Can AI replace human coaches

There is a lot of discussion in the coachosphere about whether a coach can be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Coachingbots are being created, prompts written that aim at creating an instance of Artificial Intelligence which writes or acts like a coach. The question of whether coaching is an activity that we can hand over to machines is wafting through our communities.

The comparison that is being made is most often a comparison of transcripts: Let the AI “coach” a client and then let us compare the transcripts either of different “AI coaches” or the transcripts of a human coaching session with a transcript between a human and an “AI coach”. Nobody has yet had the idea to let two AIs coach each other – might be fun.

Anyway, I think that comparing transcripts is privileging the verbal part of coaching. Using words, humans do very interesting things: they plan, they reflect, they generate ideas and insights. And these are all activities and results that can be generated through a conversation with an AI coach. Very similar “word oriented” things can also be done with a piece of paper, a pen and few interesting questions inviting reflection. The only difference is that a client and their piece of paper is less responsive. An AI coach relies on patterns learned from generic data. It has access to what are the most likely words of a coach that follow a certain response of a client and can offer these rather than static words that are written on a piece of paper, for example on a reflection log.

A conversation with an AI coach is unlike a conversation with a human being. These differences make it unlikely, in my view, that human coaches can be replaced.

A conversation with an AI coach is not a dialogue

AI may simulate dialogue but does not genuinely participate in the open-ended co-construction of meaning. It has no lived experience to share and no stake in the evolving relationship nor in the evolving creation of meaning.

AI is no-body

For embodied cognition research and phenomenological philosophy, human understanding is rooted in our bodily experience. Our perceptions and emotions are inextricably linked to us being a living and sensing body, to our interactions through which we become who we are. A coach who does not have a body misses “embodied attunement”.

AI cannot really validate

I am a singer and my larynx feels really bad when I hear someone speaking in ways that I know are hurtful to the voice. Me being a body allows me to feel with my clients and allows my clients to feel acknowledged, validated and seen. If a human coach says: “Wow, that must be tough” in a certain way that signals that they themselves resonate with what the client is going through, the client will feel more validated than if an AI prints the text. The signal of: “I am a human being, just as you are a human being and I can imagine what it feels like to be you” is important in a coaching relationship, in my view.

AI cannot authentically care

AI can mimic empathy by borrowing from the human empathy it learned from its source texts. While it may be safer for a human to trust their secrets to an AI (although data security concerns might make this a moot point), the fact that humans know that the AI cannot have compassion or an understanding also means that the client might not have access to the healing sensation of care when in conversation with an AI.

AI is not I-Thou but I-It

Martin Buber is one of my favorite philosophers. He provides a useful distinction between encounters that are “I-Thou” and “I-It”. An “I–It” relation is one where we relate to the other as an object, a thing to use or analyze. By contrast, an “I–Thou” relation is a meeting of two human beings in contact. If you have read any of my material, you know that I am very much against treating other human beings as “Its”, as objects of our curiosity and research or otherwise objectified. In this case, it is not the coach who treats their client as an object but the client who is using the AI coach, who is an object. There cannot be true mutuality in AI coaching.

AI cannot hold space

Right now, AI coaching is mainly written coaching. The pace of the conversation is determined by the typing speed of the client and the processing speed of the AI. There are no deliberate pauses or other turn-taking signals which influence the conversation. Of course, this might change as AI develops, but for now, I would think humans do better in this regard.

All this does not mean that I am against using AI in coaching – there are many things that it can be very helpful for (but this is another blog post). If you are interested in this discussion, why not join one of our free meetups and exchanges?

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