AI Coach vs. Human Coach

Partnering to achieve a shared goal: Upleveling people towards their true potential

Christina Pan
5 min readMar 23, 2024
Credit: Christina Pan using Canva

As a product leader turned executive coach, I found it fascinating to be confronted with the possibility of AI “taking over my job.”

At Reconify Generative AI demo night on February 27, 2024, I saw founders Sid Pandiya and Yen Tan demo their product Kona, an AI leadership coach. Kona is a Slack app that is an AI copilot for remote managers (much like Microsoft popularizing the term Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying “We are the Copilot company.”).

Rather than worry “Am I going to have a job?” it was enlightening to ask Sid and Yen where they saw future possibilities of how Human Coaches fit in with AI Coaches.

Personally I like to view AI Coaches like power boosts or power-ups in video games (enhancements or extra powers). I used to work in social/mobile gaming back in the day and love integrating game design anywhere it adds more fun. Who wouldn’t want an endless supply of power boosts in life?!

The differentiators that stood out to me between AI Coach vs. Human Coach:

Pros of AI Coach:

Power boost in a video game

AI Coaches give leaders and managers guidance in real-time, like when you want to find out different best practices or frameworks for effective 1:1 meetings, or when your Human Coach is not available in that moment.

AI Coaches help managers have higher impact as leaders, with higher quality, faster speed, and less mental burnout.

For example: Performance reviews can be greatly time consuming, especially if you want to do it well. Kona helps managers write performance reviews faster with higher-quality tailored feedback for their direct reports, culling from notes from internal systems/data. This higher-impact leadership only lifts everyone else by giving the best chance possible for their growth potential. The rising tide lifts all boats.

One interesting insight from Sid and Yen was that AI Coaches could enhance human coaching too! As a Human Coach, if the AI Coach can give me better coaching ideas specific to a client based on their AI coaching history (insights that I might not have otherwise), then this only levels up everyone!

It makes me better at my job, faster.

Scalability

A huge advantage is that Kona reaches more managers sooner — especially valuable at growth-stage startups, where it’s chaotic with crazy fast growth and frequent changes in number of employees and team configurations, and thus there is often less support for new managers. It’s not as realistic to quickly support all these new managers with Human Coaches, or to get such support in place when top priorities are to survive and keep up with customer firedrills and overwhelming business growth.

For example: Kona works especially well for remote managers at bigger startups with at least 60–80 managers and enough useful internal data to pull from. Kona’s customers include Canva, Masterclass, Buffer, etc.

Personalized coaching guidance leveraging internal data

An AI Coach is not a generic static Q&A (question & answer) database experience like Quora or Google search. The beauty of AI is that it trains on all the company’s internal existing data to give tailored guidance specific to each particular manager.

For example: Kona trains on internal data from the team tools/integrations that many companies commonly use internally, such as BambooHR, Rippling, Notion, Asana, Jira, etc.

One interesting current sticking point: Kona does NOT train data on public or private Slack conversations. My personal contrarian view is that it would be incredibly useful and advantageous to train on public Slack conversations.

When I started as a product leader at Tophatter, I initially was very much about private team Slack channels for efficiency and less distraction from “outside noise”—but I was completely WRONG. That experience taught me that public team channels and openness and transparency leads to much much stronger trust, faster collaboration, better ideas and better team and company outcomes—and even more so in remote teamwork.

Pros of Human Coach:

Confidence and mindset!

Confidence and mindset are the most valuable transformations people get out of executive coaching as it exists today in my personal opinion, and it’s interesting that Sid and Yen saw this as the main differentiated value of Human Coaches in the future as well.

As an executive coach, I feel it is my highest calling to focus on helping people in this highest way possible. It’s the most fun and fulfilling for me, and I can bring the highest value and most meaningful transformations to people’s lives in this way.

Here’s a metaphor that captures the essence:

“Your AI Coach gives you power boosts anytime you need it, while your Human Coach levels you up to Level 100 for the rest of your life.”

-Christina Pan

As Professor Carolyn Anderson, Wellesley computer science professor, puts it:

LLMs (large language models) are PARTNERS to humans — rather than saviors, competitors, or replacements.

Now that’s a positive framing that is a win-win!

Yen Tan said it best reminding us that we’re all aiming for the same goal:

“AI coaches and human coaches can partner together to achieve a shared goal: Upleveling people towards their true potential.”

-Yen Tan

One last point I wanted to highlight: Sid and Yen use both AI Coaches and Human Coaches! This is the future ya’ll!!

AI Coaches will evolve, I’m definitely going to evolve, we will all evolve! So rather than waste our energy on fear, we can use our expansive, abundant mindset to focus on what’s in our control, and experiment our way to new possibilities that utilize our best potential at every moment in time!

Christina Pan is an executive coach and highly-experienced product leader with 20+ years at startups and high-growth tech companies. She started her career on Wall Street and has an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Thank you so much for reading! I welcome comments and feedback.

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I coach founders, executives, and leaders to harness their full potential. I help innovative trailblazers get clarity and confidence in their zone of genius for their highest-impact leadership and most fulfilling life.

More on my executive coaching at my LinkedIn or Instagram (christinawpan).

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Christina Pan

Passionate about building products and teams that bring positivity to people’s everyday lives