We are pleased to share an article entitled “AI Coaching Comes of Age – The surprising results of a transformative pilot study“ written by Sam Isaacson.
The field of coaching is on the cusp of perhaps the most significant disruption it has ever faced — a revolution powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that promises to bring coaching conversations to vastly more people around the world than has ever been possible before.
A pioneering pilot study conducted with the National Health Service (NHS) in England has provided compelling evidence that AI-powered coaching can produce meaningful gains in goal attainment and self-efficacy, even for experienced coaches and leaders.
A collaboration between NHS Elect (a network within the NHS providing a range of services including coaching), the University of South Wales and AIcoach.chat (an AI coaching platform), the study pushed the boundaries of what AI is capable of in delivering non-directive conversations to catalyze personal growth.
At its core was a disarmingly simple question: Is an AI chatbot capable of increasing self-awareness effectively enough to justify its use as an alternative to human coaching?
THE ETHICS OF AI COACHING
In my book, How to Thrive as a Coach in a Digital World, I laid out the foundations for an ethical framework for adopting technology in coaching (or not). Essentially, if we can demonstrate equivalent outcomes to human-delivered coaching through AI coaching but at a lower price point, we have an obligation to not knowingly withhold the technology from clients.
Here’s how I put it in the book: “Where technology offers opportunities to better achieve positive outcomes from coaching, with an acceptable and transparently understood level of risk, and at a price that justifies it, it would be ethically wrong to not embrace it fully.”
The NHS – funded by taxpayers with the purpose of caring for the well-being of a nation – represents an ideal testing ground. As one of the biggest employers in the world, the cost of delivering human coaching universally has simply been too high to justify.
Perhaps AI could help to make some of the transformative benefits of coaching more accessible and affordable for NHS staff, with implications that could be profound for the country as a whole, and of course the entire coaching profession.
THE STUDY’S APPROACH
For one month each, 53 volunteers from two NHS trusts became pioneers in this bold experiment. Those invited to participate were already coaches or senior leaders in their local organizations, so while the tool benefitted from an existing understanding of coaching, these were potentially challenging coaching clients!
Before and after their AI coaching experiences, participants completed surveys measuring their goal attainment and self-efficacy (their self-belief in overcoming challenges). Identities were kept confidential from AIcoach.chat, and the tool was left to conduct its sessions according to the prompts that we had built into the tool.
Dr. David Tee, a coach, researcher and editor of The Coaching Psychologist, oversaw the study’s evaluation from an independent perspective.
THE STUDY’S OUTCOMES
Frankly, the results were better than I’d expected. After just a single session with AIcoach.chat, in most cases goal attainment had increased by an average of 10 percent. Self-efficacy – crucial for any organization’s resilience – showed an average five percent uplift. Encouragingly, these gains showed no variation based on the client’s gender and improved proportionately with more AI coaching sessions.
The challenge I’m taking away as a coach myself is that I intrinsically believe I’m a better coach than a machine could be, but would those 53 people have seen that level of change if I’d delivered coaching sessions to all of them within a month?
Perhaps I’m identifying a limiting self-belief here, but I wouldn’t be particularly confident of getting that result, and even if I were, I doubt that I’d be able to make the time.
The consequences of this are profound. AI coaching could bridge the gap that’s always existed between professional coaching and the majority of the world’s population.
The historic blocker of too few accredited human coaches simply doesn’t exist any more. Particularly in an organization like the NHS, with 24/7 operations and diverse shift patterns, the option for on-demand AI coaching makes what was once inaccessible to all but the privileged few extremely convenient.
Of course, this pilot study is just one step. While it has accomplished as much as a proof of concept ever could have at this early stage, true impact and adoption remain to be seen.
I do believe there’s appetite for it, however. The general trend in many organizations is to move away from “command and control” cultures to coaching styles of leadership. With budget a permanent restricting factor, a cost-effective way to scale the experience of coaching conversations feels like a wonderful support to this positive move. Regular access to a low-cost AI that takes a non-advisory approach might provide leaders with an opportunity to think through how they’re acting, and will help staff at all levels to reflect this in their own practice.
Darren Leech, director and head of coaching at NHS Elect, shares his vision for coaching’s AI-empowered future: “If we can bring the benefits of coaching to the many rather than just an elite few, we’ll be powering more resilient individuals, more cohesive teams, and ultimately better outcomes across entire organizations and systems.”
THE CHALLENGE FOR ALL OF US
It feels self-evident to me that the coaching profession needs to notice that this will present us with challenges. Coaching budgets are tight within many organizations, so a way to deliver 10 times as much “coaching” for one-tenth the price is going to be attractive to some.
This should make the professional bodies sit up and rethink the documentation and practices that sometimes feel like they could be describing a coach from the 1990s.
Ethical guardrails will need reinforcing, including those around issues of confidentiality, bias in datasets, so-called hallucinations and escalation points.
And the commercial opportunities afforded by AI in the coaching realm will draw technologists and venture capitalists, and these are not the stakeholders that should have the most influence on the future of the coaching profession.
But these challenges shouldn’t give us an excuse to bury our heads in the sand. If we’re currently seeing the dawn of AI-powered coaching, the world needs coaches who will do their best to protect the profession.
With technology only accelerating in its development and adoption, there is a risk that coaches will become less and less involved in shaping what coaching looks like in five and 10 years’ time. By becoming informed about what’s possible now and what will be possible in the near future, we empower ourselves to increase in our effectiveness as coaches, demonstrating our relevance to clients who are increasingly likely to be curious about innovation, and play a part in building a resilient profession.
Enthusiasm for AI coaching must be tempered with ethical rigor and pragmatism, but there’s no denying the results. We will see machines delivering coaching conversations at scale within the next year or two, and that could be truly transformative for leaders, organizations, wider systems – and of course, the coaching profession itself.
As with all disruptive change, aspects of this won’t be easy, but if we remain clear on our core purpose and ethics as coaches, we might find ourselves playing a pivotal role in the future of human potential.
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