It’s a fair question. I’d ask it too.
So let’s start with the part most coaches won’t say: AI is genuinely good at this. In two randomized trials published in PLOS ONE, each running about ten months, an AI coaching chatbot matched what human coaches achieved on goal attainment (Terblanche et al., 2022). A 2025 Conference Board study found AI handles roughly 90% of routine career-coaching conversations well, and that people like it: 96% felt the responses were tailored to them, and 91% would use it again. A 2025 study in Coaching: An International Journal rated an AI agent at the level of an early-career certified coach.
I use AI every day, and I coach people on how to use it better. What follows is about how abundance doesn’t solve every problem, and how, as AI improves, it’s easy to feel left behind if your uniquely human skills aren’t improving alongside it.
Abundant advice was never the problem
You already know what you should do about most things. Delegate more. Have the hard conversation. Stop rewriting the deck at 2am. Most of us can name exactly where we could improve, and we’ve known it for a while. So what’s stopping us? Not a shortage of information. AI is the best advice engine ever built, arriving into a world that was not short of advice.
Closing the gap between knowing and doing is the actual work, and it’s worth looking at why you still need a person to close it.
A product pleases you; a coach is paid to be useful
Every product is optimized to give you what you want, and AI is spectacular at it. But what you want and what serves you are often different things. As a founder you’re already surrounded by agreement anyway: your team wants to stay employed, your friends want to be encouraging, and your chat window wants you to come back tomorrow. Critical feedback and pushback are hard to come by, yet that’s exactly how we find the places we can improve. Somewhere in your week there should be one person whose only job is to say the thing nobody else will, early enough to matter.
AI answers the question you asked
A coach hears the question you’re avoiding. AI answering only the question you asked is a structural limit, not a temporary one. You can’t prompt for your own blind spot, because you’d have to see it to type it. I’ve sat down with more than 1,500 founders and CEOs, and one pattern held. The problem people raise first is rarely the real one. “Help me manage my time” usually turns out, a few questions later, to be something else – not trusting the team enough to hand anything off. AI will happily solve the time management. A coach works on the trust problem underneath it.
A commitment made to software is easy to drop
You can close a chatbot mid-sentence, and it’s easy to never revisit the conversation or the actions it suggested. Telling a person you respect that you’ll do something, then sitting across from them two weeks later, feels different, and that difference is the point. The relationship is the accountability device. And underneath it sits something simpler that people rarely say out loud: being genuinely known by someone who is on your side changes what you can face. You’re not alone. That was true before AI, and it will be true after it.
Some pressure has to be real
You can rehearse a pitch with AI all day and your pulse won’t move. Rehearse it in front of someone whose opinion matters to you, and your body treats it as real, which is exactly what makes the practice work. In my case, that someone has heard and improved hundreds of pitches, judged and scored applications on several funding programs, and designed a process that moved companies from intake through funding. I know what the judges are listening for. Skills you’ll perform under pressure have to be trained under pressure.
Coaching improves what you get from AI
AI amplifies whatever clarity and rigour you bring to it. What becomes important are the questions you ask, the context you provide, and your ability to envision and describe exactly what a great result looks like. The quality of the blueprint you give AI determines whether your productivity multiplies, or the output that looks strong and polished collapses under pressure.
When is the last time you sat down and focused on improving your question-asking skills, or practised slowing down and thinking proactively instead of being in reactive problem-solving mode? Coaching works on developing the transferable skills that make you more effective, whether that means using tools like AI or not.
So the choice was never coach or AI. Use AI, seriously and daily. Have every conversation with it you find useful. And notice how often your professional development aspirations and opportunities take a back seat to other priorities, no matter how good the advice was. Advice was never the problem. The gap between knowing and doing is, and that gap is what a human coach is for.
If you want to test the difference rather than take my word for it, that’s the right instinct. Book a free intro call and bring your hardest current problem.