements, mapping processes, identifying boundaries, and designing bounded experiments before considering broader implementation.
“AÇAI and this ICF Coaching program with an AI specialty was built around a simple idea: leaders need AI fluency, but they also need coaching discipline to engage in curiosity and inquiry required to design good requirements. The answer is not always another tool. Often the first move is to slow down, clarify the work, protect human judgment, and choose the next safe step,” said Brittany Chiang, Flatter, Inc.’s CEO , program architect, and lead facilitator.
The first cohort was supported by leaders and subject-matter contributors across coaching education, operations, and AI implementation. Karnita McElveen brought an executive and operational perspective; Lucas Flatter connected coaching conversations and requirements to practical technical patterns; Aboudi Tayara contributed large language model expertise; and Danny Doucette helped anchor the seminar in ICF-aligned coaching development.
About Flatter Leadership Academy
Flatter Leadership Academy develops leaders, coaches, and teams through practical learning experiences that connect professional coaching, leadership development, and emerging workplace capability. The AÇAI AI Champion Leadership Coaching Seminar is designed to help student-coaches responsibly support leaders as they explore AI opportunities, clarify business or mission challenges, preserve human judgment, and take practical next steps.
About Flatter, Inc.
Founded in 2002, Flatter, Inc. is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB). We deliver solutions that enhance the security, readiness, and effectiveness of our nation. By placing the needs and growth of service members at the forefront, we enable them to meet the demands of an ever-changing strategic environment. Our core capabilities include Mission Acceleration, Workforce Development & Readiness, and Digital Transformation & Modernization.
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