I am thrilled to welcome Paola Sanmiguel as a guest blogger this month. Paola is one of our own — a current student in our coaching cohort — and she brings a perspective I think every coach needs to hear right now. Before she began her coaching journey, Paola spent twenty years as a product strategist and operator in Silicon Valley, building teams at Google, Intel, Salesforce, Verizon, and her own startups. She is a 4× founder, a professor of product design and design research, a Stanford-trained Design Thinking practitioner, and a candidate for ICF Leadership Coaching Certification. Paola is one of those rare people who bridges the world of technology and the world of human development and in this piece, she makes a compelling case for why that bridge matters more than ever, especially in the emerging world of AI coaching. Read on and discover why the skills you are building as a coach may be the most valuable assets in the AI economy. Please leave a comment and tell us what you think.
AI Coaching in the Workplace
Something is shifting in every boardroom, team meeting, and coaching conversation I’m a part of — and I suspect you’re feeling it, too.
The leaders I work with are not asking me how to implement AI. They’ve hired consultants for that. What keeps them up at night is a different question entirely: When every competitor can buy the same AI tools I buy, where is my edge?
That question changes everything about what coaches do and why we matter now more than ever.
The Shift is Bigger — and Closer — Than Most of us Realize
The numbers tell an urgent story. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that nearly 40% of the skills required on the job will change by 2030. Gartner predicts that by 2026 — not some distant future, but this year — 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions.
Meanwhile, the investment gap is staggering. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey of over 9,000 leaders across 89 countries found that 93% of technology funding goes to the technology itself — and just 7% to the humans using it. AI infrastructure spend is rising 44% this year. Training budgets? Five percent, according to Fortune.
Powerful tools in untrained hands, however, do not build a competitive advantage. They build expensive conformity.
“Only 14% of leaders feel adept at shaping human-AI interaction.”
— Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends
That 14% is not just a data point. It is a door wide open for every coach reading this.
The Capabilities That Matter Most are the Ones we Already Teach
Here is what I find remarkable. When you look at the human capabilities that innovation and strategy experts say leaders need most in the AI era, they map directly onto what coaches are already trained to develop.
IDEO, the global design and innovation consultancy, identifies six core human skills for the future of work:
- Curiosity
- Collaboration
- Adapting to ambiguity
- Experimentation
- Self-awareness
- Maintaining momentum.
McKinsey’s research confirms that demand for social and emotional skills — judgment, relationship-building, empathy, critical thinking — will grow 26% in the United States alone through 2030. Workday’s global study found that 83% of professionals believe AI will elevate the importance of uniquely human capabilities like ethical decision-making, empathy, and relationship building.
Now hold those against what we practice every day as coaches.
When you evoke awareness in a client — helping them see a pattern they couldn’t name — you are building the curiosity and self-awareness that IDEO calls essential for navigating ambiguity. When you cultivate trust and safety in your coaching relationship, you are modeling the very collaboration and emotional intelligence that McKinsey says will grow in value as AI handles the routine work. When you listen actively — truly listen, rather than just waiting for your turn to speak — you are exercising the relational muscle that no algorithm can replicate.
AI Coaching and the ICF Core Competencies
The ICF’s core competencies are not just a certification checklist. They are a blueprint for the human capabilities the AI era demands. And the convergence is not a coincidence — it is three independent sources, from coaching to innovation to management consulting, arriving at the same conclusion: the human skills are the irreplaceable ones.
You Can Only Coach What You’ve Built in Yourself
This is where it gets personal for every one of us.
It is one thing to understand intellectually that curiosity, emotional intelligence, and adaptability matter. It is another to embody them — to walk into a session with a leader who is terrified of the transformation happening around them and hold space from a place of genuine presence, not performance.
The leaders who will navigate this transition successfully need coaches who have done their own work. Not coaches who can recite the competencies, but coaches who have wrestled with ambiguity themselves, who have practiced self-awareness under pressure, who have built the resilience to sit with a client’s discomfort without rushing to fix it.
The skills once called “soft” are now the hardest to replace — and you can only teach what you’ve genuinely developed in yourself.
Working alongside AI in Coaching
There are no shortcuts here. No prompt can replicate the judgment you build through hundreds of hours of practice. No chatbot can develop your capacity to hold silence while a client finds their own insight. AI can help you schedule sessions, get organized, and research. It cannot do the inner work for you — and that inner work is precisely what makes you valuable.
The Opportunity Ahead is Enormous
Every leader is becoming an AI leader. Not just the CTO or the Chief Digital Officer — every executive who manages people, budgets, and strategy is now making decisions about how AI reshapes the work under their watch. The World Economic Forum projects 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced by 2030. That is not a technology story. That is a human story — about fear, adaptation, identity, and growth.
Leaders Need Coaches Like You
Coaches are the people best equipped to walk alongside leaders through that story.
Think about what you already know how to do. You know how to help someone sit with ambiguity instead of reacting to it. You know how to ask the question that unlocks a new way of seeing. You know how to build the trust that allows a leader to say, out loud, “I don’t know how to lead through this” — and then help them find their way forward.
The 86% of leaders who don’t feel adept at shaping human-AI interaction need exactly what you offer. Not a technology tutorial. Not a strategy deck. A thinking partner who can help them lead with judgment, creativity, and relational intelligence through the most significant workforce transition of their careers.
Your Humanity is the Dividend
I have spent twenty years building teams inside some of the largest technology companies in the world, and I have watched this pattern repeat: the organizations that invest in their people’s human capabilities outperform the ones that invest only in tools. Every time. The tool is the commodity. The human is the moat.
I call this the Human Dividend — the compounding return organizations earn when they invest in irreplaceable human capabilities. And coaches are uniquely positioned to help leaders claim it.
The coaches who invest in truly developing curiosity, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and adaptability — not as concepts, but as lived capabilities — will find themselves holding something the market cannot commoditize. A differentiation that no one can AI themselves into.
Your humanity is not what you defend in spite of AI. It is the return on developing yourself fully as a coach — and helping your clients do the same.
I am designing a framework for leading AI transformation through human capability — and I am sharing it month by month on my Substack, The Human Dividend. If this resonated, I invite you to follow along.
By: Paola Sanmiguel, Leadership Coach | The Human Dividend
Paola Sanmiguel is a Leadership Coach, 4× founder, and professor of product design and design research. She spent twenty years building teams at Google, Intel, Salesforce, and Verizon, is a Stanford-trained Design Thinking practitioner, a Johns Hopkins-trained AI transformation architect and candidate for ICF Leadership Coaching Certification. She writes at The Human Dividend.
The Limits of AI Coaching – FAQs
What is AI coaching?
AI Coaching involves using artificial intelligence tools that focus on enhancing skills including leadership, personal development, time management, education and training, and more. AI tools are often seen as being easily scalable, providing immediate results, and a more financially accessible alternative to traditional coaching.
Can AI replace a human coach?
AI Coaching cannot replace a human coach. Powerful tools in untrained hands do not build a competitive advantage. They build expensive conformity. I have spent twenty years building teams inside some of the largest technology companies in the world, and I have watched this pattern repeat: the organizations that invest in their people’s human capabilities outperform the ones that invest only in tools. Every time. The tool is the commodity. The human is the moat.
What are the limits of AI coaching?
AI coaching can be efficient, scalable and accessible, but its limitations become obvious when the work moves beyond information and into emotions and transformation.
Coaching is not just about asking questions or offering structured guidance. It is about presence, trust, and the ability to meet a client in uncertainty. Prompts and technologies cannot replace what coaches have learned through lived experiences, or the capacity of coaches to hold silence when clients arrive at their own solutions.
How can coaches use AI without losing the human side of coaching?
Coaches do not have to compete with AI, but rather learn to work alongside it. AI can support the operational side of coaching (organizing sessions, identifying patterns over time, generating ideas, etc.).
But the coaching conversation itself must remain human-led. The skills that define effective coaching (presence, active listening, ethical judgement, trust-building) cannot be replicated by AI.
Sources:
- World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report 2025. January 8, 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
- Gartner. Strategic Predictions for 2026: How AI’s Underestimated Influence Is Reshaping Business. October 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-10-22-gartner-unveils-top-predictions-for-it-organizations-and-users-in-2025-and-beyond
- Deloitte. 2026 Global Human Capital Trends: From Tensions to Tipping Points. March 2026. Survey of 9,000+ business and HR leaders across 89 countries. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends.html
- Fortune. Companies Are Pouring Billions into AI and Cutting Training Budgets. It’s a Losing Strategy. March 17, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/ai-economy-workplace-investment-human-potential-competitive-advantage/
- IDEO U. What Is Human-Centered Leadership? 6 Human Skills for the Future of Work. Updated September 23, 2025. https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-human-centered-leadership-6-human-skills-for-the-future-of-work
- McKinsey Global Institute. Agents, Robots, and Us: Skill Partnerships in the Age of AI. November 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/agents-robots-and-us-skill-partnerships-in-the-age-of-ai
7. Workday. Elevating Human Potential: The AI Skills Revolution. January 14, 2025. https://investor.workday.com/2025-01-14-New-Global-Research-from-Workday-Reveals-AI-Will-Ignite-a-Human-Skills-Revolution
