When it comes to career and executive coaching, some of the most important work happens in one-on-one sessions with the client. That’s when breakthrough insights often emerge, motivation gains momentum, and coaches build an essential connection.
Then comes the hard part: turning those words into actions.
Transcribing conversations into meaningful action items for clients takes time and effort — something a team of assistants could easily handle. However, when you’re the only person running your business, that time and effort leaves coaching solopreneurs with a difficult tradeoff: take notes during sessions and sacrifice presence, spend hours after each call transcribing insights from recordings, or leave follow-through entirely to clients.
“Trying to juggle it all on my own wasn’t an option — it was just impossible to build a sustainable business,” said Kim Surko, founder of leadership coaching business Surko Coaching, regarding how easy it was to feel overwhelmed by work that felt more administrative than transformational. “Leaning into AI was the most natural solution to help with all of that responsibility.”
Here’s how three solopreneurs in leadership, business, and communications have used AI to help clients achieve more results in less time, expanding their capacity as coaches while increasing the value of the work they offer.
From the “Aha” moment to immediate action
For all three coaches, the biggest game changer has been using AI note-takers to distill long conversations into something more tangible.
After getting client consent, “I record my coaching sessions and upload transcripts into ChatGPT. This allows me to rapidly transform nuanced insights from our conversations into concrete outputs clients can actually use — pitches, résumés, website copy, positioning statements, and more,” said Katharine Campbell Hirst, founder of business coaching company KCH Coaching & Advisory. “What used to take weeks of agonizing refinement now takes minutes.”
Liz Morrison, founder of communications coaching company LM Strategic Storytelling, appreciates how AI ensures that valuable sound bites from her coaching sessions don’t get lost in hours of recordings that nobody has time to revisit. She’s built custom projects in Claude to help her transform session transcripts into “Story Banks” in minutes — pulling out three to six narratives per session that clients can use immediately for interviews, networking, social media, and building their businesses.
While this type of work was essential before AI, doing it as a solopreneur meant sacrificing time that could be spent supporting other clients. “I’ve saved almost an hour per client per day by relying on AI to take notes and summarize them for me,” said Surko, who added that she nearly doubled her capacity for coaching clients with AI’s support.
Tracking and celebrating the small wins
Surko has also used AI to help her clients appreciate the progress they’re making, improving the feeling of momentum. “A lot of work with coaching is celebrating the small wins,” she said.
Using the project management tool Kanbanchi, supported by Gemini, Surko can quickly update to-do list boards that lay out all of the client’s goals and achievements.
“Having that visual representation of the progress we’re making shows the value of coaching,” Surko said. The process has been extremely valuable, as it has improved her client renewal rate because clients can see exactly how they’re getting closer to a goal, rather than feeling like they aren’t making progress, she added.
Morrison tells a similar story. She built a custom ChatGPT tool called Story Explorer that walks prospective clients through a story-coaching exercise to uncover one immediately usable story they can post on LinkedIn or use in a networking conversation.
“I find when I give people this builder, it’s the start of a much bigger conversation,” she said. They often uncover other narratives they want to explore further with Morrison, she said.
Improving in-the-moment coaching
Alongside the benefit of being more present during conversations, these coaches have found AI valuable for improving their in-session coaching in other ways.
Surko, for example, used Gemini within Google Docs to create a searchable archive of the massive toolkit of exercises and prompts she’s collected in her decadeslong career, which before were buried in various folders.
Previously, she would have to wait until after the session to hunt down an exercise. Now, she can quickly pull them up during sessions and dive deeper with a client. “We make more progress in each session,” she said of this improvement. “We’re able to continue that momentum.”
AI can even be a helpful coach for these coaching experts.
Hirst uploaded transcripts across her client’s full arc and asked where she did well and where she could have improved. While she also works with coaches, she appreciates that AI can effectively be over her shoulder all the time.
“The feedback is surprisingly concrete, pattern-based, and immediately actionable — effectively giving me a reflective practice partner I wouldn’t otherwise have access to as a solopreneur,” Hirst said.
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