Can AI be an Effective Executive Coach?

Executive coaching is a soft skill. Yes, there are some technical frameworks you can be trained on, but at the end of the day, a good executive coach is proficient in what are generally considered soft skills: conversations, intuition, active listening, appreciative inquiry, etc. Soft skills are those less tangible skills that are more dependent on our ability to be human and interact with other humans than hard skills like accounting or even project management.

As AI takes more and more center stage in our collective awareness, and our ability to leverage and access AI-powered tools becomes commonplace, we have begun to wonder,  Could AI be an effective executive coach?

We already know that AI is capable of back-and-forth conversation that looks and feels surprisingly human-to-human. We also know that great coaching sessions follow a structure and predictable flow (i.e. it’s a “learnable” for AI). Additionally, great questions follow a common structure and format (therefore it’s also “learnable”). Since the bedrock of good coaching is asking great questions and then letting the client wrestle with those questions, it doesn’t feel completely out of reach for AI to do a pretty good job.

We did some initial internet sleuthing and there are a few early AI coaches already out there. CoachHub doesn’t seem to leverage AI to coach, but is leveraging AI to make recommendations to clients re content, goals, matching them with a coach, etc. Bunch describes itself as an AI coach and community that seems to offer bite-sized coaching in 2 minute increments.

We also ran our own experiments. Kara went to ChatGPT and typed in, “Can you be an executive coach for me?” and got this response: 

I'd be happy to help you as an executive coach! Whether you're looking to enhance your leadership skills, improve decision-making, refine communication, or navigate workplace challenges, I can offer guidance and support. We can discuss strategies, tools, and frameworks to boost your performance and growth.

To start, it would be helpful to know a bit more about your current goals and areas you're focusing on. What would you like to work on most?

Kara answered a few questions and then got a set of tips and content from ChatGPT similar to what she could have found with a regular Google search. In our minds, this qualifies as a start, but it didn’t feel quite like the value that a true executive coach can and should offer. Most of the questions that ChatGPT asked were aimed at helping ChatGPT understand information and narrow the scope to a place where ChatGPT could offer a solution. They weren’t open-ended and designed to help Kara reflect and find the solution within herself. It felt like ChatGPT was acting more like a consultant, offering insights and expertise, than as a true coach. 

Then Kara asked ChatGPT, “Ask me powerful questions to move my thinking forward on growing my business.” The output was a huge set of questions that would probably yield some interesting thinking on the topic of growing the business, but it wasn’t conversational… yet. Kara noticed that she missed that silent moment that hangs between coach and client after her coach asks her a question. That space to think and speak feels different when you’re interfacing with a digital platform.

All that said, Kara’s experiments don’t make for a perfect test of what an AI executive coach would be like. There's likely a ton more that we can learn about how to prompt AI appropriately to maximize the power of what it can do, including instructing it on the style of coaching desired, to ask questions one at a time, to ask questions that are in response to the answer provided to the prior question, etc…all of which could very conceivably be built into an AI-oriented coaching tool. Even as we publish this article, we’re aware of the ways that conversational AI is rapidly developing, and perhaps in just a few weeks tools like ChatGPT will be even more sophisticated.

What is compelling about the potential here is that there is a structure to a coaching conversation that is easily learnable. There is a strategy for formulating and asking questions that can be taught. Already AI is offering “conversation modes” that allow you to simply talk to it rather than type. 

If we go in this direction, what are the risks and/or what do we potentially lose? Can AI take it all the way given that coaching relies on intuition, heart, and courage—qualities that feel (at least at this point) uniquely human. Can you code instinct? Can you code heart and connection? Can you code the ability to hear not just what’s said, but what isn’t? Maybe… but that’s still yet to come. Or even if it is, do we want it to?

What do you think? Is there a world where professional coaching moves into the AI space? Where is it likely to show up first?