Coaching 5.0, coaching for the fifth industrial revolution

The rising use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Metaverse and Blockchain technologies has influenced capabilities in a wide variety of industries. These have now started to provide affordances for automating provision of insight and empowerment in coaching business leaders and staff. This paper discusses the risk, that as such technologies become smarter, human beings may abdicate their thinking capabilities, especially related to creative problem solving, to machine intelligence. The author calls for prevention of cognitive decline in human beings as machines get smarter. A route to this can be mapped through use of Industry 5.0, Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) approaches, that focus on a harmonisation of human and machine intelligence, ensuring human beings can make machines smarter and that machine intelligence can in turn make human consciousness advance. Practitioner Coaches, to future proof their practice, must ensure they embody 5IR mindsets, techniques and technologies. The coaching discipline that is fit for practice in 5IR environments and contexts is what the author has called “Coaching 5.0.” This paper looks at Coaching 5.0 components and how they can be adopted by coaches to ensure the future is sustainable, insightful and empowering one for their practice and for their clients.

1 Introduction

Throughout human history there have been paradigm shifts in society, science and commerce that have triggered revolutions in how human beings engage with technology. Such revolutions or paradigm shifts can be understood with the Emerging Paradigm Model (EPM) (Smith and Rasool, 2015); (Bienert et al., 2016). The cyclic nature of paradigm shifts in the EPM is illustrated in Figure 1. The EPM recognises that paradigm shifts in history happened through shifts in mindsets followed by the mindsets being embodied in practices or techniques and finally technology being brought in to scale and refine the way things are done and the dissemination of the practices and underlying mindsets. Paradigm shifts in the last few hundred years have manifested as Industrial Revolutions.

Figure 1

Figure 1. The Emerging Paradigm Model (EPM). New paradigms or revolutions emerge through new mindsets that can foster aligned techniques to put them into practice. Technologies can disseminate, scale and refine the practices, and, when done well, can lead to whole new mindsets emerging. As Coaching goes through this process it will go through paradigm shifts and revolutions.

Revolutions typically begin with one or more people thinking differently than the status quo, they form new mindsets through which to frame disciplines. For those seeing merit in the mindsets, techniques and practices are developed to prove the mindset’s value. Valuable practices and methods will test the integrity of the mindset and if it has too many flaws it could be abandoned but if it proves to be robust enough to be useful it can be adopted or integrated in existing working contexts. To scale the adoption or dissemination of practices related to the mindset, technologies can either be created or re-purposed for reaching wider and broader audiences or markets as well as sustaining quality through continuous refinement. The technologies, if coupled well with practices, can reveal their shortcomings, inferring the call for more refined methods. The technologies could even reveal that an apparently robust mindset that many had been practicing could have subtle or nuanced flaws, possibly leading to it being advanced. This suggests the process of revolutions arising through new mindsets, techniques and technologies is not linear but circular, operating in a cycle, where new technologies, if sufficiently advanced can result in the emergence of new mindsets.

1.1 Industrial revolutions throughout history

Major industrial revolutions (Dan Sodergren, 2023) illustrated in Figure 2, have happened throughout history. The first three industrial revolutions began with Industry 1.0, in 1784 introducing mechanisation into textile industries using such technologies as the weaving loom. From 1870 the second industrial revolution (Industry 2.0) saw the introduction of mass production and assembly line methods accelerated with the affordances possible through the rising adoption of electricity in manufacturing environments. The third industrial revolution (Industry 3.0), from 1960s onwards, integrated automation, computing and electronics to refine precision and consistency for manufacturing practices.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Major industrial revolutions.

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) began to gain momentum around 2012, as electronic and computing technologies became more connected with one another through computer networks like the Internet, information started to be shared through sensors and devices, other than regular computers, in “Internet of Things,” IoT, ecosystems, giving rise for the need to have enhanced safety, cyber-security and cyber-physical frameworks. With more data, more information started to be generated resulting in new knowledge domains and systems of intelligence to harness the large volumes of data and information, what came to be known as “Big Data.”

When the COVID epidemic hit the world in 2020, a major area impacted was people’s mental health and the way people managed their emotional and social intelligence through digital technologies. It was around this time an urgent need appeared to harmonise how people worked remotely through digital technologies and related to one another in person. The first signs appeared of Industry 5.0 (5IR), where organisations needed to manage their workforce talent and intelligence remotely and in the real world through digital channels, while preserving working emotional and social intelligence.

Since the dawn of 2023, there has been an explosive adoption of AI, especially through applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT conversational, Generative AI (GenAI) application. In the space of less than 2 years we have seen how many users of GenAI have started to hand over their education and cognitive development to AI, significantly threatening the integrity of work submitted by students as well as many professionals. This has advanced the call for 5IR mindsets, techniques and technologies, where human consciousness advances together with developments in technologies such as AI, the Metaverse and Blockchain technologies. For human development not to be left behind AI’s advance, 5IR approaches must use such technologies to advance human cognitive capacity and fidelity in concert with emotional and social intelligence, to ensure evolution of human consciousness and intelligence stay ahead of machine intelligence. This is unlikely to be committed to without ethical, inclusive and compliance-based approaches, initiatives, education and innovation programs.

New laws regulating the use of AI, such as the EU AI Act (EU AI Act, 2024), will confine AI use in Unacceptable or High-Risk use cases, compliance that many coaches are not aligned to in their use of AI, possibly exposing clients to psychological harm. Adopting and integrating ethical, inclusive and compliance-based technology-enhanced coaching standards can help safely deploy use of AI and other Industry 5.0 augmenting technologies when coaching clients to generate insights for realising their potential in empowered ways. This will require business and executive coaches, that are helping leaders prepare for the future, to gain awareness of emerging 5IR mindsets and techniques associated with technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Metaverse Ecosystems as well as Blockchain. By 2034 it is expected that Coaching, through the affordances of Industry 5.0 approaches, will undergo a three-stage process, discussed in later sections, which will facilitate an emergent harmonisation of human consciousness and intelligence with machine intelligence. The remaining sections of this paper show how such shifts in history align to shifts in the evolution of coaching and their parallelism to shifts in technology, resulting in new standards of technology enhanced coaching as well as future Industry 5.0 workforce deployment of coaching-technology collaborations.

2 Revolutions in coaching principles and practice

Along with Industrial revolutions, parallel sets of stages in development and revolution of coaching have happened (Passmore and Woodward, 2023). The phases are 1) “pre-profession,” transactional and unqualified training and delivery of coaching 2) “practice-based professionalisation,” a movement into qualification and competency based coaching provision with governing body oversight and 3) “evidenced-based professionalisation,” growth through higher education programmes and evidence-based research driven training. From the mid-2020s a shift in the coaching industry happened from “professionalisation” to “productisation,” where coaching was packaged in a scaled way through online digital coaching platforms.

Another perspective is the evolution of workplace coaching development (Grant, 2016). Workplace coaching for employees, managers and leaders focuses on helping them attain work-related goals. Over the last 30 years, three generations of workplace coaching have been progressed through. From the 1990s, the first generation’s focus was performance management. From the 2000s, the second-generation utilised coach training programmes, with a methodical, sequence of steps, to enable leaders to augment their function with coaching approaches. This mechanistic approach through did not align in its fit with organisational environments where uncertainty and rapid change were the norm. From 2010 onwards, a third “generation” workplace coaching approach evolved that would align well with future Industry 5.0 mindsets. It involved a harmonised enhancement of both the performance and the wellbeing of individuals and organisations in ways aligned with Industry 5.0 strategies that cultivate sustainability and employee flourishing alongside technology augmentation, automation, adaptation and adoption.

Industry 5.0 mindsets seek to harmonise human and technology sourced intelligence, and their reciprocal, mutual development. Auditing what intelligences must be cultivated and which ones must coherently exchange development will be primary areas of concern for coaches guiding those in Industry 5.0 shaped workplaces. A variety of human, technology and hybrid intelligence strategies may be needed (Kolbjørnsrud, 2024). These include.

• Individual intelligence: when a human individual works independently (without intelligent technology).

• Collective intelligence: when multiple people collaborate in their work.

• Augmented intelligence: when a person uses or collaborates with intelligent technology to improve, accelerate, and/or support their work.

• Augmented collective intelligence: when multiple people and intelligent technologies collaborate in their work.

• Automated intelligence: when work is automated with intelligent technology (no human involvement).

Industrial revolutions, coaching developmental stages and intelligence approaches have refined how data, information, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom are managed through empowered training, learning and development as well as coaching approaches, something framed as early as 2010 by the author and discussed in the next section.

3 Evolution of data into wisdom and hardware to mindware

The illustration, Figure 3. shows how, historically, the raw assets of eras in computing have shaped technologies, especially the evolution of social networking relationships (Rasool, 2010). The very first kinds of data were purely handled by hardware, with Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, and later, solid state electronics. Data was organised into information and visualised across Data networks through browsers like Mosaic and Netscape, focusing on creating an internet that connected people through data that had relevance, the era that could be considered “Web 0.0.” That organisation of networked data into information was no longer done purely by hardware but software, so this was the era of the Software, Relevance driven Internet. Web services like Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia would then organise that networked information into Knowledge, in the essential era of Web 1.0 at the turn of the 21st century. Around this time Networked Knowledge started to be organised into Networked relationships and social intelligence, especially through platforms like Facebook which would work on a Relevance driven internet influenced by what people had a resonance with. This was a time of Web 2.0, where Social Networking and human connections fostered Cloud based services and a Cloud driven Internet. The outcome of this would be emerging era of Intelligence assets. Around 2008, the author recognised the need for a new kind of web engine that optimised for resonance-based connections that delivered outputs that were of relevance to users. This Web 3.0 era saw the creation of the first Resonance Engine that organised networked relationships, and collective consciousness, into applied networked wisdom and action. This era, the one we are at the peak of now is where Cloud based technologies are giving rise to what was called “Mindware”at the time the illustration was first designed in 2010. Mindware in current parlance, is what people are now engaging with in the form of technologies such as Generative AI, including applications that simulate varieties of human conversation as if users were exchanging with human minds.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Evolution of social networking relationships.

A key lesson to be learnt through this evolutionary process is that Data is not Information, Information is not Knowledge, Knowledge is not Intelligence, Intelligence is not Wisdom, Wisdom is not Action and Action is not Impact or Power. For coaching, the challenge for the future will centre on converting Intelligence into Wisdom, Action, Impact and then the kind of Power that results in Empowerment driven realisation of potential, talent and performance.

However advanced technologies like AI get, there is no guarantee they will trend towards generating empowering wisdom. So, to have AI advance human wisdom it is important to look at what AI is currently capable of and see how it compares with what a human coach might be able to achieve with a client.

4 The Spectrums of Coaching

How well AI can coach human beings can be evaluated through four spectrums (Rasool, 2024a) of characteristics that frame coaching progress, Rapport, Change, Development and Confidence as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Figure 4. The Spectrums of Change How Rapport, Change, Development and Confidence are addressed by AI relative to Human Coaches.

4.1 The Rapport spectrum

How well two people engage with one another is determined by the chemistry they generate or is present between them, the rapport that mediates their relationship. Rapport can be as simple as Acknowledgement, Appreciation, Alignment, Affirmation, facilitating Agency, providing Authorisation or simply curating Accommodation. These provide lower-level common denominators of rapport, what might be considered as sympathetic rapport. As the rapport deepens a territory may be entered where subliminal rapport might touch on mental health sensitive issues relating to a shared lived experience, through which empathy, compassion and resonant states of consciousness could be shared, a realm of empathic and resonant rapport. AI’s capability can possibly be seen as in the Sympathetic Rapport range, possibly leaning into the Subliminal Rapport range. The Subliminal Rapport range is a grey zone between Coaching and Therapy, so ethically requires transparent contracting to enter into prior to commencing coaching sessions, however it is not in the conventional remit for coaches to enter and typically in the event of nudging up against it, clients may need to be signposted to a qualified mental health professional as it can give rise to past trauma being triggered.

4.2 Change

Aligned to the Rapport Spectrum is the Change Spectrum. Coaches can work with clients in a transactional way, where they provide a minimal, in the moment intervention, without any forward planning. Several transactional interventions, over a short period of time and a few select challenges, can result in a transition, resulting in a transitional change. Transitions over longer periods of time can eventually result in the client experiencing a significant transformation, resulting in a transformational change. All these kinds of change focus very much on what clients are trying to change and how and address the lowest common denominators of human change within coaching. When the grey zone between Coaching and Therapy is approached, a person’s lived experience and wisdom could be engaged with and result in them changing who they are, they transcend their current behaviours and way of being, through a transcendental change shifting their lived experience, self-esteem and compassion as well as current level of consciousness. Within this spectrum AI is best suited to serving Transactional, Transitional and possibly Transformational change but ethically, due to psychological safety issues as well as possible legal risks, should probably not veer into territory of Transcendental change unless there is transparent, accountable and unbiased psychotherapeutic oversight moderating the intervention.

4.3 The Development spectrum

What exactly can be cultivated, generated or developed is gauged by the Development Spectrum. An AI, for example, is very good at generating content and possibly helping a client advance a competency and the capability it supports. However, if a person simply doesn’t have the potential, substance or capacity, an AI is unlikely to change that as that might require a source of development that has demonstrated it can expand its own capacity and level of consciousness -that currently is confined to human beings. The grey zone between Capability and Capacity is where Coaching and Therapy respectively have sovereignty in their remits.

4.4 The Confidence Spectrum

The level of confidence a person has is linked to their level of development in the Development Spectrum. In effect there is an “Arc of Confidence” that stretches across the areas of Content, Competence, Capability, Capacity and Consciousness. The higher the development the more confidence can be established. Again, AI can foster and mature confidence through the content it creates, the competencies it can develop as well as the capabilities it can architect from those competencies. However, ethically it would be unsound to instil levels of belief in capacity that doesn’t exist or is not possible due to lack of existing substance in a client’s experiences.

4.4.1 Determining appropriateness of AI or human interventions

Everything to the left of the grey zone in the Spectrums of Coaching can be worked with using AI. Everything to the right of the grey zone should be left to human beings, especially as new laws like the EU AI Act might regard the grey zone and everything to the right of it to be sensitive territory for human psychological safety, and be something that could expose clients to prohibited, unacceptable or high levels of risk with the potential for harm. To ensure ethical, inclusive, compliance-based use of AI and Metaverse technologies to augment coaching interventions, regulations need to be drafted to provide competency sets which can serve a standard that can be followed (Rasool, 2024b).

4.5 An Industry 5.0 coaching standard, the AI Coaching Alliance Standard, AICAS

Current competency credentialing of coaches can be assessed through the competency sets of the governing bodies of coaching such as the three major ones, the International Coaching Federation (ICF Competencies, 2019), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) (EMCC Competencies, 2015) or the Association of Coaching (AC) (AC Competencies, 2012). To empower coaches to operate in Industry 5.0 scenarios they must work with competency sets re-purposed for that kind of use case. AICAS, the AI Coaching Alliance Standard (Rasool, 2024c) integrates the competency sets of the ICF, EMCC and AC and then repurposes them for use in Industry 5.0 settings, particularly in the utilisation of AI or Metaverse augmented coaching.

4.5.1 The AICAS competency sets

The Current version of AICAS consists of four competency sets for use in Industry 5.0 interventions that are founded on an integration of governing body competency sets.

• A. Safety First

o Ethical and Inclusive AI Practice

 ⁃ Transparent AI Integration

 ⁃ AI Confidentiality

o AI-Enhanced Trust and Safety

 ⁃ Secure and Supportive AI Environments

 ⁃ Responsible AI Partnership

• Enhanced Insight

o Growth-Oriented Coaching Mindset with AI

 ⁃ Continuous AI Learning

 ⁃ Client-Centric AI Usage:

o Deep Listening Supported by AI

 ⁃ AI-Driven Insightful Listening

 ⁃ Emotionally Intelligent AI

• Enriched Empowerment

o Communicating Effectively with AI Assistance

 ⁃ AI-Augmented Communication

 ⁃ Feedback Informed by AI

o AI-Curated Learning and Goal Realisation

 ⁃ AI-Supported Awareness and Goal Setting

 ⁃ Empowerment through AI

• Future Proofing

o Sustainable Change and AI

 ⁃ AI-Integrated Action Plans

 ⁃ Promoting AI-Assisted Autonomy

o AI-Reflective Practice and R&D Advancement

 ⁃ AI for Professional Growth

 ⁃ AI and Professional Excellence

The AICA Standard recognises a “Safety First” approach that quarantines coaches and their clients from harm. Once the right protections are in place then the coach can progress to help provide the client with insight from which they can instigate enriched empowerment. Whatever is learnt in sessions is gathered by the AI to ensure more enhanced coaching of clients in the future as well as possible sharing with peers in published research or innovative products and services that can disseminate value to other coaches and clients.

5 Preparing coaching for the future 2024–2034

Passmore et al. (2024) suggest in their report that digital and AI coaching is transforming organisational and business practices. The report explored attitudes towards Digital and AI augmentation of Coaching from a Global Coach survey undertaken in Summer 2023. These perspectives suggest that businesses are adapting operations so that they can.

• Leverage AI for scaling and improved efficiencies: AI tools can be uses to reduce costs, facilitating scalability as well as improve efficiency of delivering coaching services.

• Upskill Teams: Provision of training in digital tools and in understanding of AI applications can upskill employees and coaches and ensure they are fit for emerging workplace shifts.

• Foster Differentiation: Unique human skills like empathy, creativity, and complex problem-solving, cannot be replicated by AI easily. So, ensuring such unique traits are fostered will ensure human discretion, duty of care and due diligence are not undermined, maintaining responsible and accountable practices.

• Embody Frameworks for Ethical AI Use: When AI is used in coaching, frameworks to ensure data is managed with appropriate privacy, must be operationalised. Inclusivity must be respected as well as the need to exercise duty of care around concerns for trustworthiness of systems and services.

• Embrace Hybrid/Integrated Models: For a higher chance of harmonisation between existing people and technology ecosystems with new AI facilitated services, human coaching and AI coaching delivery mixes should be experimented with to ensure a balanced approach that promotes efficiency while being personalised.

These can be considered a sequence of adaptation, integration and adoption phases. Such trends can help businesses strategically bring AI into their operations, ensuring there is proof of value for each people/technology ecosystem. How this unfolds over the next decade will need to be closely watched by governing bodies of coaching and appropriate coaching competencies evolved so they are not just suitable for human-to-human coaching but also fit for use with AI Coach to Human Client scenarios.

Diller et al. (2024), looked through a survey at how business coaches feel about the rising use of AI in business coaching services. Specifically, how artificial intelligence is integrated into business coaching opportunities, offers improvements in efficiencies related to costs and time management. However, there were concerns about the risks and challenges that were posed. Professional service workers, like business coaches, felt their role and value in business environments might be at risk or undermined.

Coaching is not available to everyone because of cost issues and availability. Divides exist that hinder Democratisation of Coaching (Bachkirova and Kemp, 2024). AI approaches can help, augmenting, to various degrees, some elements in human coaching but these also suffer from the challenges of the Digital Divide between those that have access and those that do not, so for Coaching to be democratised, AI needs to be democratised.

5.1 Democratisation

Democratisation of coaching with the aid of AI affordances, will facilitate coaching at scale but the scaling journey will have its challenges. A study (Terblanche et al., 2022) with a group of 75 participants used Coach Vici, AI Coaching software, for 6 months. Metrics for goal attainment, resilience, psychological wellbeing, and perceived stress were gathered for a control and experimental group, before during and after a 6-month study. The group using AI for coaching had a statistically significant increase only in the metric for attaining goals. The study concluded that AI coaching is effective in a narrow application, implying democratisation of coaching through AI might be cost-effective and scalable. However, the absence of statistically significant effect in resilience, psychological wellbeing, and perceived stress suggests that Coaching might not be suited for transformations in those areas, perhaps requiring signposting to those disciplines better suited empirically to help with associated issues such as psychotherapists or counsellors. This raises an important consideration of managing boundaries between coaching and other fields when scaling deployment of help through AI.

5.2 Diversification

Coaching education is predominately driven by Western Psychological Models with a lack of inclusion of wisdom traditions from other cultures that have existed for thousands of years. AI is also very much architected by datasets and algorithms built from monoculture sources. So, for Coaching to be served by Industry 5.0 affordances it must embody greater Diversity in its foundation psychological models, particularly from nations in the Global South like from Africa as well as Asia-Pacific nations like India and China. There must be a “Diversification” of AI. The release, in January 2025, of China’s super efficient, small footprint, open source AI, Deepseek, led to $1.6 trillion loss in US Stock markets. We are likely to see similar disruption when Coaching starts to use foundation models from other cultures.

Diversification involves establishing clear definitions of “fairness,” especially in the context of utilisation of machine intelligence. Examinations of perceptions of fairness in such contexts (Binns et al., 2024) point to consideration of how fairness and equity can be operationalised. A balance of benefit in concert with mitigating and minimising harms is one approach. Maybe, rather than focus on what to avoid, what must be present for fairness needs to be framed. Frameworks where the factors curating lived experience of fairness must be modelled. Part of this process would be to gain consensus on what discrimination and fairness are, maybe defining them in mathematical, logical or algorithmic forms.

5.3 Decentralisation

Coaching is governed by centralised bodies like the ICF, EMCC and AC and AI also is governed by centralised sources such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic and Meta. There must be open source, localised, small footprint AIs made available for people to localise the relevance of AI outputs, there needs to be a “Decentralisation” of Coaching as well as AI. A collective Democratisation, Diversification and Decentralisation will naturally lead to a “Decolonialisation” of Coaching through utilisation of Industry 5.0 mindsets, techniques and technologies. The timeframes for this process to unfold are illustrated in Figure 5. When this process is facilitated through implementation of regulations and standards like the EU AI Act and AICA Standard, Coaching can be practiced in an Ethical, Inclusive and Compliance based way that advances human consciousness in parallel with AI, Metaverse and Blockchain technologies, in the true spirit of 5IR driven Coaching, “Coaching 5.0.”

Figure 5

Figure 5. AI Coaching, Future Signals Timeline (Rasool, 2024d) How Democratisation, Diversification and Decentralisation will promote a decolonialisation of AI and Coaching such that Coaching can be practiced in an Ethical, Inclusive and Compliance based way that advances human consciousness in parallel with Industry 5.0 technologies.

6 Ethical considerations for using AI and other technologies in coaching

A danger of using AI as an affordance, adaptation or adoption is that it will be used whenever ethical conscientiousness is low, or it is referred to for convenience when desire to critically think or be creative is low, possibly leading to muscles of competence and discernment undergoing atrophy. Despite the myth, Peter Drucker never said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (Tallman et al., 2021), but a similar meme is emerging. People may well use AI for the sake of convenience at the expense of competence that fails to be exercised, resulting in the author’s frame of this trend, “Convenience eats competence for breakfast”, possibly becoming a future meme. The danger emergent from these behaviors is sourced from a lack of applying Ethics due to complexity of dilemmas to be considered.

This calls to attention the need to ensure technologies, especially AI, are used ethically. The EU AI Act cites unacceptable, high, medium and low levels of risk categories that people could be exposed to for which mitigation strategies must be implemented. Of the eleven risks identified in the unacceptable and high categories, nine are likely to be ones that coaches and clients will be exposed to. Ethical dilemmas will arise relating to transparency, accountability, integrity of data, privacy, client and user autonomy, diversity, accessibility, adaptability, and flexibility (Diller, 2024).

Dilemmas will require enforceable monitoring, oversight, governance and professionalisation if not regulation. If the required governance is not crafted and implemented by governing bodies in coaching, regulation may inadvertently be forced through if harm is brought about by coaches using AI systems by failing to implement national and international legal regulations such as those in the EU AI Act. Insurers have indicated that under such situations, coaches may find any claims brought against them might not be supported, the premiums for Professional Indemnity and Liability Insurance might be increased, the insurance policy could be voided, or the coach may find no insurer will provide further new cover if previous liability claims were considerably egregious in their nature, consequences that could end a coach’s ability to practice, even ending their careers.

7 Conclusion

There are dangers and dividends or risks and rewards to adopting technologies to enhance coaching practice. They must be audited by practitioners, coaching schools as well as governing bodies. What has benefit needs promotion, what might bring harm must be regulated for. Industry 5.0 practices applied to coaching can ensure human beings develop and advance in concert with technologies being adopted, developed and advanced.

If humans are not supported, through Industry 5.0 approaches to Coaching, Coaching 5.0 practices, they will not be fit enough to take advantages of technology affordances, and we may see workforces diminish in their competence. With collaborative, reciprocal development, human beings and technologies can advance workforces, workplaces, societies and even humanity.

This paper highlights that the future use of AI in coaching will not just require assurance of equitable human access, affordances and accommodation but also appropriate adaptation, integration and adoption with existing people and technology ecosystems in businesses and organisations, through operationalised Industry 5.0 mindsets, techniques and technology infrastructures.

Author contributions

JR: Visualization, Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

Author JR was employed by Artificial Intelligence Coaching Alliance.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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