Your client can now get a version of what you do, for free, at midnight.

Two comfortable responses are available and both are wrong. The first is that this is a toy and serious clients will always want a human. The second is that the craft is finished.

The truth is narrower and more useful. What is being commoditised is the part of coaching that is information and structured questioning, which was never the scarce part. What is not being touched is judgment, presence, the relationship, and the ability to say the thing a client will not say to themselves. What is genuinely changing is the shape of the week: the twenty-three hours between sessions, where the actual work either happens or does not, and where you have historically been absent.

This will not replace coaches. It will replace coaches who work alone.

The practice at risk is the one that exists only inside the session hour.

A composite, braided from several practitioners. Details are changed.

Twenty-two years in practice, executive clients, a waiting list. Not a person under commercial threat, which is what made her interesting to work with.

Her frustration was specific and old: she would end a session with a clear commitment, and a fortnight later the client would arrive having done none of it and remembering the conversation differently. She had assumed for two decades that this was simply the nature of the work.

What changed was that the week stopped being invisible to her. Her clients were working in the gap, badly at first, and the record of it was there when they arrived. She stopped spending the first fifteen minutes on reconstruction. She started sessions inside the actual difficulty.

She was clear about one thing when we spoke. She did not want to be replaced by it and she is not. The thing she said that stayed with me is that after twenty-two years she is more useful in the hour than she has ever been, because the hour is no longer where all of the work has to happen.