Every few months the question comes back around: is AI coming for coaching?
I build with AI every day. I built an AI chief of staff that runs large parts of my own operation. So take this from someone on both sides of the question: it's aimed at the wrong target.
AI is genuinely good at the clipboard work of coaching. It can track themes across months of conversations, surface patterns in how you communicate and decide, and remember every detail of every session with perfect recall. That's real value, and coaches who refuse to use it are choosing to be worse at their jobs.
But assessment is where coaching starts, not where it lives. The moment that actually changes a leader isn't the pattern report. It's the question that stops you cold, asked by someone who has lived through something close to what you're facing. AI has data. It doesn't have the 2am failures, the trust rebuilt after it broke, the decision that cost something real. Coaching draws on all of that, constantly and invisibly.
So here's the frame I use in my own practice: let the AI carry the clipboard so the human can stay in the room. Hand the machine the tracking, the recall, the preparation, the administrative weight. Keep the presence, the curiosity, and the questions for the person who has actually been somewhere.
The risk worth naming: organizations that deploy an AI tool and call it a coaching program. People will feel analyzed and wonder why nothing is changing. Insight without presence lands intellectually and shifts nothing.
AI augments the work. It doesn't replace it. And the coaches who understand that difference will quietly out-coach the ones who are afraid of it.