Can Sales Coaching Be Replaced by AI?

Here at the start of the new year, we at Membrain are preparing to make it easier for sales managers to coach. Our new coaching cockpit will enable managers to see at a glance everything they need to know to be more effective and targeted in how they manage and coach their people.

But will people be coaching, or will AI take over the coaching role?

Developers at Microshift AI recently created an AI-powered coaching module that promises (or threatens?) to take the humans out of coaching almost entirely. But can coaching actually be done effectively by a non-human “coach”? I caught up with Microshift AI’s founder, Neo Moreton, to get his perspective.

Why Neo Founded Microshift AI

Neo is an athlete, a yoga therapist, an executive coach with a passion for neurobiology, and the author of a book called Being Real for a Change. He hardly seems, based on his credentials, like the type to promote taking humans out of the coaching equation.

So what made him decide to found Microshift AI?

“I was out for a run, and I was wondering why I was doing it,” he says. “I wasn’t enjoying it, I didn’t want to run, and I wasn’t having a good time.”

But as he followed that line of inquiry, the question shifted in his mind to, “why am I suffering?”

“With asking a different question, everything changed,” he says. The new question reconnected him to the purpose of his run and gave him the motivation to keep going.

What was happening at that moment was that running shifted Neo’s brain from the stressed, anxious “reptilian” circuits into the limbic brain. As his body continued to move, his brain shifted into thinking with the neocortex, and then out of the neocortex arose a more helpful question.

“As a master coach myself, I did this naturally,” says Neo. “But I realized that I was following a process, and it’s a process that does not require another human to activate.”

The Neurobiology of Becoming “Unstuck”

Neo says that when people go to a master coach to help them get unstuck, the neurobiology works in three stages:

1. Regulate: The coach helps you get out of a state of stress so that you can activate your neocortex to find new solutions.
2. Connect: Then they connect you to your purpose, or your heart, by helping you recollect a memory in the past that was supportive, giving you a resource, or otherwise helping you reconnect to yourself.
3. Reflect: Finally, in the third stage, a master coach helps you conversationally explore solutions and plans through the magic of interaction with a skilled, outside perspective.

“The first two stages, regulation and connection, can be completely automated,” says Neo. “You don’t need a human to help you with that.”

However, until the advent of generative AI, the third stage always required an expert human to assist. And humans need to be paid. Truly masterful coaches need to be paid a lot. Coaching this way is valuable, but not affordable for a lot of people, and not scalable. It’s an inefficient business model.

Additionally, its value is highly dependent on the skill and quality of the coach, and limited by their memory for your situation and ability to track what you need from session to session.

How AI Can Change the Coaching Game

According to Neo, AI makes it possible for excellent coaching to be scaled and affordable, all the way from stage one to stage three. This is thanks to modern AI’s large language models, curated data sets, and advanced sentiment analysis, enabling hyper-personalisation of AI coaching.

Essentially, he says, it’s a data set plus a process: The two things an AI model needs to effectively take over.

“You can put together an algorithm that reads pauses, breath, coherence, voice tonality, and map that to their mental state,” says Neo. “You can train it to respond accordingly, just as a master coach would do. And I think AI can probably coach better than humans.”

One of the challenges of human coaching is that it’s limited by time and money. With AI, a client could feasibly access coaching every day or several times a day where they might otherwise only access it once a week. He theorizes that the “microshifts” attained in these small, frequent interactions might lead to bigger long-term changes than the macroshift from a once a month or once a week coaching session.

Will AI Change Sales Coaching?

I can imagine a world in which salespeople are able to access AI-powered coaching conversations on a regular basis. Working with a platform like Membrain, these interactions could use the same data that’s available through our coaching cockpit to generate and sustain meaningful conversations and allow salespeople to attain “microshifts” on a regular basis.

However, there’s a danger when jumping onto new technologies that the technology will be built just because it can. We see sales organizations building Frankenstacks all the time and falling prey to point pollution.

In my opinion, AI coaching should only become part of a sales organization’s approach when it can be integrated with a well-designed process and a platform like Membrain that will ensure the coaching is trained to HOW you sell.

And in my opinion, it can never entirely replace human oversight. But I must admit I’m intrigued by Neo’s technology and excited to see how AI will continue to change the technology landscape.

What do you think? Would you replace coaching with AI?