How Coaches Can Use AI Wisely Without Losing What Matters Most

I recently had a conversation that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. My guest was Chris Papin, a dual-licensed CPA and attorney who thinks about AI in business with a level of rigor and nuance that most of us simply have not been exposed to. What struck me most was not a warning or a prediction. It was a framework. And once I heard it, I could not unsee it.

The question Chris keeps coming back to is not whether coaches should use AI. That ship has sailed. The question is whether we are using it with enough awareness to actually serve our clients well. And for most of us, the honest answer is: probably not yet.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Principle That Changes Everything

The most important thing Chris said, and the thing I want every coach reading this to write down, is this: AI is only as good as what you put into it. The technical term is GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. If you ask a vague question, you get a vague answer. If you feed it bad assumptions, it will build beautifully articulated conclusions on a faulty foundation.

This matters enormously for coaches. We work with people who are trying to understand themselves, their businesses, and their lives. When we use AI to generate frameworks, session questions, or content, we have to be the ones holding the standard. AI will agree with you. It will validate your premise. It will produce five eloquent paragraphs on request. That does not mean any of it is right. Chris described a situation where he asked AI to check a spreadsheet calculation and got a confident, incorrect answer. When he pushed back, AI immediately conceded. The lesson is not that AI is unreliable. The lesson is that we cannot switch off our critical thinking just because the output looks polished.

The Legal and Ethical Blind Spots Most Coaches Have Never Considered

This is the part of the conversation that stopped me in my tracks. Chris explained that when coaches put client information into free AI tools, that data is often being used to train the model. Depending on which platform you use, you may be committing a technical breach of confidentiality without realizing it. As a coach who takes client trust seriously, this is something I want every one of us to understand before we type another word into a free chatbot.

Chris also raised the broader question of data rights. We consented to these tools, yes. But most of us did not fully understand what we were consenting to. The regulatory frameworks are still catching up, and in that gap there is real risk. My takeaway is simple: use enterprise or privacy-protected versions of AI tools when you are working with anything related to your clients. And stay curious about the fine print.

What AI Can Actually Do Well for Your Coaching Business

Here's where the conversation shifted into something genuinely exciting. Chris talked about automation and AI as tools for filtering noise. Imagine an inbox that only surfaces what actually requires your attention. Imagine agentic AI tools that learn your patterns and priorities over time and stop interrupting you with everything else. For coaches who are already stretched thin between client work, content creation, and business development, this is not a small thing.

The key, as Chris framed it, is using AI to do the filtering so you can do the thinking. You handle the relationship, the discernment, the nuance. AI handles the data overload. That division of labor makes sense to me. And it protects the thing that coaches do that no tool can replicate.

Why Human Connection Is Still the Foundation

Chris said something in our conversation that I want to quote as closely as I can: humans are wired to communicate directly with other humans. When you take that away, the brain changes. That is backed by science. I believe it in my bones as a coach. There is something that happens in a real conversation, where I can hear the hesitation in someone's voice or sense that the words they are using do not quite match what they are feeling, that no AI will replicate anytime soon.

The coaches who will thrive in the AI era are not the ones who resist these tools or the ones who hand everything over to them. They are the ones who use AI to do more of the mechanical work, so they can bring more of themselves to the human work. That is where we will shine.

If you want to hear the full conversation with Chris, including his thoughts on the ethics of AI copyright, what he is watching in the regulatory space, and why perception is reality for your clients right now, listen to this episode of She Coaches Coaches.

About Chris Papin: Chris Papin is a dual-licensed CPA and attorney, Forbes Best in State CPA, and author of 168 Hours: A Startup Business Guide That Respects Your Time. He runs an integrated firm in Edmond, Oklahoma, combining accounting, law, and insurance under one roof, and hosts the BLABO (Behave Like a Business Owner) podcast. Chris speaks nationally on entrepreneurial mindset and brings the same pattern-recognition thinking from championship soccer coaching to his client work.

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