AI coaching vs traditional coaching: which is best for your business?

Coaching is essential for developing employees, building leadership skills and driving business performance. Traditional coaching relies on human expertise, offering personalised guidance and nuanced feedback. AI coaching leverages technology to provide scalable, data-driven support. While both approaches have distinct advantages, using them together allows businesses to streamline processes, cut costs and maximise employee growth.

Below, we’re going to explore the differences between traditional coaching and AI coaching, the benefits of each approach and how the two can be combined for the best business outcomes.

What is traditional workplace coaching?

Traditional coaching (or human-led coaching) involves a human coach working with employees to develop skills, solve problems and achieve professional goals. It’s relationship-based and highly adaptable, responding in real time to the employee's needs.

Benefits of traditional coaching

For any business considering traditional coaching, some of the main benefits are:

• Builds trust and strong professional relationships
• Addresses complex emotional and interpersonal challenges
• Offers tailored advice based on human intuition and experience
  
  
  

What is AI coaching?

AI coaching uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalised guidance, feedback and interactive practice scenarios based on real employee performance and behaviour data. It is typically integrated into learning platforms or HR systems and accessible on-demand, ideally across both desktop and mobile devices.

Benefits of AI coaching

Some of the key benefits of AI coaching include:

• Scales easily across large teams
• Reduces time and cost compared to scheduling multiple human sessions
• Provides continuous, on-demand support
• Personalised training activities (such as roleplay) with no setup or preparation required
• Tracks progress and identifies patterns to improve learning
  
  
  

Key differences between AI and traditional coaching

Why businesses benefit from combining both

AI coaching is not a replacement for human coaching – it’s a complement. By combining AI with traditional coaching, businesses can:

• Streamline coaching processes and reduce repetitive administrative work
• Enhance human coaching with data-driven insights
• Mitigate human bias within the coaching experience
• Provide employees with on-demand support between human coaching sessions (even for those ‘silly questions’ someone may not want to ask a human coach)
• Improve ROI by scaling development programmes efficiently

In short, AI coaching enhances efficiency, while human coaching ensures depth, emotional intelligence and nuanced guidance based on years of real experience. AI coaching can be particularly useful for naturally curious learners who want to probe a coach more than a standard coaching session allows for, and can support neurodivergent employees who may struggle with the traditional coaching process.

What makes VeeCoach different from other AI coaches?

Over the last couple of years, there’s been an explosion of new AI coaches hitting the market. They’re broadly pretty similar, but with some key differences that can make or break the user experience and end results of the coaching itself.

We’ve partnered with AI coaching experts Mindset to create VeeCoach, our AI tutor agent.

What sets VeeCoach apart from other AI coaches is the fact that it integrates seamlessly into the 5app learning ecosystem. You don’t have to leave your LMS to access on-demand coaching – it’s only ever one click away, no matter which device you’re using.

We also worked closely with Mindsmith to ensure that VeeCoach can find and surface useful content from your SCORM courses, alongside videos, PDFs and your other documentation. This means it pulls from your entire content library for the most accurate, comprehensive coaching experience, and nothing stays locked away in lengthy elearning courses.

VeeCoach also connects with Helix, our AI skills intelligence platform. Once Helix has collected data about your soft skills and behaviours, it can identify your growth opportunities and take you straight to an AI coaching conversation, complete with personalised resources, tips and roleplay scenarios designed to help you improve your skills in the flow of work – no disruptive courses required.

FAQs about traditional vs AI coaching

Key takeaways

If you’re trying to decide between traditional coaching and AI coaching, the good news is that you don’t need to choose. Embracing both will help you get the best results – the human, nuanced side of traditional coaching combined with the efficiency and convenience of AI coaching gives you the best of both worlds, while keeping costs and time commitments reasonable.

Looking for a quick recap on AI coaching vs traditional coaching? Look no further:

• Traditional coaching offers personalised guidance, trust-building and emotional intelligence.
• AI coaching is scalable, data-driven and available on demand.
• Combining both approaches delivers the best of both worlds: efficiency, insight and human depth.
• Businesses can streamline processes, reduce costs  and support continuous employee development by leveraging AI alongside human coaching.
  
  

See AI coaching in action 🎬

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