Brave New Coaching World: Are Your Clients Ready for Artificial Intelligence?

You may have coached a client through a layoff, but what would you do if entire industries were rendered obsolete, because those jobs had been taken by intelligent machines?

It sounds like science fiction, but is fast becoming fact. We’re facing imminent change to the very nature of employment. However, as coaches we can be part of the solution.

Unless you follow cybernetics, you may have missed rapidly unfolding developments in artificial intelligence (AI). Loosely defined as a computer performing complex or inscrutable reasoning, for many years AI failed to deliver promises like speech recognition, language comprehension and facial recognition, and was consequently ridiculed. But in recent years those goals have been realized. You can ask your smartphone to show photos containing a particular friend, and it will decode your speech, understand the request and find images where that person was recognized.

That pace of development is poised to disrupt many fields. Most people still haven’t seen a self-driving car, yet Morgan Stanley predicts autonomous vehicles will take over long-haul truck driving within ten years. (Consider that a self-driving truck has already navigated the state of Nevada.) That will eliminate three million jobs in the United States.

But suppose your clients are white-collar workers who drive a desk and are handsomely paid for thinking—people like Wall Street analysts who earn more than $350,000 USD annually. AI is also automating that. Daniel Nadler, founder of an AI analytics company, thinks that by 2026, 33–50 percent of finance employees will lose their jobs to software. Tellingly, he predicts “clients [will] no longer feel they need or even want to work through a human being.”

Between these demographic bookends lie many other vulnerable industries, such as warehouse packers (replaced by bipedal robots), office receptionists (Microsoft deployed an artificial prototype three years ago) and security (drones hunting everything from terrorists to illegally parked cars). All this is happening not on fantasy timescales but within one to two decades. If that’s still too far off to concern you, Gartner’s Darryl Plummer predicts that within one to two years:

• Twenty percent of all business content (such as report-writing and legal documents) will be automated.
• More than three million workers will be supervised by a “robo-boss.”
• Forty-five percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than smart machines.

Bank of America lists entire industries facing widespread automation, including agriculture, health care, education and entertainment. Computer scientist Moshe Vardi predicts most jobs will be automated by 2045.

If you coach managers … who will be left for them to manage?

Deep breath, people.

Coaches are not in imminent danger of being replaced by computers. (See “Which Jobs are Safest?,” at right.) The safest jobs are those working directly with people in physical or emotional capacities.

Your white-collar clients may scoff at the notion that they are about to become obsolete; most of them are overworked and can’t imagine that mountain vanishing. But when Wile E. Coyote fell off a cliff, he also thought everything was fine right up until he went splat. Disruption wouldn’t be disruptive if everyone saw it coming.

A common belief axiomatic among intellectuals is that automation always relocates people to more rewarding, less repetitive work. The wagon builder will be more fulfilled designing automobiles. The assembly line worker will be happier as an accounting administrator. Therefore, automation is always ultimately for everyone’s betterment.

That may not be so this time. Computers are learning to perform those intellectual tasks; where will be left for the creative clever class to go when their jobs are automated? The last bastion of latter-day John Henrys will instead be jobs that speak to our souls: artists, healers … and coaches.

Many people will soon feel the pressure of automation. Think how you will help clients in high-risk occupations deal with unemployment if their whole industry vaporizes. Evaluate their skills against safer professions. Do you have forward-thinking clients who would like to plan for this upheaval before it becomes common news?

On the other side of that upheaval lies … a bigger upheaval. One day, AIs will become conscious, acting like humans with creative, independent thoughts and emotions. No one knows when or how this will happen; few experts doubt that it will happen. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk—three of the smartest people on the planet—say that super-intelligent AI is an existential risk, a threat to human survival.

In The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein writes, “If you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there. It is frightening to lose the old structures of security, but you will find that even as you might lose things that were unthinkable to lose, you will be okay.” Compared to how society may be convulsing in 2030, today’s relative tranquility is like that sacred space, a place to reflect and recharge—except all humanity is in that space.

We will need people with deep understanding of the human condition to teach those AIs to accept and not annihilate us. Not computer scientists, but psychologists, therapists and coaches.

You may have a future in saving the world.