Your role as a human coach

When clients already use AI

Be curious about what they are doing and what they find helpful. Which questions do they take to it? How do they decide whether to accept its suggestions? Has it helped them act, changed their understanding or helped them avoid something difficult?

Explore an insight they bring, consider what it overlooks and connect it to the wider work. You can respond to the client’s actual experience without first settling the whole question of AI coaching.

What your coaching offers beyond an insightful answer

I return to the capacity to help a client examine how they are making sense of a situation, especially when their usual way of thinking has reached its limits.

In my practice, that involves noticing patterns, naming something we can explore, and helping the client develop their own questions and experiments. Sometimes it involves challenge; sometimes patience, humour or staying with something that cannot yet be neatly explained.

AI makes it useful to articulate that contribution precisely. What happens in your work beyond the production of an insightful answer? How does the relationship affect what the client can consider, say or do?

Your answer will depend on how you coach. It can also help you decide which uses of AI support your work and which change it in ways you do not want.

Feeling understood and producing an insight can be valuable without leading to movement. Sometimes the work involves staying with a difficult question or testing an understanding through action. AI can also offer challenge; the useful question is what helps this particular client engage with something they might otherwise avoid.

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