I have had to summon serious courage to write this article because I suspect what I say will be incredibly unpopular and controversial. It’s an important question that needs considering: Will Coaches Survive The Technology Revolution?
There has been much talk recently about whether technology (AI ‘ChatBots’ in particular) can replace humans as coaches. The general feeling from the profession, particularly from the upper echelons of academia, is that no technology can replace the human connection between a coach and their client. The consensus is that this human connection is what makes coaching so special and that it is not possible for technology to replicate it.
A White Collar Revolution
The Industrial Revolution that occurred in Britain from around 1850 onwards was a blue collar revolution. Manual workers – albeit what we would now call ‘artisans’ – were put out of work in huge swathes and the fabric of society as it was then was altered forever.[1] The Technology Revolution will undoubtably do the same for our society.
The Technology Revolution is a white collar revolution. To date, I’ve met several people, including a copy writer and a translator whose work has already vanished due to new technology. The technology that is being developed can easily do the work of lawyers, accountants, architects and so on. Indeed I spoke to a company this week about their product which is an AI bookkeeper and accountant. Even healthcare professionals will be affected.
Chatbots In A Healthcare Setting
In April 2023, The Guardian newspaper[2] reported on a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA)[3]. It should be noted that this study was undertaken in November 2022, the same month in which ChatGPT was launched.
Researchers conducted an analysis comparing AI and human medical advice by examining interactions on the Reddit platform. They focused on the AskDocs subreddit, where medical professionals provide responses to users’ health-related enquiries. From this forum, the researchers selected 195 random conversations between verified doctors and users. They then input these same medical questions into ChatGPT to generate AI-based responses. To evaluate both sets of answers, three qualified healthcare practitioners assessed them without knowing their source, measuring both the medical accuracy and emotional understanding displayed in each response.
Astonishingly, the panel preferred ChatGPT’s responses to those given by a human 79% of the time. ChatGPT responses were also rated good or very good quality 79% of the time, compared with 22% of doctors’ responses, and 45% of the ChatGPT answers were rated empathic or very empathic compared with just 5% of doctors’ replies.
This is incredible and a clear indication that even in its infancy, ChatGPT could emulate the human connection and it raises questions for our profession.
The Technology
Platforms like ChatGPT are what are referred to as large language models or LLMs and they perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. An LLM, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other forms of content based on knowledge gained from massive datasets. The ‘other forms of content’ include incredibly life-like avatars.
AI avatars have improved exponentially since they first appeared and are now indistinguishable from humans in many cases. Whether we like it or not, avatars are here to stay.
Industrial Revolution
If we look back to the 1850s and the start of the Industrial Revolution, there were no doubt spinners and weavers who were utterly confident that the new machines that were reportedly replacing them could never produce something as beautiful as hand-spun yarn, or hand-woven cloth. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, what we know now is that it didn’t matter whether the yarn or the cloth was as good, because what could be produced by the machines of the day was good enough. Not only was the cloth good enough, automation made it possible to produce far higher quantities of cloth using far lower manpower and so the price plummeted.
Can an AI coach avatar provide the same quality of coaching as a human coach? That question will undoubtedly be debated hotly for several years. However in November 2022 ChatGPT was able to provide a superior interaction to that of a healthcare professional and that means that an AI coach could almost certainly provide a coaching experience that is good enough.
The Coaching Platforms
There are several large organisations who provide coaching to corporations and public sector organisations via an associate relationship with their coaches. BetterUp, Lyra, Ezra and CoachHub are four of the better known ones.
It is not beyond the realms of possibility for these platforms to create coach avatars to deliver coaching to their clients. They have access to an enormous dataset of coaching sessions and could, relatively easily, train an LLM to coach in a way that is practically indistinguishable from a human.
Thinking about the coaching platforms, if we remember that the primary purpose of any organisation is to create value and profit, the case for platforms to provide AI coaches to clients at a fraction of the cost of a human coach is logical. I do understand that there are many other purposes for organisations too, however the generation of income is a high priority in all organisations whether that is a for-profit or a not-for-profit company.
AI Coaches?
Once a coaching platform has created their AI coach(es) the major expense is over. The AI coaches can be utilised over and over again – even simultaneously – at a tiny fraction of the cost of an associate coach. To be blunt, there is no limit to the amount of coaching that can be sold when human coaches are not a consideration. The profit margins for this business model are exponentially bigger than the existing associate worker model.
There will always be those who are prepared to pay a premium for a VIP experience. This is a small market and I suspect that the human coach will become the VIP experience.
Where Does That Leave Us As A Profession?
The coaching profession has a challenge that no other profession has and it has hampered the client acquisition success of many coaches. The challenge is this; no one knows what we do, but they think they do and they’re wrong. People assume that we’re trainers or that we’re going to teach them something and it’s maddening.
I realise that there is a narrow section of society who absolutely do know what our kind of coaching is, but the vast majority do not. All the coaches I’ve encountered have found this same challenge with individuals outside the kind of organisations that the platforms (for example) provide coaching to.
The reason the lack of understanding of what our kind of coaching is has presented such a large challenge to date is this; everyone knows what other professional service providers do. This means that they know if they require the services of one of them. With coaching, that’s not the case, no one (outside organisations) is looking for a coach and this is borne out by the small number of online searches done for coaches compared to the enormous number of searches for, say, therapists. Bear in mind that those few searches for coaches include all the other kinds of coaches that exist, sports coaches for example.
This challenge might be the salvation of our profession.
Technology vs Marketing Skills
In the same way that people don’t know what coaching is, but they think they do and they’re wrong, coaches don’t know what marketing is, but they think they do and they’re wrong.
The coaches The Coaching Revolution works with learn how to articulate the benefits of coaching, without trying to sell the coaching process. People don’t buy processes, they buy outcomes and we teach coaches how to describe various potential outcomes, whilst remaining ethical and without crossing any of their values. The client acquisition skills we teach are comfortable, ethical and effective.
Being able to promote a misunderstood service (coaching) in a way that makes sense to non-coaches means that people who had no idea that they can benefit from coaching are able to access it. Our coaches build their own markets, and in doing so, we remove the worry that other coaches are our competition. Every one of the coaches’ businesses that have been launched via The Coaching Revolution have been built one client at a time. Then, what starts as a trickle builds into a flow and a bigger businesses emerge.
Many of the people who have been lucky enough to experience coaching from our coaches are people who didn’t even know coaching existed.
Does this make our businesses AI proof? Possibly.
The work of building hundreds of small niche markets is arduous, even for AI and won’t result in anything like the profit levels that are available from coaching within organisations. As our work isn’t easily monetiseable using the technology available I suspect that for now, we’re safe.
Being able to generate our own coaching work, that’s paid at a professional rate, is a skill that we’re all going to need as associate coaching work disappears.
[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/industrialization-labor-and-life/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/28/ai-has-better-bedside-manner-than-some-doctors-study-finds
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804309
Recent Comments