Will AI Replace Coaches, and What Can a Coach Do About It?

Some of them, yes. In a 2024 survey, about a third of coaches said AI will replace somewhere between 20% and 50% of human coaches. AI is taking over the part of coaching that is just information, because answers are now free, instant and fairly reliable. The coaches who hold on to their clients will be the ones who build AI into their own method, so clients get more from them every week.

A few years ago, if you wanted to know how to handle a hard conversation with your team, you bought a book, took a course or hired a coach. Today you open a chatbot, type the question and get a decent answer in a few seconds. It costs nothing, it is there at two in the morning, and most of the time it is good enough.

That changes what people are willing to pay for. A leadership coach we work with has about 20 years of experience coaching leaders who work with large organizations. When he looks at his market, he sees the coaching business getting harder. He points to AI, free information everywhere, a crowded field full of people calling themselves coaches, and buyers who are more skeptical than they used to be.

He is far from the only coach who feels it.

Many are. In 2024, Henley Business School and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council ran a survey for people who earn their living from coaching. They got 556 responses from 52 countries. About a third of them, 32.8%, said AI will replace some human coaches, which the survey put at 20% to 50% of them. Another 3.8% said AI will replace most coaches. Taken together, the report counts 37% who see AI as a threat to some or all of their work.

That survey is two years old now, and AI has gotten a lot better since then. My guess is that more coaches feel this way today. I have not found a newer survey that measures it, so that part is my opinion.

This is the part that worries coaches the most. In a 2025 study, trained assessors from the International Coaching Federation reviewed a real session between an AI coaching agent and a client. They scored it against the same skills used to certify human coaches. The AI showed many of the skills expected of a certified human coach. The assessors also found gaps, places where the AI still fell short.

So the people whose job is judging coaches looked at an AI and saw a lot of what they look for in a person. If your business runs on answering questions, that is a hard thing to hear.

Here is my take. If the main thing a coach sells is information, like frameworks, tips and the answer to "what should I do," then AI is now going after that same dollar, and AI is free.

What a person really pays a coach for is change. They want to become a better leader, run a calmer team or finally hit the goal they keep missing. Information is one small piece of that. The bigger pieces are knowing where to start, doing the work week after week, and seeing proof that something moved.

The coach we work with is a good example. Before we built anything together, he wrote each client's report by hand after they took his three assessments. He used a chatbot to help, and it still took him hours for each person. So AI was already in his process, and he was still doing hours of work by hand for every single client.

We built him an app around his own method. Today, when someone finishes his three assessments, the app builds their report on its own, right away. It shows their strengths, their gaps and their priorities. From there, his 12-week guide lives inside the app, with weekly content, questions and actions tied to that report.

Members get a daily reminder of the person they want to be in 12 weeks. A dashboard tracks their growth over time as they retake the assessments. There is also an AI coach trained on his knowledge and his 20 years of experience, and members can talk to it at any hour.

That is the difference I care about. A general chatbot knows a little about everything. This one is built on one coach's method and one coach's experience, so members get his way of thinking between sessions, even at two in the morning. He is still there, and one-on-one time with him is still available for the people who want it. The app adds a layer on top of his coaching. His clients get his method every day, and he no longer spends hours writing reports by hand.

An AI coach is only one way to do this. Here are the pieces we have built into a coaching business:

This is what I have learned from building it. Take what fits your business:

If you are a coach and you can feel AI pulling clients away, or you worry that a free chatbot will make your work look like something people can skip, you do not have to sit back and watch it happen. We build AI into coaching businesses, from AI coaches trained on your own method to apps that turn your framework into something your clients use every week. We are good at it. Tell us about your business at tovnamedia.com.

Passmore, J., Saraeva, A., Money, K. and Diller, S. J. (2024). Trends in Digital and AI Coaching: Executive Report 2024. Henley Business School and EMCC International. Read the report

Passmore, J., Tee, D. and Rutschmann, R. (2025). Getting better all the time: using professional human coach competencies to evaluate the quality of AI coaching agent performance. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. Read the study