Artificial Intelligence or Human Intelligence? Why coaches and consultants are still valuable!
AI and Coaches can Coexist!
Let’s face it, we haven’t seen a disruption this big since the beginning of the internet. AI is changing the way we live and do business in significant ways. And yet, coaches, consultants and advisors are still quite valuable to our clients, and we can use AI both ethically and effectively to deliver greater value to them and improve our own results as well.
Despite the fact that AI can do certain tasks faster and better than humans can do, AI is NOT human. That personal, human factor and human insight cannot be replaced.
I’ll be honest, I was watching a video lesson the other day and the “instructor” was a simulated person, an AI bot in the form of a woman. I found the whole thing so creepy that I was totally distracted and had to keep re-watching segments of the video to absorb the content. I know we are headed in that direction, but, ugh!
If you’re like me, part of the reason that I watch specific video creators or listen to certain podcasts is because I like the people. I find their personalities fun or interesting or comforting or charming or compelling.
Are we ready to give up human interaction and authentic personalities and just talk to AI bots all day? I don’t think so! I hope not!
AI as Your Partner (Not Your Competitor)
AI is evolving and spreading at lightening speed. Every time you turn around, there’s a new and better AI product that will save you time and money in your business. The question of whether we should be putting so much emphasis on developing AI products is moot (or maybe a topic for another day). It is happening whether we like it or not.
If using AI makes business more efficient and productive, we will be at a disadvantage if we, as business coaches, consultants (or small business owners), choose to ignore it.
Some of the ways that I personally use AI tools to save time and create better results while maintaining my integrity and authenticity are:
- Generating ideas
- Testing titles and subject lines
- Doing market research – (being careful to check sources as AI hallucinates and makes stuff up)
- Generating outlines for marketing and other content
- Organizing content
- Mapping out project timelines
- Analyzing and finding patterns in data so that I can interpret and apply it
- Notetaking and meeting summaries
Using AI for these types of tasks can significantly cut the amount of time you spend doing lower level work so that you can focus your time on the more valuable, higher level thinking.
Notice that I did not say that I use it to write content for me. While I might ask AI to give me a draft or an outline of a blog post or email, I don’t use it’s material without editing and usually completely rewriting it. I do often use the ideas it generates as a jumping off point, but I prefer the authenticity of writing it myself, in my own voice. (Or maybe it’s just my ego telling me that my writing is better!)
In any case, I believe that the authenticity of human writing (whether it’s mine or someone else’s) beats computer generated material every day.
Let’s talk about the reasons why you, as a real live human coach or consultant, are still quite valuable to your clients! Or, if you are a business owner, why you should hire a human coach and not rely exclusively on AI to solve your business problems.
According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, “AI advances mean employees will do less “rote work” and more “thinking strategically.” Workers will need to be able to use AI and, more important, they will need to come up with novel ideas about how to deploy it to solve problems. They will need to develop AI models, then probe and understand their limitations. All of this will require a higher level of cognition than does the rote work many white-collar employees now do.”
What does this mean for you as a consultant? If you want to be an in demand advisor, you must be able to deliver the kind of creativity and strategic ideas that AI cannot. Businesses will be looking for creative ideas, the ability to connect different concepts, and analyses that look at different angles.
AI Introduces a New Set of Challenges for Companies to Solve
One thing to remember, what you get from AI is only as good as your prompts. Operating in a world of AI is going to take a lot of new skills, and effective prompt writing takes some skill and knowledge on its own.
Do we think that corporate CEOs are spending their time writing AI prompts and figuring out how to integrate AI into their employees’ daily tasks? Of course we don’t! And we shouldn’t expect small business owners to do this either.
As more and more businesses use AI as a tool for their employees to increase productivity, they will need guidance on:
- how to effectively incorporate AI into their processes
- how to restructure work around AI’s capabilities
- how to rethink their projections and plans to take productivity and other gains into consideration
- how to smoothly transition to a new way of working
- what guardrails and policies need to be implemented or rewritten
- how to handle the emotional and mindset impact as their employees and customers get used to new ways of functioning
In other words, they will need human intelligence and emotional intelligence to help them effectively integrate AI capabilities with their human team members to enhance their roles and outcomes.
Below are some of the areas where real people shine and AI, not so much.
Big Picture Judgment
Let’s talk about human judgment. We develop judgment over our lifetime and careers based on our lived human experience. While we can give AI some context that could help it synthesize information, it doesn’t do nuance the way a human can. A good coach can help to wade through all the messy, subtle, real world factors that play into decision making, and AI is no substitute for that.
While AI can certainly crunch numbers and data, it does not have the same ability as humans to see the big picture for an individual company or person, weigh competing priorities or understand the subtle HUMAN dynamics that go into making effective decisions.
As a coach or consultant your experience and expertise has value, even when using AI. With your expertise and understanding of the markets you serve and the problems you solve, you can spot problems with the content and solutions that AI produces. You understand what is real and what might be a hallucination. You will know from experience which solutions work and which don’t. You can see when something is missing.
Seeing Beyond the Data
While AI can point out patterns and data analysis, a human consultant can apply their experience to see why an individual business is stuck, and how to address those causes. A coach or consultant will use their expertise and knowledge to interpret that data in a way that is relevant to the business they are working with. Looking in from the outside, they are able to take the owner’s feelings, beliefs and goals into account as they find solutions that are aligned with the business mission. While AI can point out possibilities, it takes a human to distinguish the best options from the mediocre or bad ones.
A coach or consultant with real world experience can support their clients with actual examples of when specific strategies and tactics have and have not worked.
For example, I recently spoke with an advisor that told me about how his clients sometimes ask him about taking specific actions that will get them the immediate result they are looking for. Based on his knowledge and experience he is able to advise them not to take those actions because while they would get the results in the short term, those same actions would be very damaging to their long term success. Using AI alone would not necessarily reveal those negative long term outcomes and why the business would want to avoid them.
In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. They might get advice from an AI bot, but is it the best advice?
Create Clarity and Focus
This is important to remember. AI generated content is based on information that already exists. A great coach can ask their client powerful, thought provoking questions that enables the client to shift the way they see things, think outside the box, and come up with original ideas. Innovation comes from human intelligence and creativity.
A great coach guides their clients to breakthroughs. AI does not have the ability to shift your thinking or recognize why you are stuck in the same way a human does.
Removing Resistance and Building Motivation
The most common roadblock for a business is not lack of knowledge. It’s the human factors that get in the way of implementing change.
Fear, doubt, friction, conflict, lack of accountability can all stop a business in its tracks.
AI doesn’t know your clients’ why, what they are passionate about, what motivates them. AI is not going to hold your client’s hand or coach them through the rough moments. More often than not AI will tell you what you want to hear as opposed to what you need to hear.
A coach or consultant can recognize the mindset, motivation and other factors that are holding their clients back. They can coach and guide their clients to overcome those factors and keep moving forward.
A coach helps their clients dig down, remember their why and find their motivation. They can inspire the courage to make changes. A Human Coach can provide emotional support, give their clients perspective, be a cheerleader and an accountability partner. And they can call BS on their clients’ excuses!
This is why so many video courses offer live Q and A or coaching sessions to help clients complete them and take action. Without the human support, most courses just sit on the proverbial “shelf” collecting dust.
Tailoring Specific Solutions
I have experienced this myself. While you can do your best to give AI context, its responses are still fairly generic. It rarely gives solutions that are specifically aligned with the unique strengths, issues, goals and position of a particular business.
What you bring as a coach or consultant is that higher level thinking that requires human knowledge and understanding. A coach can take their clients’ real-life constraints and aspirations into consideration. They can get to know the ins and outs of their clients’ business and apply that knowledge when making recommendations.
For example, AI doesn’t know why a company lost their last 3 clients to a competitor.
👉 Or why their employee turnover is so high.
👉 Or why their last prospect ghosted them after saying yes.
👉 It doesn’t know why their last product introduction flopped.
👉 It doesn’t know where the conflict inside the company is coming from.
👉 It cannot run a meeting, or identify the specific people who can help move a project forward, or who is stopping their progress in its tracks.
AI can give them some suggested answers based on general industry information, but it cannot possibly understand the inside workings of the business and it’s clients the way a human coach or consultant can.
Immutable Laws
A key exercise in The Pumpkin Plan program is to identify your Immutable Laws, the core values that you live your life and run your business by. These Immutable Laws guide your decisions, aligning your ethics with your actions.
When it comes to ethics and values, AI is only as good as the content that it has been trained on. We have unfortunately seen recent examples of AI giving unethical answers to prompts and questions. A human coach or consultant can protect their clients from blind spots that could compromise their integrity and their future success in a way that AI does not.
Challenging Assumptions
AI is built on assumptions. AI prompts contain the user’s assumptions. Unlike AI, a good coach provides an outside perspective and can challenge those assumptions. The best, most innovative ideas come from challenging assumptions.
Clients need to be challenged in order to make progress!
Contrast with Intellectual Laziness
As more and more people rely on AI to think for them, producing mediocre work that is devoid of originality or high level thinking, you can stand out as someone who understands how to create the kind of insights and “aha moments” that enable a business to move from ordinary to extraordinary. At Pumpkin Plan Your Biz we have group discussions every week, and someone inevitably brings a different point of view to the table that sparks an idea for a new way to approach a problem or issue. These sparks happen when you engage your brain and engage with other humans.
Transformation
AI can provide information and help generate ideas. But a human coach or consultant:
✔ extracts the meaning from that information
✔ inspires the client to make decisions that are right for that business
✔ helps them decide what matters most, and
✔ supports them to implement those decisions
As a coach or consultant you must do more than provide data and information to demonstrate your value. If you can inspire insights, motivation and clarity, and you can support your clients to take the actions that create change, that’s where the real transformation happens!
Are you passionate about helping small businesses to grow and thrive? We train business coaches, consultants and advisors to use our tools to create the transformative results that small businesses are looking for. Join our Program and Get Certified as a Pumpkin Plan Strategist!
Would you like the help and support of a real human Certified Pumpkin Plan Strategist to guide you to achieve your business dreams? Hire a Strategist!
