How Coaches Use AI Tools to Make Insights Visible

Key Takeaways

• Coaches who use AI-generated transcripts can reflect on their practice and deepen their clients’ insights.
• Putting AI usage into practice can help further clients’ goals.
• Adapting and innovating using AI tools can be beneficial to the quality of one’s coaching experience.

Holding the Client’s Words Still

Note-taking is a critical component of the coaching process for coaches and clients alike. When insights are captured in writing, clients are better equipped to process, retain, and act on their own profound breakthroughs. While many coaches take notes during their coaching sessions, AI-generated transcription tools offer a transformative opportunity for the client and the coach: the ability for the coach to offload this task, confident that their words will remain on the page long after the coaching conversation ends.

There is a natural connection between technological efficiency and the human-centered nature of coaching. Technology will never replace a coach’s empathy and intuition, but AI tools can be thoughtfully integrated to support the client’s needs. By shifting the administrative burden of note-taking to AI, coaches can remain even more present throughout the conversation. When AI-generated transcripts are carefully reviewed and refined by the coach, with a focus on ethical use, clients benefit from seeing their thinking mirrored back to them with clarity. Likewise, coaches benefit from reviewing past sessions with a neutral lens to identify their own strengths and areas for professional growth. The strategic use of AI-generated transcripts within a human-centered coaching relationship helps make the client’s voice visible and creates opportunities for coaches to meaningfully reflect on their practice.

While ethical considerations, including confidentiality and data privacy, must align with ICF ethics to remain at the forefront of every coaching practice, coaches who use AI tools responsibly will find they can enhance the impact, clarity, and transformative potential of every coaching conversation.

One Client’s Experience

As a seasoned educator, I recognize that not all of my clients process information in the same way, so I continually look for opportunities to honor their preferences in our work together. After discussing the potential use of AI-generated transcripts with a client who likes to write down her thoughts, she decided to try this tool to help her reflect on prior coaching sessions. She didn’t want a word-for-word transcript because it meant sifting through multiple pages, so we agreed that I would create a one-page summary for her to review. I decided to break our coaching transcript into three sections:

1. General Overview: A broad summary of the coaching session, including the topic, general outline of the conversation, and broader actions identified at the end. This section was written with neutral language, with the sole purpose of capturing the heart of the conversation.
2. Key Insights: Pull out moments of personal revelation or insight. This can include helpful metaphors, connections between disparate ideas, and themes that emerged over the course of the conversation.
3. Possible Next Steps: Highlight action steps options to consider for addressing a particular challenge. I also included some direct quotes to highlight key phrases that resonated with my client.

At every point, the human-to-human relationship remained at the heart of the work. I didn’t ask AI to generate a summary of the transcript because AI often struggles to discern nuances in conversation. Having the exact language of the transcripts was enough for me to refer to as needed.

Creating these summaries has not only benefitted my clients but also helped me reflect more purposefully about where I need to strengthen my own coaching skills. This example demonstrates how to use AI to amplify the client’s voice while respecting unique perspectives and backgrounds, ensuring that the role of the human coach remains central to the work across global communities. Beyond efficiency, coaches can leverage these transcripts for professional reflection and development, identifying constructive patterns and opportunities for improvement. The tools help make clients’ voices visible and provide targeted, data-driven reflection to help coaches grow their skills.

Putting It Into Practice

1. Hold Insights Steady for Clients: Using AI-generated transcripts with explicit client permission, coaches can create reflective summaries that make a client’s words visible. When a coach breaks down these transcripts into accurate summaries and useful action steps, it furthers a client’s ability to revisit their past goals and see clear connections between sessions over time.
2. Reflect and Refine Your Practice: Coaches who review these transcripts are better able to analyze coaching patterns, identify professional strengths, and note areas for growth. While working with a mentor coach is a critical part of every coach’s development, transcripts afford coaches additional opportunities to diagnose effective practices and determine areas for continued support.
3. Explicitly Discuss and Disclose AI Use: Coaches must examine the ethical implications when using AI, including data privacy, proper storage and security of digital records, confidentiality, and co-creating agreements that maintain trust. This includes naming the specific AI tools being used and explaining how data is stored and protected. Explicit disclosure, paired with open conversations and written agreements, is essential whenever a coach decides to integrate technology into their practice. Coaches should also stay current on updates to ethical guidelines, particularly as technology is an ever-changing field.

Ongoing conversations about the ethical use of AI help uphold the integrity of the coaching profession worldwide and its commitment to exploring how emerging technologies can help coaches improve client service. Co-creating transparent agreements that prioritize confidentiality and data privacy from the outset ensures that trust and integrity are central to professional coaching work. The purpose of using AI in this manner is to keep the client, not the technology, at the center of the coaching relationship.

As coaches continue to adapt and innovate, it is important for this professional community to continue exploring how AI tools can be used to support clients and improve the quality of their experiences. Since these tools are increasingly pervasive across communities and within organizations, learning how to leverage these tools in our own field is essential. By delegating the administrative burden of note-taking to technology, coaches can redirect their energy toward deep, empathetic connection, extending their impact far beyond the end of each coaching session.