Why AI might be the wake-up call coaches need

I don't think we've arrived at a tipping point quite yet, but there's an increasing amount of noise around AI and coaching. The ICF now has a Director of AI. Organisations are actively searching for AI coaching products (whatever that means). Last week saw the dramatic launch of The Manifesto for AI in Coaching.

Regardless of your personal perspective on the topic, it's hard to argue that AI isn't having - or going to have - an impact on the world of coaching. For some, AI might feel at first like it adjusts the edges of our work. For the profession as a whole, however, it seems to me that AI reaches deeper, into how we think about what coaching even is.

Technology's moving faster than most of us can keep up with, and despite some corners confidently expressing rights and wrongs about the subject the only certainty seems to be that, however technically correct they might be, the landscape is changing so quickly that nobody can really know what will happen in the coming months and years.

This desire to know at least something about the direction of things got me thinking. My career started in the world of technology risk and, over time, shifted into the world of coaching. That journey isn't a well worn path. Technology risk processes are structured, and human growth is...a little less neat. But I wonder if the place that they meet provides an opportunity for us to consider the coaching profession as AI continues to make inroads.

Risk assurance

For a long time my day job orbited around the topic of risk. I could - and did - spend all day thinking about what could go wrong in a particular situation, and reverse engineering steps that would (a) prevent those things from happening and/or (b) detect if they did. The world of risk is intellectually stimulating and comfortingly linear. A risk environment is chaotic, but a mature control environment means that the outcomes are going to occur only within managed bookends.

When I first trained as a coach, therefore, the performance-oriented models I was introduced to sat nicely within that worldview. Iterative change in coaching follows a similar kind of flow. The GROW model, for example, is clear and practical, beginning at A and identifying a way to get to B.

The more people I've coached the more I've moved away from those sorts of models, and the introduction of AI into the picture makes me feel even more comfortable with that. AI coaching tools - AIcoach.chat is a wonderful example - will help a coaching client set a goal, provide structured accountability and pull together tidy timelines that do exactly the same as a human coach would, but can do it faster, at much greater scale, at a fraction of the cost, and with extremely manageable boundaries.

The future of coaching delivered by humans feels like it needs to be some distance from the concepts that make risk assurance so valuable.

Creativity

Creativity is an important ingredient in coaching, even in things like GROW. Visualising a Goal and exploring less obvious Options are both valuable steps, but that isn't quite where the best sort of creative coaching goes.

I'm sure it's how I've managed to build up my social media algorithms brick by brick, but I sometimes feel like I can't move for coaching conferences providing tools to enable coaching conversations that dig into metaphor, narrative, somatics. You know, real right-brain human stuff. The kind of work where answers don’t show up on spreadsheets, but where the answers feel somehow more true.

AI, despite being transparently a machine, unpredictably can really contribute to this. Where good questioning only gets us so far I enjoy - and think it's helpful - to introduce AI-generated images that resonate. I have the privilege of having been invited to speak at the upcoming Coaching Outdoors Live event and will be sharing some of the surprising crossover that exists between the use of virtual reality (is there anything more likely to attract the sort of person who spends far too much time indoors?) and a deeply embodied coaching session spent sitting next to a flowing stream.

True creativity cannot be practiced by AI in the way that it can by humans. But it can contribute to the conversation.

Pragmatism

Something I've not heard quite so much about in coaching circles is the simple attitude of pragmatism in coaching. Some of risk assurance isn't particularly pragmatic, and for good reason. The purpose of a multi-factor authentication on a computer system, for example, is explicitly to make it more difficult to access whatever's being held within it. From the perspective of the risk professional, pragmatism might play a nuanced role in a board report but isn't going to affect whether or not a control is considered effective.

I've written previously about how impatience plays a role in how I coach (and a different role in how I supervise), and since having started running my own company I've discovered how important pragmatism is in reality. It's how things work.

The nature of a coaching conversation risks us tripping into a rabbit hole of reflection. At a certain point, all the reflection in the world won't move someone forward, and even action that's far from perfect at least provides feedback that we can use to take things forward.

I was recently coaching somebody who said they wanted to use their six coaching sessions with me to get themselves to a position where they knew what their next career step would be, their CV was tailored appropriately and they had a plan for how to apply for their next role. My impatience on their behalf kicked in and they took an action in that first session to reach out to some people on LinkedIn to just have a conversation. The next session kicked off with them sharing that they were moving across the country because they'd got a job offer and were more excited about life than they could remember!

All the thinking, conversation, reflection, dreaming, journalling and everything else that leads up to making a decision is beautiful and important but might mean nothing if the decision isn't acted upon. And this is something that AI fundamentally falls flat at. Even when making quasi-decisions (as AI agents can do when selecting tools available to them), it's nothing at all like what happens with a human.

The question of AI and coaching

AI is here, it’s already reshaping parts of coaching, and we need to do a bit of that decision-making around the way we'll work with it, as we work with any part of a system. As individuals we need to ask what we want our relationship with it to be, and what we'll do as a result.

It can be tempting to want to resist AI as something that's inherently incompatible with 'real' coaching. As the human connection within coaching is sacred perhaps we ought to dismiss everything that isn't human. That seems just as one-dimensional as the enthusiasts I'm sure we're all bumping up against at the moment who risk losing touch with the essence of coaching amid the novelty. But if we're working with our clients and wider systems in mind, considering and experimenting with AI as part of that richness to work with feels wise.

The best coaches tend not to plant their flag in just one camp. Coaches operate in a liminal space. We know, and we don't know. We have a responsibility to support our clients as they want to manage their own risk, and we want to expand creative thinking, and we want to catalyse pragmatic action that makes a genuine difference.

We sometimes act as if coaching is meant to be elegant, and it really isn't. Holding two contradictory truths at once is a skill in the same way that scoring a goal with a backheel is a skill. It looks simultaneously impressive and childish, is entirely impractical 99% of the time, but when it works you've completely changed a game. The same is true of trying something that we think isn't going to work. Or deciding in a conversation to make it uncomfortable on purpose.

When we think about AI it's sensible to put on different pairs of glasses:

• Risk assurance: Let's stay informed about ethics, data security and boundaries. If we know where the boundary lines are and why they matter we'll help our clients and the future of the profession.
• Creativity: Let's learn about AI and experiment with it so that we're ready to draw on it when that makes sense. If it accelerates breakthrough or expands our scale let's embrace it, and if it challenges us to think differently let's develop as coaches and humans. Let's try asking AI to give us unexpected questions that widen our own lens.
• Pragmatism: We have a great opportunity to try things out quickly, grasp hold of what works and let go of what doesn’t.

Coaching is a profession that lives in contradiction. We aim for clarity at times, while honouring uncertainty. We help people act through the act of pausing, pushing aside notifications if even for just an hour or so. We bring structure that catalyses surprise.

As AI becomes more embedded in what we do - and it will, whether we like it or not - we need to make sure we don't start picking sides. There are no sides. There will only ever really be the space in between, and we should tread lightly. Because in the end, what we offer our clients isn't our mastery of tools. It's our presence.