A New Game Board: Coaching in the Age of AI

The client, a Vice President of Legal Affairs at a global commercial construction supply company, arrived for a chemistry call. At Blanchard Coaching, that’s our term for the introductory conversation where a prospective client meets several coaches before deciding who is the best fit.

“How might coaching be most helpful to you?” the coach asked. “What outcomes are you hoping for?”

The client wasn’t sure.

For nearly twenty minutes, he described an extraordinary career. He had risen through the corporate ranks at remarkable speed, mastering one discipline after another along the way. When pressed for coaching goals, he identified a few possibilities: becoming a more effective manager and building stronger internal relationships. Worthwhile goals, both agreed, but neither felt they captured what was really going on.

“May I offer an observation?” the coach asked.

“Please.”

“It sounds as though you’ve spent the last decade mastering increasingly difficult challenges, almost as if your career were a game. A serious game, but a game, nonetheless. And from everything you’ve described, you’ve won. Before deciding what to focus on next, I wonder if your real task isn’t choosing another objective—it’s building an entirely new game board.”

The client sat quietly for a moment.

Then he laughed.

“Oh my God,” he said. “You so get me. I’ve never thought about it that way, but suddenly the confusion I’ve been feeling makes perfect sense. Yes. A new game board. Let’s build one.”

They laughed together, and off they went on their coaching journey.

The coaching ultimately addressed the management skills, networking, and leadership capabilities he had originally identified. But those goals now sat within a much larger framework. The metaphor of the new game board transformed his understanding of his career, and with it, the energy and purpose he brought to the work. The coach didn’t solve the client’s problem. She offered a metaphor that reorganized the client’s understanding of himself. That is often how transformational coaching works.

Which raises a question: would an AI coach have been as effective at finding the metaphor that unlocked the client’s passion? Would sharing a revelatory insight with a machine carry the same emotional weight? Can any of us truly laugh with a bot?

I don’t think so.

What Is at Stake When Using AI for Coaching?

I love AI. It is extraordinarily useful.

Many organizations are already using AI coaching to help people clarify goals, build skills, brainstorm ideas, and troubleshoot the application of new learning. It is available around the clock, documents every interaction, identifies patterns across large populations, and delivers coaching support at a fraction of the cost of human coaching. These are remarkable advantages.

What I don’t think we fully appreciate is what may be lost.

In his paper AI Coaching: Redefining People Development and Organizational Performance, researcher Nicky Terblanche defines AI coaching as “the imitation of human coaching expertise through the application of emulated human coaching knowledge.”

The key words here are imitation and emulated.

AI can imitate coaching language. It can emulate coaching techniques. That is incredibly cool.

It can also imitate empathy, encouragement, curiosity, and humor. That is just kind of creepy.

AI has never failed publicly, grieved a loss, cared for a sick child, questioned its own worth, sacrificed for someone it loves, or lain awake wondering whether it made the right decision. It has no lived experience of ambition, regret, responsibility, shame, joy, or awe. It has never inhabited a vulnerable human body that ages, tires, aches, and ultimately dies. These are not incidental details. They are the raw material of the human condition.

Human coaches do not simply apply coaching models. They draw upon years of navigating uncertainty, disappointment, success, relationships, identity, and change. They recognize patterns not only because they have studied them, but because they have lived them.

That doesn’t mean coaches should spend sessions telling stories about themselves. Quite the opposite. Their experiences stay mostly invisible. They serve as quiet reference points that shape intuition, judgment, timing, and the ability to recognize a metaphor that suddenly makes everything click.

The “new game board” wasn’t a coaching technique, it was human intuition.

The Subtle Power of Human Connection

Accountability offers another area where we can identify the strengths and the limitations of AI coaching.

AI can provide flawless accountability. It remembers every commitment, sends timely reminders, tracks progress meticulously, and never forgets a follow-up.

Those are valuable capabilities.

But decades of behavioral research suggest that accountability is most powerful when another credible person we respect knows our goal, follows up, genuinely cares about the outcome. We are more likely to follow through because another human being is invested in our success. Social accountability changes behavior in ways that simple self-monitoring rarely does.

AI can imitate caring remarkably well, but I don’t care how accurately AI mimics caring, because AI can’t love you.

Terblanche acknowledges this limitation, noting that AI cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture or meaning,” which are precisely the things coaching often explores.

At its best, coaching is not simply about improving performance. It is about helping another person make sense of the complicated experience of being human: navigating ambition, disappointment, identity, purpose, uncertainty, relationships, and possibility. Coaching almost always reveals that the question you came to answer wasn’t the question you really needed to ask.

None of this diminishes the value of AI. Quite the opposite.

Coaches should absolutely leverage AI to strengthen their practice. Organizations should embrace AI coaching to help employees clarify goals, practice skills, reinforce learning, and provide support between coaching sessions. Used wisely, AI expands access to high-quality coaching in ways we could not have imagined even a few years ago.

But we should resist the temptation to confuse technical competence with human wisdom. AI can imitate the language of coaching. It can emulate many of its methods. What it cannot emulate is fully lived experience.

The Future of Coaching: Human or AI?

The future of coaching is both: It is AI for what AI does exceptionally well, and human coaches for the moments that require something no algorithm has ever experienced: the messy, joyful, heartbreaking, extraordinary reality of being human.

The client didn’t need another leadership model. He needed a new game board.

AI can help people play the game they’re already in. It can help them clarify goals, build skills, solve problems, and stay accountable. But sometimes the real work isn’t learning how to play better. Sometimes the real work is realizing you’re playing the wrong game.

That moment of recognition is deeply human. It arises through conversation, intuition, shared experience, and meaning-making.

Much as it pains me to admit it, I anticipate that AI may one day become even better at coaching techniques than many human coaches. But until it has lived a life, it cannot truly understand one.

How AI Can Help Coaches

Coaches who are challenged to explain the value they bring to the coaching experience are often at a loss for words. They might consider the following:

• AI helps generate options; I help the client choose the ones.
• AI explains concepts; I help uncover the meaning.
• AI captures information; I notice patterns that will elicit insights.
• AI is available for quick problem solving between sessions; I provide the throughline for the experience, keep an eye on the big picture, and provide the relationship that catalyzes transformation.

Coaches have an opportunity to model the effective and responsible use of emerging technologies. Imagine a coach who refused to use the telephone; or later, email. AI represents another significant shift in how professionals work.

Coaches should avoid reflexively demonizing AI or dismissing its value in coaching. The saying, “Your job is not being taken by AI, but it may be taken by someone who knows how to use AI,” is relevant here.

Coaches who understand AI, and arrange access to AI tools they trust, can help clients distinguish between questions that are well suited for AI and issues that deserve the time and attention of a human coach. The table below gives a few examples.

With a client’s permission, coaches can record and transcribe coaching sessions, then use AI to generate summaries of key insights, themes, and commitments for the coach to review, edit, and share. For coaches who have always provided session notes, AI can dramatically reduce the time required while improving consistency.

Coaches can also use session summaries to support the creation of development plans and to produce a comprehensive overview of the client’s growth over the course of the coaching engagement.

Some technologically savvy coaches have created branded AI assistants trained on their coaching philosophy, methodologies, and published work. They make these assistants available exclusively to their clients between coaching sessions. Clients gain the sense that their coach’s thinking is available whenever they need it, while the coach can review those interactions and build on them in subsequent sessions.

How AI Can Help Clients

Clients can record their own coaching sessions (with their coach’s permission, where appropriate) and use AI to summarize key insights, commitments, and action items. Traditional coach training encourages the coach to make the client responsible for taking their own notes, but many people find it difficult to both participate fully in their coaching conversation and capture meaningful notes at the same time.

Clients can also use trusted AI tools to track their progress, reflect between sessions, identify emerging themes, and prepare for upcoming coaching conversations. This helps ensure that important insights and topics do not fall through the cracks.

How AI Can Help Professionals Who Oversee Coaching in Their Organizations

For organizational leaders, AI can serve as an effective complement to human coaching by combining elements of coaching and training. It can help employees build knowledge, develop skills, and strengthen specific competencies between coaching sessions. Human coaches can then focus on helping clients navigate complex challenges, overcome obstacles, and translate new knowledge into lasting behavioral change.

Organizational leaders should view AI not as a replacement for coaching, but as a force multiplier. When AI is used thoughtfully, it can make coaching more accessible, increase the return on coaching investments, and allow human coaches to spend more time on the uniquely human work of reflection, accountability, perspective-taking, and meaningful behavior change.

The future of coaching is unlikely to be a choice between human coaches and artificial intelligence. Instead, it will belong to those who learn to combine the strengths of both:

Used together, AI and human coaching have the potential to build a whole new game board: one that makes coaching more effective, more scalable, and ultimately, more human.

Read: Madeleine’s article AI Can Inform – But Only People Transform