Can artificial intelligence be a coach?

From drafting articles to diagnosing cancer, artificial intelligence is increasingly delivering outputs that humans once delivered.  This includes providing life coaching, with a number of artificial intelligence life coaches already on the market.  Reviews of these products often note that they hold the coachee accountable to their commitments, whilst also encouraging and inspiring the individual to do better when they haven’t met them.  So, can artificial intelligence be a coach?

Firstly, we need to look at the role of a coach. The International Coaching Federation states that a coach should honour the coachee as the expert in their life and work, helping them to:

• Discover and clarify what they want to achieve
• Self-discover what is important to them
• Generate solutions and strategies
• Focus on action, by holding them to account and making them responsible for themselves

So in summary, a coach’s role is to help the coachee explore issues, recognise and remove barriers, appreciate different perspectives and determine the options open to them before supporting them to make a decision and create an action plan to achieve their desired outcome.

A study undertaken by researchers from Victoria International University of Applied Sciences and SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences in Germany looked at the potential applications for artificial intelligence in coaching.  The study found that:

• Overall the coaching process is adaptable and open to including artificial intelligence capabilities.
• Artificial intelligence coaching has not yet evolved enough to completely replace face-to-face coaching or online coaching.
• Artificial coaching is likely to be more successful in situations where human coaches have identified and defined the problems that coachees need help with. At this point coachees could be handed onto an AI coach to deal with specific issues that are more formulaic and well defined.
• A wide range of human coaches are needed to contribute their expertise and knowledge to make artificial intelligence coaching programmes more effective supplemental tools. Computer scientists with no coaching experience are unlikely to be able to produce the data and evaluate the outcomes sufficiently.

Whilst artificial intelligence has not yet evolved sufficiently to be a coach, what are the benefits of developing AI coaches?  The main benefits of AI generally is scalability, efficiency and availability.  An AI coach would be able to bring coaching to more people, making it more accessible day or night.

However, emotional intelligence is key to a coach being able to support a coachee.  It enables the coach to demonstrate empathy and help the coachee to identify their issues and potential solutions.  It also helps the coach know when to push the coachee out of the comfort zone and when to be more gentle with the coachee.  Emotional intelligence is central to humankind and yet some humans are not emotionally intelligent.  So can we really expect AI to learn emotional intelligence?  Experts suggest that AI will learn how to be emotionally intelligent as part of their drive to continually improve and develop.

Whilst there may be benefits for AI to be involved towards the end of the coaching process, i.e. holding the coachee to account, academics, experts and the average person seem to agree that AI is not capable of coaching an individual early in the coaching journey, when they are exploring issues, recognising and removing barriers, appreciating different perspectives and determining the options open to them before making decisions.