A question I get asked a lot these days is: can an AI be your coach?
My honest answer is partly, and it matters which part.
INSEAD published a piece in May 2026 that frames the distinction better than most of what I read on this. (Nadav Klein, “AI and the Future of Executive Coaching”, 28 May 2026). His argument, in short: AI makes an excellent sparring partner. Endlessly patient, always available, sharp on frameworks, happy to roleplay a difficult conversation as many times as you need. What it cannot do is be the sensei: the person whose accountability carries emotional weight because of a real relationship built over time.
I agree with that framing, up to a point. Where I would push back slightly is on how much it assumes the client already knows how to use the sparring partner well.
Anyone can have a stimulating conversation with an AI tool. Anyone can pull up a framework or a model in seconds, and it will sound plausible. What none of us can get from a chatbot is someone in the room who notices when we are stuck, adjusts to where we actually are that day, and does not quit on us when the honest answer is uncomfortable. That is the sensei’s job. I do not think it is automatable, and I say that as someone who uses AI daily, just not for this.
In my own practice, the line is simple and I have not moved it. AI helps with research, learning, marketing, the back office, all of it. It never touches anything client-related. A client’s story stays exactly where it belongs, with me and with them.
The part of this that concerns me more than the technology is discernment. Most people have not yet developed the ability to tell excellent coaching input from average, or from outright poor input, and AI has been trained on a great deal of all three. Can an AI model know the quality of the material it was trained on? It can’t. In the future, perhaps.
That may explain something else entirely: the flood of AI-prepared outreach and content most of us wade through weekly, confident in tone, thin underneath. The tool is not the problem. Knowing what good looks like is, and that is exactly the muscle a good coach helps a client build, whether or not AI ever enters the room.
If you are weighing up where AI fits in your own development, or your team’s, and where it does not, I am happy to talk it through, plainly and without an agenda. Half an hour, no charge.