Coaching and Identity in the Age of AI: Executive Coaches’ Experience and Navigation of AI-Related Leadership Challenges

Sammanfattning

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes organizational structures and forces leaders to reevaluate their professional identity, executive coaching has emerged as a key developmental resource. Despite this relationship, the coach’s perspective on how their practice evolves in AI contexts remains largely underexplored. This study examined how executive coaches experience and navigate AI-related leadership challenges in their coaching practice. Eleven semi-structured interviews with executive coaches based in the German- speaking organizational context were conducted. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (TA; Braun & Clarke, 2006) from an interpretivist stance, resulting in five core themes. Coaches perceived AI-related leadership challenges as distinctively severe in their affective appearance, marked by powerlessness and identity threat. Their directiveness in addressing those challenges varied along a spectrum that simultaneously reflected an ongoing negotiation of their own professional identity. To restore leaders’ sense of agency, coaches applied established methodology and practitioner-developed AI-specific interventions. Empathy and presence were described as the irreducible human core of coaching. Furthermore, coaches seemed to process AI disruption in parallel with their coachees, with biographical readiness functioning as a key personal resource. The findings suggest that coaching in AI contexts is a shared sensemaking process, shaped by coaches’ own identity dynamics. Coach training programs should integrate AI-specific methodology and identity-focused guidance. Organizations should consider executive coaching as a developmental resource in AI-disrupted contexts.