AI coach

Can you build an AI coach?

The obvious answer is yes: AI is great at spotting patterns in what you say, and you can ask it to use any style of coaching, any framework.

An exec coach I used to work with thinks you can't build an AI coach, because true change happens in relation to another human. I've tried using AI as a coach, without much success: tens of times, an insightful conversation in the moment has left me unchanged the next day. Why could that be? What are the active ingredients in a human coach?

1. People remember. Your entire relationship history, even if you'd rather they didn't. And you can't delete a person's memory by starting a new chat.
2. People can die. AI can be copied, because it is software. It can be suspended, saved, cloned, restarted. This seems to make an AI's behaviour somehow too light, unlike humans, whose actions are irreversible and the consequences carried through life.
3. People rarely pay attention. You don't often get 30 minutes of undivided attention from someone, so when somebody is really present like that, you invest yourself more into the conversation. The attention of an AI is on-demand and nearly free.
4. People have a body. It's hard to take seriously a conversation with someone who's never felt the fear mixed with excitement before going on stage. A bit like a 12-year-old marriage counselor who only knows about relationships from novels.

All four of these ingredients could plausibly be replicated with clever software design, plus much progress in robot hardware. So you could build it as a product that is instant, cheap, always-on, and interacts like a human.

But that cheapness is exactly what stops you from taking it seriously enough to change. Change happens in special moments, and moments that you can manufacture for 30 seconds while waiting in the supermarket self-checkout line are by construction not special.

I am still optimistic that one could make a useful AI coach, but unfortunately it needs to be expensive.