At dinner recently after explaining what I do i was asked if i was worried that Ai would replace coaches and therapists.
The age of automation has made our lives astonishingly efficient. But don’t confuse information with transformation. The former is what machines supply. The latter is irreducibly human.
My mornings now read like a minor episode of Black Mirror. A smart speaker wakes me, reads the weather and my diary, and nudges me towards the gym with the disapproval of a Victorian headmaster. My watch counts my steps and, less helpfully, my excuses. Email drafts itself. Invoices chase themselves. Even my food processor has Wi-Fi, an innovation that has yet to explain itself.
In Atlanta recently I rode in a Waymo, a driverless car that glided through junctions with more courtesy than most Sydney cabbies. Back home, contactless Opal gates swallow me into the Sydney Metro; e-gates wave me through Sydney Airport; my bank flags fraud before I notice I’ve been “buying” patio heaters in Perth. The ATO and my GP clinic greet me with triage chatbots that never run out of hold music. Apple Music senses my mood with unnerving accuracy; Netflix anticipates my taste with unnerving confidence and my Instagram feed is a mirror of the conversations I had a hour ago.
And then there is ChatGPT — the silent colleague who never asks for annual leave. As a coach and consultant, I use it daily: to outline a workshop, polish a paragraph, summarise a meeting, or surface research in seconds. Productivity is, as the tech bros say, “through the roof”.
So do we still need humans?
Yes. Emphatically. Not because the machines are incompetent — they’re increasingly excellent — but because they are excellent at the wrong thing. AI excels at information.
Change, growth, courage — the things that alter the trajectory of a life or a career — are the realm of transformation. And transformation is gloriously, inconveniently human.
Consider emotion. A model can detect sentiment in a sentence; it cannot share the silence of shock, or the laughter that breaks tension, or the small, steadying breath before a difficult admission. People don’t change because an algorithm has produced a convincing bullet point. They change because something shifts in the chest, not the spreadsheet.
Consider accountability. Apps ping; reminders stack up; tabs are quietly closed. But showing up to a session and saying, “I didn’t do what I promised,” to someone who knows your story and wants you to win carries a moral weight no notification can deliver. A bot can track your habits. A coach will help you change them — and help you understand why you didn’t last time.
Consider intuition. Machines are superb at pattern recognition. Humans are superb at noticing the thing that doesn’t fit the pattern and gently asking why. A client says, “I’m fine,” in a tone that very obviously isn’t. An eyebrow lifts. A pause stretches. The real conversation begins. You can’t code that.
Consider presence. Even over Zoom you can feel when someone is with you rather than merely hearing you. The pace of their questions, the warmth in the voice, the well-timed silence — these are instruments a human tunes in real time. Live music remains thrilling even though the recording is flawless; the same is true of live conversation.
And consider authenticity. AI is polished, consistent and, crucially, unembarrassable. Humans are muddier and more interesting. Real change often arrives via awkward laughter, a wobble in the voice, an honest “I don’t know” — the tiny, unscripted moments that create trust. In a world of frictionless optimisation, a bit of honest friction is oddly healing.
None of this is an argument for Luddism. I would sooner give up umbrellas than autocomplete. The sensible future is not “man versus machine” but “man with machine” — a division of labour that lets technology do the drudgery while people do the dignity.
In my practice the split is clear. AI helps with lift-off: research, structure, tidy notes, draft plans, reminders. Humans provide lift-through: context, courage, challenge, compassion. And humans provide lift-after: adapting when life intervenes, reframing when a plan falters, celebrating when it works. The robots move us faster. People help us move meaningfully.
There is, of course, a broader civic point. Public services are adopting automation because budgets are thin and demand is thick. Fair enough. But we should design systems in which the machine is the front door, not the whole house — triage first, human soon after. No one should be sentenced to an eternity of “unexpected item in bagging area” when the item in question is their health, livelihood or grief.
Will AI replace coaches, therapists, mentors, teachers? It will replace the worst versions — those who deliver content rather than change. It will not replace the best, because the best are not competing on information at all. They are competing on presence, judgement and care.
If you doubt this, try hugging a chatbot. Try asking a delivery drone whether you’re making the right career move. Try telling a self-checkout you’re scared of failing again. The future will answer your emails. It will not hold your hand.
By all means let the machines book the meeting, transcribe the notes and nudge us when we drift. But let a human look across the table, raise an eyebrow and ask, “What’s really going on here?” That is the moment everything changes, and it is, thankfully, beyond the reach of code.
We don’t need fewer humans. We need better robots and more humans with heart — people to bring wisdom, warmth and the occasional well-timed laugh to a world that already has more than enough information.
