Will AI Replace Coaches?

Can AI Replace Coaching?
Delenta's Coaching Executive Series

Our Co-Founder Liz Whitney, recently joined a panel as part of Delenta's Coaching Executive Series alongside two other executive coaches for a live conversation on the question everyone in L&D is asking: can AI replace coaching?

The panel was moderated by Rev. Monica Humpal, MCC, with three coaches: Liz Whitney (that's us), Nancy J. Di Dia (former Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, 25 years in financial services), and Sarah Fraser (Founder of Happiness Express).

Monica had five questions lined up and being the keen-as-mustard coaches that we were, we answered two of them before she even had to ask.

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1. What feels genuinely promising about AI in coaching, and what gives you pause?

The panel's instinct was: don't confuse enthusiasm with strategy. Organisations are rushing to put coaching and L&D through AI before they've worked out what problem they're actually solving, and the tools are getting adopted faster than anyone is putting governance around them.

Nancy: "It helps me with data and thematic themes, but it's based on my input, not what AI thinks should be done."

Liz: "It's quite frightening how there is very little governance and checks and balances and ethical usage being considered before tools are tried and experimented. And that gives me a lot of cause for concern around data privacy."

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2. What ethical questions does this raise for organisations?

This is where Nancy's DEI background came through hardest. Her concern wasn't AI itself, it was coaching (AI-assisted or not) being repurposed as a tool for conformity rather than development.

Nancy: "What I have seen almost is a desire that coaching is, and I put this in air quotes, 'make them a better fit.' And that, as a former chief diversity officer, is a hot button issue for me, because we don't want leaders to fit in, which means we become echo chambers on our leadership team."

Liz also raised a sharper, more practical worry: organisations wanting thematic reporting on coaching conversations on a quarterly basis, which pushes towards feeding session recordings into AI to extract themes. Her line on that: "we're going to have to find a different way of doing that, which feels safe for the person who's having that chat," because the moment coaching starts getting reported back to the organisation like a data feed, it stops being coaching.”

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3. Why do human coaches remain irreplaceable?

Naturally, we all had some pretty strong views about this question, and not because we’re worried about our jobs (we’re not). 

One panelist said "AI coaching isn't really coaching. It's guiding and advice-giving with some coaching style questions." And for those who’ve tried to get a chatbot to coach you: "There's no space held. There's no silence. As soon as I paused, it jumped in again. It can’t be intuitive."

Liz backed this up with a story from her own practice, reviewing three 360 feedback reports for a CFO client the morning of their session. There was a temptation to put this through AI to get a quicker summary but she resisted, knowing the process of reading it all through was an important part of the job: "This is why we get paid to do this job. We are adding this layer of intuition, this insight, and it's part of what we do in order to know our clients. You can't shortcut it."

Liz also raised a longer-term worry, about what happens to critical thinking if people delegate judgment to a tool too early: "I'm very concerned about how this use of AI is going to create a whole generation of people who don't know how to think for themselves or do things the ‘old fashioned way’."

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4. How does coaching become part of an organisation's culture, not just a leadership initiative?

Liz drew on her own history here, having watched her previous company, ustwo bring in agile coaching methodology from Sweden and seeing it change how people actually behaved, not just how they were trained: "They asked better questions, they gave really good feedback. It doesn't matter what level it was, the feedback culture shifted." Her broader point: coaching sticks when it's built into how meetings run, how feedback gets asked for, how pulse surveys get followed up, rather than sitting off to the side as something only the most senior leaders get as a perk. 

This was then picked up from a different angle, connecting it to why younger employees are pushing for it: "the role of emotional intelligence in leadership training now… this idea of servant leadership, leadership that's very purpose driven with employees… we especially see that with the younger generations coming into the workforce."

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5. Why do empathy, trust, self-awareness, and real human connection matter more than ever?

Nancy pointed to research on what actually predicts leadership success: "The two primary competencies for leaders right now are vulnerability, trust and empathy, and leaders that demonstrate that have the most success in empowering and enabling their teams to be highly engaged."

Liz then told a story that grounded the whole panel: a client arrived furious about a piece of feedback that, once Liz actually read it, wasn't harsh at all. It had just landed badly, on someone who was already braced for bad news. "There's moments where I was like, do you know what? I should just cancel the session, this isn't a coaching session… but I didn't. I just held the space and let her cry and talk out her frustration." The client texted the next day to say it was the best session they'd had.

Sarah offered a response to that story and reframed why it worked: "It absolutely was a coaching session, because coaching is about where we are now, today, in this present moment, and where we want to get to. It's very forward-looking, unlike maybe therapy, where we spend more time in the past." And a sharp bit of self-honesty about the profession's own habits: "sometimes as coaches we can be guilty of rushing through the GROW model to get to the action, because our bias towards action plays out." We have to remember that listening is sometimes enough. 

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Where this leaves us

None of the coaches on this panel were arguing that AI has no place in coaching. Nancy uses it for spotting themes in data. Liz sees value in how it can open up access to guidance for people who'd never normally get a coach. The disagreement, if you can call it that, was never really AI versus humans.

What came through instead is that coaching's core skill, holding space, sensing when someone needs silence rather than a next step, catching what's underneath the words rather than just the words, isn't something AI does yet, and possibly isn't something it's built to do. The risk the panel kept coming back to wasn't AI replacing coaches. It was organisations using AI (or using coaching itself) to smooth people into a mould, to get quarterly themes out of a conversation, to move faster towards action than the person in front of you is ready for. 

The line that sums it up best came from Liz: AI coaching has a place, but it shouldn't be used as an alternative to human coaching. It should be used alongside it. The job for organisations right now isn't choosing AI or coaches. It's being honest about which parts of the soft skills development at work should remain human. 

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