How can coaches utilise the power of AI to assist or enhance the coaching they provide?
Artificial intelligence is advancing almost every industry and coaching is no exception. There are benefits of a fully AI coach, but there’s growing interest in AI-assisted coaching, which represents a hybrid model and potentially the best of both worlds.
AI-assisted or AI-enhanced coaching describes a traditional coaching relationship where the coach utilizes artificial intelligence to improve their service. This might be simply through saving time writing emails, for example, or using AI to provide ideas for questions to ask. However, it might also refer to using more complex applications of the technology such as data analysis or predictive analytics.
The main idea of AI-assisted coaching is that by combining the skills and experience of a human coach with the vast knowledge and processing power of AI, the overall experience for the client is enhanced. This should result in faster progress or progress on a far greater scale than was previously possible. Let’s look more specifically at the benefits of AI-assisted coaching.
There are several ways AI can be integrated into the coaching process to benefit both the coach and the client.
Time saving: A highly practical use of AI is utilising its ability to complete routine tasks. This can enable coaches to manage their clients more efficiently by freeing up time. A coach could enlist the support of an AI virtual assistant to schedule appointments and send reminders amongst other things.
Idea-generation: Sometimes, coaches may benefit from additional inspiration when thinking about how to respond to clients. Coming up with ideas for suggestions or lines of questioning is taxing, but AI does it almost immediately. This could help them ask better questions but also respond to emails far more efficiently if the AI can create good coaching questions.
Real-time data analysis: With access to data, AI can spot patterns and opportunities for a business far more efficiently than a human can. This real-time feedback can provide powerful insights that can equip a coach to provide more personalised and data-driven coaching.
Generative content
Coaches can leverage AI’s ability to create content in several ways. They might use an AI tool to create valuable content for their website or resources for their clients. Furthermore, AI could be used to visually display concepts they’ve imagined to help clients understand their ideas and way of thinking.
Chatbot support
If a coach creates an AI version of themselves, trained with all their content and coaching frameworks, their clients can access this chatbot between sessions. This provides clients with small but frequent doses of inspiration and guidance to keep them on track.
With interventions from a coach, many of the issues associated with a purely artificially intelligent relationship are managed. Some potential pitfalls to consider are:
The coach’s over-reliance on AI potentially resulting in less care and attention given to email responses, for example.
More generic coaching being provided if the coach is not providing the AI model sufficient context for each client.
The coach feeling disenfranchised with the process as AI becomes more integral to the client relationship.
The client feeling less engaged with the coach if they believe the human connection is being lost or that the coach is “outsourcing” them to AI.
The key to overcoming these issues is for the coach to clear on exactly what role AI is playing in their relationships. They should takes steps to provide sufficient context to the AI model about clients and use their skills to interpret responses and modify them as necessary for their clients.
Overall, AI-assisted coaching has the potential to revolutionize the coaching industry by providing coaches with new tools and techniques to help them deliver more effective and personalized coaching services. It is hard to see how, once engrained in their processes, a coach will cease utilizing AI for the benefit of them and their client. With the capabilities of AI only set to advance in the coming years, coaches shunning the technology will surely find themselves at a disadvantage.
