The last couple of years I’ve made predictions for the coaching profession, and this year looks like being an impactful one. Technology developments in particular are accelerating, in spite of plenty of clickbait suggesting the opposite, and the new US presidency is likely to be felt around the world.
Let’s begin by revisiting the two big predictions I made last year:
- AI coaching would start to be used. This has happened, at least in the form of early indications. There have been a number of AI coaching pilots commissioned. Precisely what we mean when we say “AI coaching” is yet to be universally defined, and may never get there. The majority of “AI coaching” providers are actually offering a customised chatbot that can give structured advice, so it’s worth getting into the nitty-gritty a bit.
- Immersive technologies will hit the mainstream but most won’t notice it. The “most won’t notice it” bit has been more accurate than the hitting the mainstream bit! Apple’s Vision Pro has been far too expensive and far too strange to properly impact adoption, but it has triggered interesting innovation, not least in the form of Meta’s Orion headset, which looks like a pair of glasses, doesn’t need a separate battery pack, and can be controlled through thought. Once again this area of technology is taking a while to reach us but is definitely coming.
What will the next 12 months hold?
I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about what I might want to predict for this year – it will be interesting to look back on this next January!
AI is going to start impacting everywhere
AI coaching tools, particularly non-directive products such as AIcoach.chat, are brilliant at handling foundational coaching tasks such as goal-setting, progress tracking, and cognitive behavioural reframing. Organisations looking to deliver coaching at scale are going to find it very difficult to justify the significant higher cost of working with humans when budgets remain tight.
And this won’t just be felt in HR conversations. Current internet algorithms tend to reward content producers based on the engagement factors of individual pieces of content, not on some sort of distributed mean, which is why influencers develop an audience based on something going viral rather than steady, organic growth. The historic control over this has been the amount of time and effort it takes to produce enough content to find the gold nugget, but the volume of content that AI can produce is shocking, and the latest image – and, particularly for 2025, video – creators are going to flood our online experience.
A big focus area for coaches as individuals and with our clients ought to be how to increase our skepticism around online content without increasing cynicism.
Organisations will increasingly look for team, group and internal coaching to diversify
Mature organisations are increasing their focus on collective resilience and adaptive capacity in an increasingly volatile world combined with the challenges of remote and hybrid working. As colleagues discuss and learn together, they have the opportunity to contribute to increased understanding around systemic factors and cultural alignment.
The balancing act this will demand is to ensure that appropriate supervision is in place, so I’ll be expecting more people to come out as group and team coaching supervisors to support this (and if you’re looking for supervisors for your internal coaching faculty please get in touch with me!).
The professional bodies will come under increasing disruptive pressure
In recent years we’ve seen the centre of influential gravity for the coaching profession start to get pulled in various different directions, with AI dominating conversations and the big digital coaching platforms causing ripple effects on a global scale. Who has the biggest impact on an individual coach’s way of thinking about their practice nowadays? The ICF? The Coaching.com summit? Simon Sinek? Betterup?
Our clients’ needs are complex and interconnected, and the ecosystem they interact with needs to recognise that multifaceted challenge. This isn’t just about AI, in spite of the attention it receives, because the technical challenges are changing more quickly than any sort of quasi-regulation can keep up with. But thinking around accreditation and so on is going to feel the pressure to take into account technology, data ethics and cultural intelligence.
Coaching ethics will be centre-stage
As coaches we’ve always been told to “find our niche”. In some ways, perhaps that’s truer than ever in 2025. But with the rise of AI integration and demand for coaching generally, ethics is going to be a topic that comes up in every other conversation about the profession.
And I’m a little concerned about this one, if I’m honest. The codes of ethics we look to as coaches are, by design, a bit woolly around the edges. Every discussion I historically had around coaching ethics seemed to end up with the conclusion that it’s all a bit of a grey area, which coaches enjoy holding as ambiguous on purpose. That is, until AI entered the picture, at which point we seem to gravitate to more extreme positions: AI is either a wonderful innovation that makes coaching truly accessible for the first time ever, or it’s an existential threat that introduces new, or exacerbates existing, problems, including carbon emissions, DEI concerns, data privacy, hallucinations, inequality, and the list goes on.
2025 is going to be a year where we’ll need to properly grapple with these issues – we must not ignore them – and challenge ourselves to become more informed and probably more measured in our emotive passion!
The future of coaching is about more than technology
Organisations, political systems and individuals are under all sorts of pressures at the moment, and they all impact on the coaching room. We should continue to challenge ourselves about our practice, and I’d hope use 2025 as a year for investment in developing ourselves and the profession as a whole.
Two things I feel I ought to draw attention towards, therefore, are:
- the Digital and AI Coaches’ Conference – tickets are still available for this gathering of some of the biggest names in the profession, which promises to be extraordinary, so I hope to see you there!
- the Coachtech Collective – every month I produce a detailed report that dives into what I’m noticing at the cutting edge of technology, we experiment with a new piece of technology together, and have the opportunity to get to know other coaches across the world with a whole range of experience. This coming month I’m excited to be welcoming Professor Tatiana Bachkirova with an exclusive article so I know we’re going to have a wonderful time and it would be fantastic to see you there!
