Coach share of coaching revenue to decline

Coaching promises human beings self-driven pathways to greater success and satisfaction. But automation of coaching delivery is set to take an increasing share of the market from human coaches. This is happening both at the platform level and within the actual interactive coaching experience. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study launched today makes sobering reading for business-oriented coaches. According to the ICF’s cover note to members,

Nearly half of coaches worldwide (47%) use digital coaching platforms, according to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study. Yet some coaches report declining compensation — and being told their credentials no longer matter.

What I observe anecdotally is that most newer coaches are getting their clients through large scale digital marketing, coach matching and scheduling systems like BetterUp, Ezra and CoachHub. This is great if you are a new coach and lack the marketing muscle and reputation to secure clients in your own name.

However coaches are earning a declining portion of the total cost of coaching paid by the client. Simply put, the Uber-like platforms of coaching are getting more money than the coaches themselves. But this is only the beginning.

Coaching chatbots are coming of age

Not a week goes by without a really skilled, experienced coach telling me they tried getting coached by an AI-powered coaching bot, and were highly impressed by the skill and utility of the service.

Flesh and blood coaches are going to find it more and more difficult to differentiate ourselves enough to justify the higher cost of hiring a human coach, when you can get a pretty good coaching experience from a robot.

Coaching chatbots are coming of age, and they are going to eat the lunches of a lot of coaches.

The ICF is more focused on coaches than business

It’s no surprise that coaching credentials become less important with the growth of large scale digital platforms. As long term coach and business executive Professor Marc Kahn says, business is more concerned with “does it work” than “does s/he have a certificate?”

I was surprised and disappointed that the ICF 2025 Global Coaching Study was so thin on market and business intelligence. I bought it today at the member price. If I was PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) I would be embarrassed to be associated with this document. It’s priced to the public at nearly $300.

It promises to examine “the global size and reach of the coaching industry, perspectives on trends, and a deep analysis of the state of coaching today.” In truth the guts of the report merely summarizes the results of an annual member survey and is more oriented towards coach training organizations and the ICF itself than coaches seeking to analyze the coaching market and its strategic future.

Where might clients continue to pay for quality human coaches?

In the absence of useful data in the above report, here are some thoughts for exploration. Where are human coaches still a better value proposition to our clients than AI-powered chatbots?

I think the multi-layered complexity of executive leadership is probably enough to give good human coaches the edge for a while yet. Provided we are able to switch seamlessly and more empathetically than a robot through the many dimensions of senior leadership:

• business and personal
• strategic and tactical/operational
• logical and emotional
• myriads of systems and relationships: internal human and technical systems, customer and competitor systems, and the economic and social ecosystems in which our clients operate.

The other branch of coaching that has some time before the bots take over is team coaching. I believe the sheer complexity as well as the difficulty of obtaining machine learnable data from complex human team interactions means we team coaches still have time to develop our businesses.

What other niches are you finding still have growth potential for human coaches? I am aware of opportunities in family and relationship coaching, business development and sales coaching and a few more.