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’ve been working so closely with AI
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.
Supporting CEO growth with Human x AI coaching →
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.
Finding your approach
Start with a question about your own coaching: a moment when you move into advice, a response you want to explore, or a familiar framework you want to examine. A focused experiment can help you decide where AI contributes and where you prefer to leave it out.
Explore directiveness, bring your experience into the interpretation, and choose a first experiment with a clear purpose.
Read the guide: finding your approach →
Questions to ask yourself
- What would I like AI to help me explore in my own practice?
- What could I try using a fictional scenario, and how would I judge whether it was useful?
- Where would I choose to leave AI out, and what might lead me to reconsider?
AI, confidentiality and your clients’ trust
You may see real possibilities in AI and still hesitate to bring it anywhere near a client’s words. Confidentiality is part of the space you offer as a coach.
Explore the limits of privacy settings, what removing names leaves identifiable, and how to talk openly with clients about your proposed use of AI.
Read the guide: ai, confidentiality and your clients’ trust →
Questions to ask yourself
- What can I confidently explain to a client about how their information would be used?
- What information does this reflection actually require, and what could still identify someone?
- How will I make room for a client to question the arrangement or prefer to keep AI out?
Reflection and professional judgement
An AI reflective partner can offer another reading of a coaching moment. Its fluency does not establish that it has understood the client, the relationship or the kind of coaching you intended.
Examine the evidence behind its feedback, notice when reflection becomes too much, and consider what to bring to human supervision.
Read the guide: reflection and professional judgement →
Questions to ask yourself
- What assumptions about good coaching am I asking my reflective partner to work with?
- What makes an interpretation convincing to me, and what might challenge it?
- How is this reflection affecting the attention I bring to my clients?
- What would be useful to bring into human supervision?
Using AI around coaching sessions
Recording, summaries, rehearsal and tools between sessions each change something different about the work. Begin with the purpose and the client’s experience.
Consider what recording does to a private conversation, whose interpretation a summary captures, and what fictional rehearsal can help you explore.
Read the guide: using ai around coaching sessions →
Questions to ask yourself
- What would recording make possible, and what might it change in the conversation?
- Whose understanding of the session would a summary capture?
- What would I want to learn through rehearsal before trying something in practice?
- What would make support between sessions useful to this particular client?
Your role as a human coach
Your clients may already be taking questions to AI. Be curious about what they find there, what they question, and how it relates to your work together.
Explore what your coaching offers beyond an insightful answer and how the relationship affects what a client can consider, say or do.
Read the guide: your role as a human coach →
Questions to ask yourself
- What are my clients already finding in AI conversations, and what might those conversations overlook?
- What does our coaching relationship make possible for the client?
- Which uses of AI support the way I want to coach, and which would change it?
Your brand, business and clients’ changing world
AI may change both your coaching offer and the working lives of the people you coach. Questions of expertise, identity, authority and belonging can enter the conversation alongside questions about tools.
Examine what clients recognise as distinctive about your work, what AI fluency means for a coach, and whether new uses of AI are saving time or creating more work.
Read the guide: your brand, business and clients’ changing world →
Questions to ask yourself
- What would a client recognise as distinctive about my work?
- What do I need to understand about AI to follow the changes my clients are experiencing?
- What opportunities, losses or questions of identity might those changes bring into coaching?
- Across a whole engagement, what is AI adding—and what is it costing in time and attention?
Explore these questions in your own practice
AI-Augmented Coaching is my live course for experienced coaches who want to experiment, develop their fluency and make informed decisions about AI.
On the course, we move into the practical work: developing a reflective partner, examining what it produces, and working through the privacy and contracting questions that arise when AI meets client work. Demonstrations, supporting materials and discussion give you a basis for experimenting in your own practice.
The group matters too. Comparing experiences helps reveal assumptions and possibilities you might miss working alone. The aim is to develop an approach you understand, can explain and can decide to use selectively.
View course details and dates.
You can also follow my writing on coaching and leadership.