Deep in the Javari Valley in Brazil, a tribe called the Marubo received Starlink antennas.
The internet arrived. Fast.
Elders who had walked for days through the Amazon rainforest to reach the nearest radio now held the entire world in their hands. They could video call relatives in distant villages. They could reach doctors. They could see what was happening outside the canopy for the first time in their lives. Real benefits, immediately.
But the world arrived without a manual. Teenagers were glued to their phones. Group chats filled with gossip strained relationships that had held for generations. The pace of communication changed faster than the community’s norms could keep up.
In June 2024, Jack Nicas reported on the Marubo for The New York Times. His piece sparked debate. The Marubo themselves pushed back on the most sensationalized readings of the story. Tribal leader Enoque Marubo publicly repudiated claims of an addiction and pornography epidemic. Nicas himself published a follow-up clarifying there was “no hint” of pornography addiction in what he had observed. The nuance matters: the internet didn’t destroy them. But it arrived faster than the wisdom to harness it. Benefit and disruption came bundled together, and the community wasn’t ready to unbundle them.
That’s the story.
Now let’s talk about what actually happened next.
AI Just Did the Same Thing to All of Us
The Marubo got Starlink in a remote rainforest. The rest of us got AI at our desks.
The delivery mechanism was different. The dynamic was identical.
A powerful tool arrived. Access was instant. The frameworks for using it deliberately were not. And now the whole world is the tribe. Every executive coach, every leadership consultant, every solo practitioner sitting in front of a screen trying to run a coaching business. We all got the dish from the sky at the same time.
The question is not whether AI is here. It is. The question is whether you have a framework for harnessing it, or whether you’re just scrolling.
The Misdiagnosis
When AI tools don’t deliver on their promise, coaches do the same thing the Marubo elders probably wanted to do with the antennas: they blame the tool.
They swap ChatGPT for Claude. They try a new note-taking app. They sign up for another AI writing assistant. They read another comparison article. They spend a weekend testing tools.
And then they go back to running their practice the same way they ran it before.
The tool wasn’t the problem. The adoption was.
AI adoption is a skill, not a purchase. Buying access to GPT-4 is the dish landing on your roof. What happens after that, how you think about where it fits, what you hand it, what you protect, that’s the actual work.
The tribe had the antennas. The work was figuring out what to do with them.
Access Is Not the Win
Every coach in your market has the same access you do. The same models. The same APIs. The same AI tools for coaches that you have.
That levels access completely. Which means access is no longer the competitive edge.
What separates the coaches who build efficient, high-leverage practices from the ones who stay overwhelmed is not which AI tool they subscribed to. It’s whether they changed anything about how they operate.
The coaches who get it right are not the ones who adopted the most tools. They’re the ones who adopted deliberately. They picked the few jobs AI is genuinely good at, handed those off systematically, and protected the things AI cannot touch.
The Coaching Admin You Should Automate First
There’s a framework that helps here. Instead of asking “how should coaches use AI?” ask a sharper question: where is the friction in my practice that doesn’t require me?
Here are the coaching admin jobs most coaches should automate first, roughly in order of friction removed versus effort to set up:
Session documentation. After a coaching call ends, you have to write something. A summary, a note, a record. This is low-creativity admin work. AI handles it well. You review and send. Total time: five minutes instead of thirty.
Follow-up drafts. Between-session emails, accountability check-ins, resource shares. AI drafts, you refine, you send. The relationship stays yours. The drafting time disappears.
Session prep. Pulling context before a call. What did you cover last time? What commitments did the client make? AI can surface this from your notes so you walk in sharp.
Content repurposing. If you’re writing articles, recording calls, or sharing frameworks, AI can help you turn one source into multiple formats. One talk becomes three posts. One framework becomes a guide.
CRM hygiene. Contact notes, tags, follow-up reminders. The administrative scaffolding that supports client relationships but doesn’t require your coaching judgment.
Proposal and intake drafting. Not sending AI-generated proposals directly, but letting it produce the first draft so you spend fifteen minutes sharpening instead of ninety minutes building from scratch.
Research and synthesis. Competitive landscapes, industry context, client background pulls. Hours of reading compressed into a starting point you can verify and use.
These are the jobs worth handing off. The work around the coaching. The parts no client sees.
The One Thing You Never Automate
Now for the hard line.
AI is infrastructure, not voice. It belongs underneath the relationship, doing the work around the coaching. The session reports, the follow-ups, the prep, the CRM. The parts no client sees.
It does not belong inside the relationship itself.
The coaching relationship is not an administrative problem. It is not a friction point. It is the entire product. The reason someone pays you, trusts you, and returns to you is what happens in that room. The quality of your presence, your questions, your perception. None of that is automatable.
There are things you should never automate.
You should never automate the discovery conversation. You should never automate the coaching session. You should never automate the judgment call in a difficult moment. You should never automate the relationship.
The Marubo’s elders understood something the teenagers didn’t: not every part of their culture needed to change just because new technology arrived. Some things were worth protecting. The community that thrives is the one that gets deliberate about which is which.
You’re making the same call, whether you’re thinking about it or not.
Deliberate Adoption Looks Like This
Most coaches either adopt nothing or adopt everything. Both are wrong.
Adopting nothing means you’re carrying the administrative weight of your practice on your own while the market around you gets leverage you don’t have. That weight is what keeps your practice small, your calendar full, and your energy depleted.
Adopting everything means you’ve handed off things that should stay yours. Clients start to feel it. The texture of your communication changes. The relationship that justifies your fee starts to thin.
Deliberate adoption sits between those two failure modes. It looks like this:
Pick two or three jobs from the list above. The ones with the highest friction for you right now. Set up a simple system for each. Use it for thirty days. Refine it. Then add one more.
You don’t need a new tool every quarter. You need to actually change how you operate. That’s the distinction between buying the antenna and learning to navigate the world it opens up.
Your Practice Is Infrastructure
Here’s the reframe that makes this click for most of the coaches I work with.
You’ve probably thought about AI as a productivity shortcut. A way to do more with less time. That’s a fine way to think about it.
But there’s a more useful frame: your coaching practice is infrastructure. Systems that either support powerful conversations or get in the way of them.
When your admin is a mess, you show up to calls distracted. When your CRM is empty, you miss follow-ups. When you’re writing session notes at midnight, you’re spending energy that should go into being excellent for your clients.
AI doesn’t make you a better coach. But it can clear the path so you can be one.
Simple systems beat complex funnels. The goal isn’t to build a complicated AI stack. It’s to clear the drag on your practice so the relationship can do what it’s supposed to do.
FAQ: AI for Executive Coaches
Should coaches use AI with clients? Executive coaches should use AI in the infrastructure of their practice, not inside the coaching session itself. That means session documentation, follow-up drafts, prep, and admin. The coaching conversation, the relationship, and your judgment stay yours. That’s the line.
What should a coach automate with AI first? Start with session documentation. After every call, use AI to produce a first-draft summary from your notes or a transcript. Review it, send what’s useful to the client or log it in your CRM. This single habit can recover fifteen to twenty hours a month. Once that’s running, layer in follow-up drafts and session prep.
What should a coach never automate? Coaches should never automate the coaching relationship itself. Discovery conversations, coaching sessions, and the judgment calls inside them stay human. Automating these is how you erode the thing your clients are actually paying for.
How do I know if my AI adoption is working? The test is simple: has anything changed about how you operate? If you subscribed to a new tool but run your practice the same way, the adoption didn’t work. The signal that it’s working is time recovered, admin reduced, and energy freed up for the actual coaching.
The Dish Has Already Landed
The Marubo didn’t get to choose whether the internet arrived. The antenna went up. The world poured in. The real question was always what they would do with it.
You’re in the same position.
AI is already in your market. Your peers have it. Your clients are talking to it. The question isn’t whether to adopt. It’s whether you adopt deliberately or by accident.
Buying a subscription is the antenna on the roof. Changing how your practice operates is the rest of the work.
The coaches building durable, high-leverage practices right now are not the ones with the most tools. They’re the ones who’ve built the right infrastructure underneath the relationship and protected the relationship itself.
That’s the whole framework. Start with the jobs worth handing off. Stop at the coaching relationship. Build simple systems. Measure what changes.
If you want a structured way to build this into your practice, that’s exactly what CoachOps is designed for. A coaching business operating system that handles the infrastructure so you can focus on the conversation.
Start there.