AI and Coaching: Questions from Practice
Are you thinking carefully about how to use AI in your coaching practice, but unsure where to start?
By Richard Hughes-Jones
AI is having rapid and profound impacts on the coaching industry. Views on its utility for coaches, and clients, are incredibly mixed and often polarised. AI can offer a fresh perspective and insights on a coaching conversation. It can ask you, and help you arrive at, questions you’ve never before thought to ask. However, it can also misread a client, reinforce your assumptions or biases, or overwhelm you with more analysis than you can process. How do you decide what deserves your attention?
You may have tried ChatGPT or Claude and begun to see possibilities for your practice. But where exactly does it fit, if at all? Going further brings questions that draw on your experience as a coach: what information is appropriate to share? When does AI-supported reflection help you learn? How might it affect the attention you bring to your client? Critically, how do you deal with sensitive personal client data in accordance with the law?
The themes in this guide draw on my own coaching practice and conversations with coaches taking part in my AI-Augmented Coaching course. They explore practical uses, confidentiality, the coaching relationship and what AI could mean for the working lives of our clients.
The aim is to help you develop an informed approach you can explain, question and refine through experience.
For an introduction to the tools and their practical uses, start with my guide to using ChatGPT and Claude in your coaching practice.
Before you start
Why I developed this guide
I began experimenting seriously with AI after several conversations with founders and CEOs who were already weaving it into their businesses. It raised a question I found difficult to avoid: how could I coach people who were leading through this shift if I remained at a distance from the tools myself?
That led to a series of practical experiments in my own coaching. One of the earliest was with Rider Latham, Co-founder and CEO of Solo and Secret Spa. Together, we explored how a personalised AI resource might support—but not replace—our coaching relationship.
My approach: augmentation, not replacement
I am neither a techno-optimist nor a pessimist. AI is already changing the context in which coaches and their clients work. My starting point is that useful judgement about it should be grounded in experience.
That does not mean every coach should reach the same conclusion, or use AI in the same way. It means I want to understand what these tools genuinely make possible, what they distort or diminish, and what working with them asks of us before arriving at fixed answers.
For me, augmentation begins with the coach, not the technology. It asks how AI might build on capacities developed through experience—reflection, pattern recognition, preparation and professional judgement—while remaining alert to where it might weaken attention, flatten context or encourage unwarranted certainty.
The aim is not to use more AI. It is to make better-founded choices about where it belongs in our practice, where it does not, and why.
The questions that follow are offered in that spirit: not as an argument for or against AI, but as material from which you can develop a position of your own—one you can explain, test and continue to revise through experience.
Explore the six themes
- Finding your approachDecide where AI may contribute to your practice—and where you prefer to leave it out.
- AI, confidentiality and your clients’ trustExamine confidentiality, anonymisation and how to discuss AI use openly with clients.
- Reflection and professional judgementUse AI as a reflective partner without outsourcing context, discernment or professional judgement.
- Using AI around coaching sessionsConsider what recording, summaries, rehearsal and between-session tools change in the work.
- Your role as a human coachClarify what the coaching relationship offers when clients can already take questions to AI.
- Your brand, business and clients’ changing worldExplore how AI may reshape your offer, your clients’ organisations and their working lives.