I am a programmer who delights in making computers do cool things to make people happy. A large part of my career has been discovering, building, and selling ways by which to automate away tedious tasks.
So make no mistake: I love me some automation.
And holy moly, here in the advent of AI we seem to find ourselves in a golden age of it. There’s a lot of speculation that, for many fields, humans just won’t be needed at all! Or at least a lot fewer of ‘em.
Let’s set aside for now the possibility that us clients might decide we like a coaching chat with our friendly state-of-the-art LLM fine enough to dispense with hiring human coaches, and instead focus our attention on the opportunity for you, as that human coach, to harness some of that sweet, cutting-edge AI power to automate some of your work in the name of efficiency.
Because of my position as the creator of a coaching platform used by thousands of coaches, I have a front row seat to the musings on how technology might be leveraged to automate this or that in the delivery of coaching.
In plain terms: I hear a lot of feature requests.
Naturally, there’s a rising tide of requests to add AI to the mix.
Because automation.
Because efficiency.
Because elevated service.
The first and second of those? Sure. Obviously so.
But that third one? To give elevated service, or any variant on the theme of giving clients more and better? I call BS.
Because so much of the essential value of coaching is that we are working with someone who cares. And not just lip-service-cares, but cares enough to spend time actually paying attention.
If you have AI churn through the session notes to discover overarching themes, that means you’re not spending time thinking about us: our situation, our aims, our progression. So you know us less, and must show up to our calls as more of a blank slate.
If you have AI skim through transcripts to make an action plan, then that action plan is owned by no one, is hopefully accurate, and is easier to blow off.
If you have AI take the notes that we’ll ultimately remember those calls by, you sidestepped the opportunity to give us something thoughtfully crafted that could be a gift, in favor of a copy-paste job1If you use AI notes as a starting point, to ensure you’re not missing anything, and which you then thoroughly edit and tighten up before sharing with your client? More power to you, provided you actually stand by the end result as your words. That level of responsibility is not the stuff of abdication. Just be on guard against being gradually lulled into rubberstamping more and more of AI’s output verbatim, especially as AI gets better. Because some slopes are, in fact, slippery..
And if you need those AI notes to recall the session, relieving you of the burden of taking your own so that you may “stay more present”, I don’t mean to be rude, but please ask yourself: what does that say of your ability to be meaningfully present in general? Humans have been having meaningful conversations for literally eons, long before “coaching” was christened as a profession and even longer before the AI boom. How weird would it be if your mom said “Hold on, sweetie—let momma turn on her AI notetaker first” when you called her for advice?
Automation is great. But if you automate bits that are actually the meaningful part we pay you for, you effectively abdicate your responsibility as coach. And once you do that, your relevance is on shaky ground.
And doubly so from the “learned helplessness” angle. How many of us remember when we’d write down directions to get to a new place before we got in the car, and then paying attention to signage to know when to turn? I’m not as good at that as I was, how about you? All of which is to say: if you need AI to help you give and recall a powerful coaching conversation, how long until your muscle to do that atrophies, too?
I predict amid rising pressure to leverage AI, a rising number of coaches will proudly disavow using it in the delivery of their coaching, citing instead their ability to actually pay attention for themselves, and their unwavering willingness to continue giving their clients the time and caring attention that clients are paying for.
Notes:
- 1If you use AI notes as a starting point, to ensure you’re not missing anything, and which you then thoroughly edit and tighten up before sharing with your client? More power to you, provided you actually stand by the end result as your words. That level of responsibility is not the stuff of abdication. Just be on guard against being gradually lulled into rubberstamping more and more of AI’s output verbatim, especially as AI gets better. Because some slopes are, in fact, slippery.
