Human Coaching Versus AI Coaching: An Executive Coach’s Perspective

The short answer: human coaching and technology-enabled coaching are not in competition. Human coaching offers depth, nuance, and relational connection that no platform can replicate. A quality coaching platform fills a critical gap, making coaching accessible to the managers who need it most but have never had access to it. Used together, they build stronger leaders at every level of an organisation.

I have been a professionally accredited coach for over 15 years, working with hundreds of senior leaders across that time. I am also the founder of Bravyn, a leadership coaching platform built to make quality coaching scalable, accessible, and affordable to managers much earlier in their careers. My aim is to give organisations that believe in the impact of coaching a way to extend that benefit to a far wider population of their people.

I have skin in both sides of this debate. And my honest view is that human coaching and technology-enabled coaching are not in competition. They are complementary, each with a distinct and valuable role to play in developing leaders.

What Coaching Actually Is

Before comparing different models of delivery, it is worth being precise about what coaching is, because it is widely misunderstood. Coaching is a pull development technique.

The person being coached is guided through a development journey they largely steer themselves, through careful questioning, supportive challenge, and skilled reflection. It is highly personalised. The power lies in the individual discovering more about themselves and their own capabilities through the process, and making their own choices about what to take forward and what to change.

This is fundamentally different from training, where content is delivered to the learner for them to interpret and implement later in their own context. Leadership coaching is not about giving people the answers. It is about helping them find their own.

Coaching is also an unregulated industry, which has long been problematic. Anyone can call themselves a coach without formal training, accreditation, or supervision. This creates inconsistency and, at its worst, real harm.

The same challenge exists in technology-enabled coaching. There are providers claiming to offer coaching that do not actually coach at all. They deliver another form of learning, which has its place, but it is not the same thing and should not be presented as such.

What a Quality Coaching Platform Can Do for Managers

A properly trained and supervised coaching platform can hold a genuine, personalised coaching conversation at a level that is genuinely helpful to managers in their day-to-day leadership. That includes helping someone work through an in-the-moment challenge, preparing for a difficult conversation or key meeting, prioritising and reflecting effectively, and thinking through a problem from multiple perspectives.

It can also support deeper development work over time: building new skills, changing and embedding behaviours, working towards personal leadership goals, and improving emotional intelligence through sustained self-awareness practice.

A well-designed coaching platform can challenge a manager to think differently, recognise patterns in their behaviour they might not identify themselves, and support the implementation of learning from broader development programmes.

If that sounds like what a human coach does, it is because the coaching methodology is the same. What differs is the depth, the quality of connection, and the level of nuance that an experienced, accredited human coach brings to those conversations. A coaching platform will not read body language, interpret what is left unsaid, or develop the relational depth that makes executive coaching so transformative at senior levels.

That is not a failure of the platform. It reflects a difference in what each is designed to do.

The Case for Accessible Leadership Coaching

Human coaching, at its best, is extraordinarily powerful. It is also largely reserved for senior leaders, and even organisations with well-trained internal coaches cannot offer enough coaching to meet the needs of their full management population.

Most new and mid-level managers receive little or no coaching support as they step into their roles. What they get, if they are fortunate, is time-constrained training with limited coaching support and very little help embedding what they have learned into their daily work.

The consequence of this is something I see consistently in my executive coaching work. Many senior leaders have spent years developing without coaching support, building what I would describe as armour along the way: the habits, defence mechanisms, and limiting beliefs accumulated in navigating leadership without the right support. When they eventually access executive coaching, a significant part of the work involves unlocking that armour before the deeper development can begin.

At Bravyn, we believe that offering managers quality coaching support much earlier in their careers leads to less of that armour being required in the first place, and more effective, deeper executive coaching experiences when they reach senior levels. Developing as a leader should not begin when someone reaches the top. It should begin when they take their first step into leading people.

The Risk of Leaving Managers Without Coaching Support

There is a practical dimension to this conversation that organisations need to take seriously. Large populations of managers are already turning to general-purpose AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, to help them navigate leadership challenges. These tools are not coaching platforms. They provide general answers without considering individual context or organisational environment. They tend to be sycophantic rather than challenging. They offer immediate solutions rather than developing the thinking that leads to better decisions over time. The risk is that managers are getting something that looks like support but is actually diminishing the critical, analytical thinking that good leadership requires.

If your organisation is not actively considering the coaching and development needs of your manager population, it is worth reflecting on what they are already doing to fill that gap.

What to Look for in a Leadership Coaching Platform

Not all coaching platforms are equivalent, and the questions an L&D or HR professional should ask before implementing one are the same questions they would ask of any coaching provider. How has the coaching methodology been designed, and to what standards? What evaluation and governance is in place? How is the platform developed and improved over time? What guardrails exist to protect users? How personalised is the coaching conversation? How does it account for individual context and organisational environment? And critically, how will you measure its use and impact?

These are not optional considerations. They are the difference between a leadership development coaching tool that genuinely develops your managers and one that simply keeps them busy.

How to Embed Coaching in Your Organisation

How organisations approach coaching and embed it into their culture is an important question, and one that deserves careful thought. My own view is that coaching works best when it is offered rather than imposed: when people choose to engage with their own development rather than feeling it has been mandated from above.

I would also recommend starting with your management population specifically. There is a real risk in introducing coaching to an entire organisation simultaneously if your managers have not yet had access to it themselves. Offering it to teams before leaders have had the opportunity to develop through it can create an uncomfortable dynamic.

The most effective ways to introduce leadership development coaching to a manager cohort tend to be purposeful and context-specific. This might mean offering it as part of a personal development plan, supporting managers leading a significant change initiative, embedding it alongside an existing L&D programme to help translate learning into daily practice, or supporting a cohort whose roles and expectations are evolving. It is also a powerful resource for managers being prepared for promotion, where the gap between technical performance and leadership capability is often most visible.

The Problems Bravyn Was Built to Solve

Bravyn was built around a specific belief: that developing people’s capacity to navigate complexity, embrace uncertainty, and lead through change should not be limited to those at the top of an organisation.

The cost of one-to-one coaching means it has never been scalable beyond senior leaders. Bravyn’s annual seat licence model makes quality coaching available to management populations at a fraction of that cost.

Where traditional support tends to arrive after issues have escalated, Bravyn is available in the moment, in the flow of work, at the point where a manager actually needs to think something through. And where learning programmes often remain disconnected from the daily decisions and behaviours they are intended to change,

Bravyn works with the real-time scenarios that managers are actually navigating.

Early data from pilot conversations is encouraging. Over 40% of sessions helped users reduce worry, stress, procrastination, or overthinking in the moment. The platform is designed to coach to consistent standards, without bias or judgement, and in alignment with an organisation’s own leadership philosophies and values.

Poor management remains one of the leading drivers of employee attrition. Research consistently places it as a factor in between a third and two thirds of departures. Giving managers access to quality coaching support is not a soft investment. It is one of the most direct levers an organisation has for improving retention, developing leadership capability, and building the kind of culture where people actually want to stay.

The question is not whether human coaching or technology-enabled coaching is better. The question is how organisations can use both to build the depth of leadership capability their people and their businesses genuinely need.

Key Takeaways: Human Coaching and Coaching Platforms Compared

• Coaching is a pull technique, not a push one. The coachee steers their own development through guided reflection and questioning. It is fundamentally different from training.

• Human coaching offers depth, nuance, and relational connection that technology cannot replicate, particularly for the complexity senior leaders face.

• A quality coaching platform fills a critical gap. It makes consistent, personalised coaching support available to managers who currently have none.

• Not all coaching platforms actually coach. Ask hard questions about methodology, governance, personalisation, and how impact will be measured.

• The risk of doing nothing is real. Managers are already using general-purpose AI tools that provide answers without developing thinking. That is not coaching.

• Start with your managers. Introducing coaching support to teams before their managers have access creates an uncomfortable dynamic.

• Early investment reduces later complexity. Managers who develop with coaching support earlier in their careers arrive at senior leadership with less armour to unlock.

• Human coaching and coaching platforms are complementary. The goal is not to choose between them, it is to use both to build leadership capability at every level.