Friday Note: The Part That Doesn’t Scale
On the difference between delivering coaching and being a coach.
Camino Institute™ - A Transformation Practice
This week another company announced that artificial intelligence can now coach your managers. The system reads their calendars, their messages, and their meetings and sends each one a steady stream of guidance in the flow of the workday. It joins a field that has spent the better part of a year making a confident claim: that most of what a coach does, a machine can now do, and do for everyone at once rather than for the fortunate few.
The claim is not absurd. A great deal of what passes for coaching is information delivery, and information is the one thing these systems are genuinely good at moving. If coaching were the transfer of frameworks, good questions, and timely reminders, the field would be right to automate it.
Then there is what the evidence shows. A study published earlier this year followed twelve professional coaches whose firm adopted AI from the top down, and the researchers went in expecting a story about tasks: which ones the coaches would keep and which ones they would hand over. That is not the story they found. When the machines arrived, the coaches did not first ask what they would lose. They asked who they now were. What the researchers set out to document as a technical transition, they ended up documenting as an identity crisis.
That detail is worth sitting with, because it came from practitioners under real pressure, not from a survey of opinions. These were not people protecting their billing. They were discovering, in real time, that they could not say cleanly what their work had been. If the AI could ask the good question and offer the apt framework, then what had the coach been doing in the room all those years? The threat was not to their schedule. It was to their sense of what they were for.
What they arrived at, over time, is the part field selling automation has not caught up to. The coaches did not conclude that they did the same work as the machine, only slower. They concluded that the work was never the question or the framework at all. It was the relationship inside which a person could afford to examine themselves. The machine could supply the prompt. It could not be the presence that made the prompt safe to answer honestly. The researchers gave this a careful name: in relational work, deciding what to automate is not a technical question. It is a question about identity.
This is the line the field keeps stepping over. When you hear that a system can deliver most of the coaching, the figure is doing something quietly. It is defining coaching as the part that can be delivered and setting aside the part that cannot. The part that cannot be delivered is not a remainder. It is the mechanism. Change in a person does not come from receiving better insight. It comes from being seen well enough, by someone whose attention they trust, that they can finally look at what they have been avoiding. That has never scaled, and the reason it has never scaled is the reason it works.
None of this makes the tools worthless. The coaches in the study ended up using them, and using them well, once they understood what the tools were for. A prompt delivered at the right moment has real value. The error is not in building the systems. The error is in the sentence that says the system is the coach, because that sentence mistakes the delivery for the thing being delivered, and the people who do this work for a living felt the difference the moment the substitution was proposed.
So the question the field is not asking, while it counts what can be automated, is the one its own practitioners reached on their own. When the machine can do everything coaching can be reduced to, what is left is what coaching actually was. Will we recognize it in time to keep it?
The photograph above has not changed. You have. What is it saying now?
Walter Calvo, LCSW, DBA · Co-Founder and Clinical Director, Camino Institute™