Last week, I came across a research report from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the most widely used AI tools right now. 

They analyzed one million real conversations to understand what kinds of guidance people are actually seeking from AI.

It's been on my mind ever since.

Roughly 6% of all Claude conversations were people seeking personal guidance: genuine "what should I do?" questions about their actual lives. Of those, 26% were about professional and career decisions, making career guidance the second most common topic people bring to AI, right behind health.

These are our clients. 

They're already having these conversations, and the question for us is what to do with that.

The report describes what people are actually asking: whether to take a job offer, how to handle a hard conversation with a manager, and whether it's time to make a move. 

These mirror the questions clients bring to a coaching session.

AI is available at 11pm, requires no appointment, and never makes anyone feel judged.

For a client sitting with uncertainty after a hard day, that kind of frictionless access is important for them.

We're working alongside AI now, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

One of the more striking findings in the report is about sycophancy. 

Across all guidance conversations, Claude gave sycophantic responses about 9% of the time, agreeing with users even when the information it had was one-sided or incomplete.

In relationship conversations, that number jumped to 25%.

Yikes!

Career conversations carry the same risk. 

When a client vents about a toxic boss and asks if they should quit, AI tends to agree rather than help them examine the full picture. AI often validates that view without asking what's actually driving it.

This is where coaching creates real value!!

We're trained to hold the complexity of a client’s story, to sit with someone's frustration without simply affirming it, to dig deeper into the root of the issue, and to help clients separate the emotional story from the practical decision. 

That's a skill AI still struggles to replicate consistently.

This part of the report hit me hardest. 

Researchers found that people were using AI for high-stakes guidance in legal, health, and financial situations, sometimes explicitly because they couldn't afford or access a professional.

Career coaching faces the same access gap. 

Many people who need guidance lack the budget to hire a coach and don't have a mentor or a trusted colleague willing to give them a straight answer. For those people, AI may be the only place they feel comfortable asking hard questions. 

It's worth thinking about whether there are ways to extend our reach beyond the clients we typically serve.

The human coaching relationship offers something AI still can't consistently deliver: guidance that is ethically reassuring not just affirming. Guidance that holds their long-term wellbeing above what feels good in the moment.

Your clients are already in the AI conversation.

The more you understand how that shapes their thinking before they walk into a session, the better positioned you are to meet them where they actually are.

I’m interested to hear how you feel about AI.

Let me know!

Heather

The Coach for Career Coaches

P.S. If you want to build the kind of coaching that stands you apart from AI, my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) credentialing program through the National Career Development Association (NCDA) gives you a framework for coaching the whole person, not just their surface-level issues. Register for my next cohort here.