Can AI Replace Coaching?
I´ll be honest with you. When people ask me whether AI can do what I do, my first instinct is to say no. But I'm also aware that's exactly what someone with a coaching business would say.
So instead of defending my position, I decided to actually look into it. What does the research say? What can AI genuinely do well, and where does it fall short? Here's what I found, including the parts that were uncomfortable to read.
The uncomfortable truth: AI is more capable than most coaches want to admit
Let's start with what AI can actually do, because dismissing it would be dishonest.
Research shows that AI coaching tools can already demonstrate behaviours that meet the ICF's entry-level credentialing standards, the same standards that professional coaches work towards. AI can ask structured questions, hold frameworks, track goals, provide accountability, and create a space for reflection. For someone who has never experienced coaching before, a well-designed AI tool might feel surprisingly useful.
And from a practical standpoint, AI coaching is available 24 hours a day, costs a fraction of working with a human coach, and carries no social awkwardness or fear of judgment. Those are real advantages worth acknowledging.
But here's where it gets interesting
When an ICF Master Credentialed Coach, one of the highest levels of professional coaching certification, was asked to evaluate a coaching session conducted by ChatGPT-4, the conclusion was striking. The output didn't just fall short of professional coaching standards. It couldn't be recognised as coaching at all.
Not because the answers were wrong. But because coaching isn't fundamentally about answers.
At its core, coaching is a joint inquiry. It's a partnership between two people, where the process of thinking together is as important as any insight that emerges from it. The coach is not a tool delivering information. The coach is a presence, someone whose energy, attentiveness, and humanity are part of what makes the conversation transformative.
AI can ask you what you value. It cannot sit with you in the silence after you realise you've been living against those values for years.
What human coaching offers that AI structurally cannot
The most powerful moments in coaching don't come from the right question at the right time, although that matters. They come from what I'd describe as dancing with the client in uncertainty, holding space for someone to not know, to feel confused, to sit with a difficult realisation without rushing toward a comfortable conclusion.
That requires a human being. Someone who has navigated uncertainty themselves. Someone who can sense what you're not saying as much as what you are. Someone whose presence in the room changes what becomes possible in the conversation.
Research from coaching academics backs this up. The most powerful coaching moves arise from intuition, emergent and unrepeatable moments that require deep human sensitivity. A coach isn't just a facilitator. They are an instrument. And that instrument cannot be replicated by a language model, however sophisticated.
There is also something important about what coaching is actually for. AI may offer the correct answer. Coaching helps you discover the answer you're ready for, the one that belongs to your life, your values, and your particular moment of growth. Those are not the same thing.
So who is AI coaching actually a threat to?
This is perhaps the most honest part of what the research says: AI is a genuine threat to novice coaches who rely heavily on simple models, scripted questions, and structured frameworks. If your coaching is mostly process and very little presence, AI will eventually do it better and cheaper.
But for coaches doing deeper, values-based, transformational work, the kind that requires genuine human connection and the capacity to hold complexity, the research suggests AI is not a replacement. If anything, it frees up coaches to focus entirely on the work that only humans can do.
My honest take
I think AI will make certain kinds of coaching obsolete. The transactional, checklist-driven variety that was never really coaching in the first place.
But the work I care about, helping someone reconnect with who they are, what they value, and where they actually want to go, that work happens in the space between two human beings. It requires presence, lived experience, and the kind of listening that goes beyond processing words.
That can't be automated. And I don't think it ever will be.
If you're curious what that kind of conversation feels like, I'd love to find out together:)
Sunny smiles,
Marius
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Marius Ketels is a Stockholm-based life and lifestyle coach helping young professionals find clarity, direction, and balance. With a background in psychology, design, and personal training, he brings a perspective that looks at the whole person, not just the professional one.
