Written by Friderike Butler
AI can scale coaching behaviors. The question now is what kind of growth we are scaling.
Paris asked: What is happening to coaching? New York asked: What is coaching today, and how fast can we scale it? I ask: What are we scaling, and who protects the human purpose of the work?
Within a few weeks, I sat in two rooms where the future of coaching was being explored from very different angles.
At the ICF Converge Conference in Paris, I heard a profession actively making sense of change. There was curiosity, excitement, and a desire to understand what technology means for the deep human work at the center of coaching. Coaching has matured and proven its value. Now technology challenges us to examine some of our own assumptions about what makes coaching powerful.
At the NYU Coaching and Technology Summit, the energy was different. It was optimistic, perhaps promotional at times, and focused on scale, access, enterprise adoption, research, and the speed at which technology is already reshaping leadership development.
Paris felt like the profession looking inward.
New York felt like the ecosystem already moving at a rapid pace.
Coaches are still debating whether AI can coach.
Organizations are already deciding where AI coaching belongs.
All these conversations were valuable. We need all of them. But together, they make the replacement question feel too small. When the democratization of coaching is heralded, the question for me is: What exactly are we scaling, for whom, and to what end?
Coaching Is Changing Because It Works
Coaching has evolved because it has proven its value. What began for many as remedial support or executive privilege has become part of how organizations think about leadership, culture, performance, and change.
That success created pressure.
More people need support than the traditional one-coach-one-client model can reach. First-time managers need help before having difficult conversations. Leaders need a sounding board in the middle of complexity. Teams need better ways to practice collaboration, feedback, and accountability. Organizations need learning that is not limited to training and workshops but shows up in the flow of daily work.
Technology stepped into that gap.
The pressure to rethink coaching was already emerging. AI accelerated the timeline.
The Promise: Support in the Moments That Matter
AI can bring support closer to the moments where leadership actually happens: before a performance conversation, after a conflict, during onboarding, while preparing for a meeting, or between human coaching sessions.
Those are the moments when development often breaks down. Not because leaders lack insight in a workshop or a coaching session, but because the moment arrives later, under pressure, with real people, real stakes, and little time to think. In-the-moment access to an interactive resource that is tailored to a specific context can make a meaningful difference.
For many frontline leaders and first-time managers, AI-supported coaching may offer developmental support they would otherwise never receive.
We still need to ask: If frontline leaders get AI coaching and executives keep human coaching, have we democratized development or created a new hierarchy of care?
Expanding access and scaling coaching behaviors are not the same as scaling human development. AI may help us become more productive and effective. The question is whether it also helps us become more discerning, connected, ethical, and wise.
The Question We Cannot Skip: What Are We Scaling?
This is where I found myself pausing when I heard AI being championed primarily as a tool to increase efficiency, performance, and speed.
When AI coaching is deployed primarily to improve performance, increase productivity, and help people move faster through organizational demands, support can start to feel pressure. A tool designed to help a leader grow can also become a tool that nudges people to cope with unhealthy systems instead of changing them.
AI may say: Here are five resilience practices for your burnout.
A human and systems lens also asks: Why is this organization producing burnout?
Both questions are useful. They lead us to different places.
The risk is not that AI coaching will fail. The risk is that it will work well enough to scale support without scaling discernment and connection.
I do not know exactly where the line is. I am not sure anyone does yet. I believe we need to wrestle with what we mean by coaching, growth, flourishing, and transformation before the systems are fully built.
- When does support become pressure?
- Who benefits from the development being scaled?
- Who is responsible for protecting the conditions for human growth and well-being?
Coaches Need to Help Design What Comes Next
These questions are core to my work. At Optify, where we are exploring AI-supported coaching through our product offerings I am seeing first-hand how much care the design process requires. I am especially interested in the choices underneath the tool: where AI can support practice and reflection, where human coaching remains essential, what guardrails we need, and how we evaluate impact with more than usage data.
The question is not simply whether a tool works. It is whether the development experience it creates keeps human growth at the center.
Coaches cannot afford to stand outside this conversation, critiquing what others are building. If we care about human development, we need to be part of the design conversation.
Not to defend legacy models but to help shape new systems.
That also means coaches need to evolve. AI literacy is becoming part of the context our clients live in. Leaders are already using AI. Organizations are already being reshaped by it. Work itself is changing.
A coach without AI literacy may soon be like a leadership coach who does not understand organizational culture, power dynamics, or systems. They can still coach, yet they are missing important parts of the world their clients are navigating.
The Human Edge Is Changing
Coach education will need to move beyond technique alone. Coaches need deeper grounding in human development, systems thinking, ethics, power, organizational life, and the use of technology. We need backbone and heart. We need a deeper capacity to hold tension with clients when they are facing hard truths, competing commitments, identity shifts, ethical dilemmas, and uncertainty.
This is also where I want to challenge one of the more common arguments in the field.
It is short-sighted to assume AI cannot create trust or rapport.
People are already forming meaningful connections with AI tools. AI can remember context, recognize patterns, ask useful questions, and create a sense of being heard and seen.
If AI can do some of what we have assumed only humans could do, then we need to be more precise about where human coaching truly matters. The future value of human coaching may have less to do with better questions and more to do with deeper responsibility and care for something larger than self.
Growth does not happen only through support. It often requires productive discomfort and friction.
The moments that transform us are often the moments when someone cares enough not to make the discomfort disappear too quickly.
That is a challenge for AI. It is also a growth edge for human coaches.
AI systems optimized for satisfaction, engagement, or continued use may have incentives to reduce discomfort. Strong human coaching often asks us to stay with the tension long enough for something more honest to emerge.
That kind of work requires more than technique. It requires discernment, moral courage, embodied awareness, systems awareness, and care without a hidden agenda.
Stewardship Belongs to the Whole Ecosystem
It also requires collaboration across the whole ecosystem.
The next era of coaching will not be shaped only by the people who understand coaching. It will be shaped by the people who understand coaching, technology, organizational systems, evidence, and human development well enough to design across all of them.
The stewardship of this next era does not belong to coaches alone. It belongs to an ecosystem: coaches bringing human development wisdom, researchers bringing evidence, technologists bringing capability, and organizations bringing scale and application.
None of us can design this future alone.
Designing for Flourishing
If we were to agree that the future of coaching is a design and discernment challenge, the next generation of coaches may need to become ecosystem architects of human development. They must be prepared to help design environments where technology, relationships, reflection, challenge, practice, and human care work together.
In a world of increasing complexity, volatility, and division, we do not only need more efficient humans. We need more capable, connected, and caring humans.
The choices we make now will shape whether AI becomes another tool for optimization or a catalyst for human flourishing.
The future of coaching will not be solely defined by what AI can do. It is shaped by what kind of humans, leaders, organizations, and societies we are trying to grow.
This is the conversation I hope more of us are willing to have before systems are built around assumptions we have not fully examined.
I am grateful for the many pioneers pushing this conversation forward.
Anna A. Tavis, PhD and the NYU Coaching Innovation Lab created a space where researchers, technologists, organizations, and coaches could be in serious conversation together. Prof. Nicky Terblanche (PhD), Rebecca Rutschmann, Jonathan Reitz, MCC, ACTC, Rachel Cossar, Maureen Kennedy, MA, PCC, Tim Harrison, Dr. Christian Schmeichel, David Drake, PhD and many others helped sharpen my thinking about evidence, access, human-AI collaboration, and the ethical questions we cannot afford to treat as an afterthought.
