‘AI coaching’: democratising coaching service or offering an ersatz?

Organisational coaching is not the only field that has recently been challenged by the extraordinary developments in artificial intelligence (AI) with a threat of replacement of human practitioners by machines. The challenges of this field, however, are unique because the nature of coaching remains fairly elusive, making comparison between human coaching and AI coaching a complicated exercise. In this paper we conceptualise the essential characteristics of organisational coaching and propose a number of criteria according to which interventions can be identified as coaching. Our conclusion is that AI 'coaching' does not meet these criteria. However, in considering various genres of organisational coaching along simple model-based types, we identify a number of elements in human coaching that could be augmented to various degrees by the use of AI.