Why AI Works for Some Coaches and Not Others

I've watched two kinds of coaches with the same tools get completely different results from AI, over and over, and it took me a long time to work out why.

I was mentoring a younger guy on AI and entrepreneurship recently and he said, what I'm understanding is that Jarvis is only useful if you're Tony Stark.

It instantly clicked and took me back to when I watched Iron Man for the first time. I thought it would be the coolest thing to have my own Jarvis. The assistant who thinks with you, finds what you need, runs the operation in the background while you do the part only you can do. That was science fiction, and now it sits in our pocket, and hardly anybody finds that remarkable anymore.

You've probably tried using AI. Asked it something that actually mattered, and got back an answer that sounded reasonable, helped a little, and changed nothing. Then a week later you read a post from someone claiming AI runs half their life and business, and you wondered, quietly, what they know that you don't.

With this post I want to tell you what they know, and it has nothing to do with AI.

What made Jarvis useful was never Jarvis. It was Tony. Think about it. Jarvis doesn't decide what to build. He doesn't know what matters, or what any of it is for. He has no reason to get up in the morning. All of that was Tony's, and Jarvis was the amplifier sitting on top of it. Which means the question was never how good the tool is. It's who's using it.

And that's where this gets interesting for coaches, because you have spent years doing the inner work, becoming the best version of yourself and you have been quietly told it doesn't matter. It matters. In fact it's the most important thing in the age we are in.

Most people are trying to buy with $20 a month, what you already paid for in years.

I remember when ChatGPT launched its voice feature. I had a long conversation with Cove, my first AI assistant. It was my first year of the business, everything landing on me at once, my mind was running on fumes. It did the thing I had only ever experienced in coaching sessions. It asked questions that made me slow down and see the gaps in my own thinking. I came out of it with a plan and two or three ideas I hadn't considered. It wasn't coaching, not by a long shot, but I could see what it was going to become.

Then, for a long stretch, it was useful and unremarkable. Faster drafts. Better search. A decent thinking partner. I kept waiting for the thing everyone kept promising and mostly got a very shallow assistant with a fading memory of who I was.

And then this year the agents arrived. The moment I saw one work I knew Jarvis was finally here, and nothing was going to be the same anymore. I now had a strategic thought partner that could actually take action, not just talk about it.

Everything I assumed about how work gets done needed rethinking. I wasn't scared, I was excited. My mind started getting filled with so many possibilities.

So I spent hundreds of hours learning how to integrate it into my life and business systems. And since then it has been constantly taking over routine tasks and solving complex business problems I could never have solved myself. I now have agents that help me strategize my day and my week, keep years of my reading searchable instead of dying in a stack of books I half remember, run research, and build things with me, from decks to strategy documents.

But I am not here to convince you to start using AI. I am sure you have heard a version of this story where AI was super helpful to someone in some way. What doesn't get talked about is the reason why it's so useful to some and not to others. It's so hard to understand because it has nothing to do with AI. In my case, everything that made it work was already in place before I ever typed a word into one. I was years into reinventing myself and building my business, and through that journey I had gained an enormous amount of clarity on who I was and what I was building. I had earned that clarity the slow way, through trial and error, along with the soft skills that came with it: problem solving, strategic thinking, taking action. I documented everything, refined it, and turned it into my Life Guide and Brand Guide. Two documents that hold all the insights and principles for how I run my life and business, and what my vision is. That is what got plugged into AI when it arrived, and that is why it worked. Without it, the same tool would have been a very fast way to produce a great deal of confident nonsense.

I have watched that happen to people. They arrive with every tool and no center, and six months later they are publishing more than they ever have and none of it sounds like anybody. The machine didn't fail them. It did precisely what it was told, which was nothing in particular.

Because here is what documented clarity does. It gives you direction, and it gives the same direction to anyone working with you, your AI included. For you it's a compass. For everyone else it answers what matters here and what to actually do about it. Without it, it's all one big guessing game.

The question is not how do I prompt AI, it is what do I know about myself and my business clearly enough to hand over.

Which is why I won't tell you that AI is some miracle which will change everything. Underneath everything it does for me sits work that had nothing to do with it. Years of holistic personal and business development, documented, organized and refined over time.

Once the foundation is there, AI becomes the next layer on top of everything. The same clarity and understanding you use to build systems in your life is the one you use to build them in your business, and then in your AI.

Beyond all the Noise, the real question was never whether AI can do what you do.

The question is whether you can say who you are, what you do and where you are going, clearly enough to turn artificial intelligence into amplified intelligence.

Until next time,

— Shaan