Your brand, business and clients’ changing world

Your coaching brand and positioning

Experience, credentials and a broad range of capabilities matter. They can still leave a prospective client wondering why they should choose you.

The music business offers a useful metaphor. Think about a specialist record shop, HMV and Spotify. The record shop might earn loyalty through distinctive taste, relationships and a community. A large retailer offers breadth and convenience. A streaming service changes how people access the music in the first place.

Which part of that picture resembles your coaching business? And what would a client recognise as distinctive about it?

It is easy to imagine ourselves as the specialist record shop while describing our work through a long list of services and qualifications. The metaphor invites us to examine that assumption. It is a lens for thinking about positioning, rather than a forecast of which coaching businesses will succeed.

AI adds another choice. You might make it prominent in your offer, use it selectively behind the scenes, or deliberately preserve a space without it. Each position needs a clear connection to the people you serve and the value they experience. Simply adding “AI” to your profile does not explain that value.

Developing AI fluency

Your clients may be navigating a world in which AI matters a great deal.

A client might be delegating work to AI agents, questioning the reliability of an automated recommendation, or managing colleagues whose roles are changing. If their coach cannot follow what they mean, the conversation may miss something central to their experience. Over time, that could affect the relevance of the coaching relationship and your business.

Fluency means having enough understanding and experience to ask informed questions, recognise limitations and keep learning. You do not need to become a software engineer or follow every product announcement. You do need to understand the difference between a convincing output and something a person can verify, explain and take responsibility for.

That distinction matters for clients too. AI can help someone produce work beyond their current expertise. What happens when they have to defend it, adapt it or recognise where it has gone wrong?

Being able to explore those questions is useful even if you decide to keep AI out of your own sessions.

Changes to organisational structure

Some leaders are proposing changes to the organising logic of a business, extending well beyond helping employees complete familiar tasks faster.

In From Hierarchy to Intelligence, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha describe Block’s ambition to put more organisational context and coordination into an intelligence system. People would work around its edges, bringing judgement and contact with realities the system cannot adequately perceive. Their proposed roles include specialists, people responsible for particular outcomes, and leaders who combine hands-on work with developing others. They acknowledge that the transition is at an early stage and parts may fail. Dorsey and Botha, March 2026.

Brian Armstrong’s publicly shared email announcing redundancies at Coinbase sets out a related ambition: intelligence at the centre, with people around it providing alignment. He proposes fewer management layers, leaders who also contribute directly, and smaller teams using AI agents, including experiments with one-person teams. His explanation for the redundancies includes both market conditions and changes enabled by AI. Armstrong, May 2026.

These are leaders’ stated intentions. Their accounts do not establish that the models will work everywhere, or that organisations will all move in this direction.

For coaches, they open up a possibility worth understanding: AI could change who coordinates work, where authority sits, how expertise is valued and what it means to lead. Our clients may have to make sense of these ideas long before anyone can demonstrate how they will turn out.

What organisational change means for clients

My coaching interpretation is that changes to organisational structure could become changes to identity, relationships and culture.

A manager who has built their sense of contribution around leading a large team may face a different definition of leadership. An experienced specialist may gain new capabilities while questioning the value of hard-won expertise. Someone earlier in their career may wonder where they will learn if familiar entry-level work changes or disappears.

There could be more freedom to build, experiment and make decisions. There could also be greater workload, insecurity or pressure to demonstrate value. A smaller team may feel energising to one person and isolating to another.

These possibilities invite questions about the client’s actual situation. Who can challenge a decision shaped by AI? What earns recognition now? What happens to trust when a promise of greater productivity arrives alongside redundancies? How does the client feel about the future they are being asked to help create?

We need enough understanding of cultural shifts to hear what is happening for the person in front of us. That includes being open to opportunities, losses and outcomes that differ from our own expectations. A client’s reluctance may contain sound judgement; their enthusiasm may reveal a possibility we have overlooked.

Evolving your coaching offer

AI could change who you can serve, how support is delivered and what a client is paying for.

For example, an offer might combine human sessions with carefully designed support between them, or make a different balance of individual and group work possible. You might also find that clients want help making sense of AI-related changes in their working lives. That is a potential area of relevance for coaching, provided it fits your experience and competence.

The starting point is the client’s need. What becomes possible that would help them? Where does human involvement matter most? What expectations would a different offer create about availability, continuity and responsibility?

An attractive demonstration is only part of the answer. A new offer also has to work in practice, including for any associates or partners involved, and be something you can explain and stand behind.

These are possibilities to examine through experience. Adding AI does not by itself establish demand, improve outcomes or make a coaching business more profitable.

Is AI saving you time—or creating more work?

AI may make your coaching business more efficient, but pay attention to where the saved time goes. A tool can shorten one task while creating more preparation, reviewing and maintenance elsewhere.

Look at the whole engagement. Does the additional work help the client? Does it improve your attention or free capacity you can use? Or has it become elaborate support that your client may not value and your fees may not sustain?

Being able to produce more makes deciding what is enough a business decision as well as a professional one.

(Before using client material, see AI, confidentiality and your clients’ trust.)