Why AI Can’t Replace a Coach
It’s not hard to imagine a future where you can ask AI anything about your business and it will provide tailored recommendations for you. Many analytics programs already do something similar. You can ask tools like ChatGPT anything from, “How can I set goals for my business?” to “Build a comprehensive brand strategy.”
Used correctly, AI can help you access insights more quickly. Yet despite its strengths, it can’t replace what a coach can give you as a CEO.
Our CEO and Founding Partner Mark Moses created a digital twin to see what AI thought about the topic, and surprisingly, he agreed.
What’s missing from AI? Empathy, experience, and emotional intelligence needed to guide CEOs through whatever challenges they’re facing. It’s just not ready to replace a coach when it comes to helping your business. Here’s why:
1. Coaches offer an emotional layer that AI can’t access
With artificial intelligence, you can go over the basics of your goals and performance. But AI can’t help you sort through your feelings about a big deal you’re considering, or help you navigate a hard conversation with a member of your leadership team who is underperforming.
Half of CEOs feel loneliness in their position. It’s a stressful, high-visibility role no matter the industry you’re in. And in today’s volatile economic climate, it’s impossible to predict what external shocks you’ll face.
Your coaches provide empathy, personal understanding, and emotional intelligence that AI can’t replicate. That’s because when you engage with a coach, you’re building a relationship with someone who has been in your shoes before as a CEO.
Anyone can look at your numbers and give you some recommendations, but a coach is a person who knows how you feel. Coaches bring a shared understanding from real-life leadership experiences, making clients feel supported and understood.
2. You need more than hard numbers to make a decision
AI can offer the insights you need to make better decisions—but they don’t have that gut feeling shaped by human experience, context, and understanding. You can’t always play it safe if you want to win BIG. Without innovators who paid attention to their intuition, we probably wouldn’t have the lightbulb, the iPhone, or the Tesla.
AI might offer surface-level suggestions, but it cannot challenge clients emotionally and psychologically in a meaningful way. This is the root of any type of growth.
While AI is good at pattern recognition and idea generation, human creativity, problem-solving, and innovative thinking—especially in ambiguous situations—are irreplaceable.
3. Personalized insights over generic suggestions
Ask ChatGPT about how to set goals for your business and you’ll get plenty of valid suggestions, from utilizing the SMART framework to creating smaller milestones that mark your progress. This is a helpful starting point for setting goals for any business, not just yours.
Because everyone can access AI tools (including your competitors), you should tread carefully following advice like this to the letter. It’s the same as using a bestselling business book or podcast for a strategic framework or leadership advice—take what resonates with you, and leave the rest.
Coaches provide tailored advice to specific leadership styles, challenges, and goals. Your coach works 1:1 with you to build a mission and vision for your business that takes into account the full context of your industry, experience, and product. What’s more, your coach can help you as a leader in a way that AI won’t be able to understand. While AI can identify patterns in your performance, it can’t detect the personal or emotional blind spots that often block leaders from achieving their full potential.
4. AI moves fast, but coaches are more agile
ChatGPT can generate answers to your questions in less than 10 seconds. While it may take more time to engage with a coach, you’ll get significantly more nuanced, detailed answers to your questions—and will open up more opportunities for reflection than a yes/no answer.
That’s because coaches react and adapt to unexpected emotional or behavioral shifts in real time when they have a conversation with you. They can move seamlessly between discussing strategic goals, operational challenges, and personal growth in a holistic way that AI is not equipped to handle. And they can read between the lines on what’s about the business and what’s about you as a leader, helping you make BIG happen no matter what challenges you face.
Think about it this way: AI is like a wide receiver at a football game who runs their route the same way every time, no matter where they are on the field. Your coach is the running back threading the needle between the opposing team’s defensive line, finding the best way through depending on the context of the game. (As CEO, you’re the quarterback who calls the shots.)
5. Your business is in the real world
AI provides theoretical suggestions, but it is human coaches who ensure strategies are actionable, practical, and fit for real-world application. All of the information at your fingertips is meaningless without being able to apply that knowledge in context for your specific business, calling upon wisdom and real-world experience.
In the same way, AI can track progress and set reminders, but it doesn’t have the human presence needed to truly hold clients accountable for their actions and commitments. Your business is in the real world, and your solutions must be, too.
You can’t rely on artificial intelligence to make BIG happen—that’s up to you.
Our coaches weren’t created a few years ago by tech companies who have no idea what it’s like to run a successful business day-to-day as CEO. They’re real people who have experience building and running leadership teams, mergers and acquisitions, and seven-figure exits. See how our coaches can help you >
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average EBITDA CAGR of 53.5% during their time as a client, more than three times the U.S. average, and a revenue CAGR of 26.2%, nearly twice the U.S. average.
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