It’s my first proper day back at the laptop of the new year, which means it’s time to revisit the predictions I made last year and make some new ones.
Last year I predicted that:
- AI would start to appear everywhere. This has definitely happened. I’m sure my social media algorithms are tuned differently from others, but I feel like every other video I see is now AI-generated. On Christmas Day my oven broke (yes, really), and the way I booked a gas technician was through an AI receptionist. In January 2026 this feels like it wasn’t the most controversial of predictions, but a good start!
- Organisations will diversify coaching offerings away from just external and 1:1. This hasn’t happened so much, and that strikes me as interesting. I’ve seen coaching budgets tighten but that seems to be leading to simply less coaching rather than alternative approaches, which is a bit of a shame.
- The professional bodies will come under increasing disruptive pressure. Oh yes, this is happening. There are a good number of different forces shaping the professional bodies, and that looks like it will continue for a while now.
- Coaching ethics will be centre-stage. Ethics has been a big discussion point throughout 2025, and that conversation is, perhaps, maturing. It feels extremely closely connected with the previous point, as codes have been updated and conferences have featured dialogues about it. There’s still a fair amount that’s unclear, particularly with regard to AI.
So what does 2026 have in store?
AI will emerge as the new psychometric assessment
The reason people have given me most often when they say that they want to work with someone else as a coach is that I don’t hold the right qualification in a psychometric they want to use. Some providers of psychometrics and other assessments use this line of reasoning almost exclusively as their sales pitch to coaches: “Pay to become qualified and it will lead to more revenue for you!”
The sorts of insights afforded to us now, thanks to AI, are starting to become quite helpful. The idea that an organisation will make available to its people an AI that will automatically book time into their diary to enable them to prioritise their workload is simply now a question of turning it on. Five years ago that would have felt like science fiction, but most have experienced some aspect of it now.
I expect that this year some coaches will win work specifically because they have access to a tool that augments their approach using AI, and some will miss out because they don’t.
Job descriptions will evolve
While presenting at the City HR Association conference recently I broke down an example L&D function into the various tasks that are performed, and discussed how some of those tasks can be performed by AI at least as well as humans perform them. It’s worth thinking through the future of the workforce.
The problem is that we all know that a person’s role in an organisation can be much more than the tasks they carry out. Up until now, we’ve produced competency frameworks and skills matrices with the unstated assumption that those being assessed through them are humans. It would have felt silly to do so. But now we might need to revisit that assumption.
The AI receptionist for the gas engineer in many ways did everything a human could, and more. It is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It’s patient and calm. It understands exactly what I say and provides a helpful, appropriate response. And yet it didn’t do what I actually needed it to, when the person behind it explained he was busy and sent over the number of someone who lives right round the corner from me.
Some roles are not just about the tasks. On paper, a team leader might ‘only’ act as a go-between to cascade direction downward and feed exceptions upwards. But we’ve all worked in organisations where a team leader’s experience and personality are the things that add the value.
The consciousness debate will get louder
When I watched the excellent scifi TV series Humans it was blindingly obvious who were the goodies and who were the baddies. The goodies were the ones who fought for the equivalent of human rights on behalf of the robots, because they were clearly conscious, and the baddies only ever saw them as machines.
I really ought to rewatch it now, because I’m extremely clear in myself that AI is no more than a next-generation calculator wearing the emperor’s new clothes. I hope I’m not one of the baddies.
I’ve been experiencing a bit of confusion over the past couple of years, however, as I’ve heard really smart computer scientists argue that, in essence, the only difference between my own consciousness and the consciousness of generative AI lies in computing power. There’s an argument that consciousness isn’t as binary as we imagine it to be, and the conversations we have with ChatGPT aren’t just illusory. To their minds, the human experiences of awareness, memory, creativity and so on are simply a version of what we see in artificial neural networks.
As AI becomes more powerful in 2026 we’ll see this dialogue become more mainstream – I don’t foresee any robot-run terrorist groups rising up any time soon, but this debate isn’t nothing either.
You might see your first pair of smart glasses out in public
I’ve been banging on about immersive technologies for a long time now, and the last few years of adoption have not matched the vision Mark Zuckerberg had when Facebook was rebranded to Meta. But with the launch of the Meta Ray-Ban Display we have a more consumer-friendly device that I expect is going to get some fans.
They’re still a bit chunky on the face, but things are moving in the right direction. I bought my first set of smart glasses in 2025, and are at the hyper-tight end of the budget range (£50 for prescription smart glasses, including shipping). But I wore them out in public and didn’t catch anyone giving me any funny looks.
I’m not predicting everybody’s going to be sending emails through the power of thought this year, but it’s quite likely you’ll see someone wearing smart glasses this year (even if you don’t realise it!).
So what?
The world is feeling pretty volatile at the moment. There’s excitement in some corners, but a lot of fear, particularly of the unknown. Leaders are going to be looking to coaches for support and challenge around sense-making and decision-making, so it’s important we continue to make sure we have support and challenge around ourselves.
A friend challenged me before Christmas, saying she was sometimes not clear what I wanted her to do when she reads one of my articles, so here’s a practical call to action: Book a demo of AIcoach.chat, where you can see what we’re doing and share thoughts about what the future might look like within your context.
