AI in the Coach’s Chair: How Professional Coaches Navigate Identity and Role Ambiguity in Response to AI Adoption by Their Coaching Firm

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) coaching challenges the professional roles and identities of human coaches, yet empirical research on this transformation remains scarce. This qualitative field study investigates how professional coaches navigate their roles following the organizational adoption of AI coaching. Drawing on the automation-augmentation paradox, occupational role identity, and role ambiguity theories, we analyzed 15 semi-structured interviews with 12 professional coaches in an Asian coaching firm, contextualized by pre- and post-interviews with the company CEO and the AI provider. Findings reveal that top-down AI implementation triggered significant role ambiguity, catalyzing both protective and expansive identity work. Coaches defended their unique human value (e.g., empathy), while simultaneously experimenting with AI, shifting their perception from threat to collaborative tool. This adaptive process enabled the emergence of distinct AI functions and new “blended” human–AI coaching models. Our resulting conceptual framework demonstrates that resolving the automation-augmentation paradox in relational professions is fundamentally an identity-driven process rather than a technical task reallocation. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that organizationally induced role ambiguity can serve as a catalyst for professional renewal and vocational adaptation, particularly when supported by participatory leadership, thereby advancing theory and contributing new insights to the literature on technological and vocational transformation in organizational contexts.