312: Training Coaches for the AI Age: What Providers and the Profession Must Rethink with Jonathan Reitz
Coaching Voices: The Association for Coaching PodcastShow Notes
AI has brought new urgency to questions the coaching profession has wrestled with for years: what is coaching, what value does it create, and what kind of practitioner should coach education produce? In episode 7 of our series, AI, Ethics and Trust in Coaching, host Smaranda Dochia talks with Jonathan Reitz, a coach and coach educator with nearly three decades of experience, about his unexpected path from broadcasting into coaching and what that journey taught him about the profession's evolving identity.
Jonathan draws a sharp distinction between coach training, which transfers skills, and coach education, which reshapes the practitioner's identity, ethics, and self-awareness. He argues that meaningful development doesn't happen in the classroom alone: it comes from a blend of focused instruction, field experience, deliberate practice, community reflection, and a wider circle of trusted support. As AI tools increasingly position themselves as "coaches," he makes the case that providers and professional bodies carry an institutional responsibility to prepare adaptable, reflective practitioners, not just add an AI module to existing curricula.
The discussion also digs into the practical and ethical terrain coaches now have to navigate: GDPR-level data handling, client-controlled recordings, one-year deletion policies, and the difficulty buyers face in measuring coaching ROI. Jonathan's view is that coaches should aim for AI augmentation or redefinition of their practice - never inversion, where the coach hands off genuine cognitive engagement to a tool. Even coaches who choose not to use AI themselves, he notes, need enough fluency to understand the language and developmental world their clients now inhabit.
You will learn:
· AI and coaching bots have forced a reckoning on defining coaching · Coach education beats training, and it belongs in the field with practice and community · Ethics and AI fluency are the differentiators. There are foundations of responsible practice that must be in place before AI fluency can start
"I think the advent of some of the AI tools that are in the world right now have forced us to say, hey, with these AI tools now calling themselves coach, what is it that they're doing that I also do? And what is it that I do that they are not doing?"
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review! Your feedback helps us bring you more valuable content.
For the episode resources and guest bio, please visit: https://www.associationforcoaching.com/page/dl-hub_podcast-channel-AI-ethics-trust-in-coaching-coach-education-definition-ethics
More from Coaching Voices: The Association for Coaching Podcast
In this first episode of our podcast series, Psychology in Coaching, host Lucy Whitehall talks with psychologist and coach Dr Hayley Lewis about how psychology shapes coaching practice. Hayley's journey runs from occupational psychology and organisational development at the BBC to executive coaching. She shares how her sketch-note summaries aim to make psychology accessible to the public, and how one of them ended up in Adam Grant's book, Think Again, after she mistook his publisher's emails for phishing. Her story opens a wider conversation about impostor feelings, and why self-doubt can signal that we are learning or stepping into unfamiliar territory.
This episode is part of our 'A Day in the Life' series, where we talk to coaches about their real lives and businesses. What happens when creativity, personal story and deep self-reflection find their way into coaching? In this warm, honest conversation, our host Maxine Bell, talks with Paul Williamson, Group Head of Talent Development at ATG Entertainment. He has designed acclaimed in-house leadership development programmes, helped to build a successful internal coaching faculty, and coached leaders at all levels within the organization. Paul traces his path from a creative childhood filled with art, drama and storytelling, through management roles, to becoming a qualified coach. Like many people, he was steered toward more 'sensible' career paths, but his creative instincts never left him, and he came to see creativity as a powerful tool for transformation.
In this final episode of our series: AI, Ethics and Trust in Coaching, we step back from individual perspectives and ask what all these conversations might be telling us about coaching itself. Rebecca Rutschmann, co-founder of Viva la Coaching, researcher, educator and long-standing explorer of the space between coaching and technology, joins host, Smaranda Dochia, to consider whether AI is forcing the profession to become clearer about what coaching is really here to do.
AI coaching is moving fast, but the evidence hasn't quite caught up with the excitement. In episode 9 of our AI, Ethics and Trust in Coaching series, host Smaranda Dochia sits down with Professor Nicky Terblanche, Professor in Leadership Coaching at Stellenbosch University Business School in Cape Town, South Africa, where he leads the master's and PhD programmes in leadership coaching. Nicky began his career in electronic and software engineering before moving into coaching and applied psychology and has been researching AI coaching since well before generative AI arrived on the scene.
Across workplaces, AI tools are being introduced at remarkable speed. Licenses are being purchased, productivity gains are anticipated, and employees are being encouraged to experiment. But access to AI is not the same as knowing how to work with it well. In episode 8 of our AI, Ethics and Trust in Coaching series, host Smaranda Dochia sits down with James Varnham, who brings 26 years of experience in learning, workforce development, and AI adoption, to unpack what's actually happening inside organizations as AI moves from experimentation to daily practice. They dig into the gap between leadership ambition and employee readiness, the rise of shadow AI and the data security risks it creates, and why generic, one-size-fits-all training rarely builds the kind of AI literacy organizations need.