You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick. And if this is your first time at The Coaching In, do subscribe or follow because then you can get every episode as they download and welcome. And if this is your 400th episode, welcome too. And a big warm welcome to our guest for today, Jazz Rasool.
Jazz sent me a message and said, do you want to talk about AI? And I went, yeah. So, Jazz, welcome to the Coaching Inn. Claire, for all, allowing me to honour of being in your space. it's pleasure. It's an honour. It's an honour to me. So, tell us a bit about you and your coaching journey. And then I've got so many things I want to ask you and talk about. Well, in a nutshell, and it will have to be in nutshell because it's quite a universe I've been living in for the last 40 years.
I'm a scientist by background. physicists and a biologist. In my master's degree, we studying the brain and consciousness and how people lose it when they're under anesthesia. So that got me very interested in the mind and for a long time also in medicine as well. And it got me specifically interested in mind-body medicine and how people heal psychologically and physically. Not just from a Western perspective, but from a perspective that was taken from other cultures too.
India, China, places like that. Eventually I trained in Chinese medicine myself and martial arts and taught people mindfulness for many, many years. And it was about 20 odd years ago that my partner, who's an executive coach, said, why don't we actually look at the fact that a lot of coaching really only uses Western psychological models. and doesn't really properly include models from other cultures.
And why don't you think about putting together a coaching model, which is a bit more intercultural, which I did. I created a new psychometric as well to evaluate people and identify where they needed to get help. And in 2008, I actually converted the whole coaching model into an AI coaching platform. So I've been working with AI now 16 years.
And hundreds and thousands of people I've worked with have led to an awful lot of best practices, discovery of an awful lot of things that you shouldn't do with AI. for seven years, was at Ravensborne University looking at new technologies and how they would enhance learning. was a research fellow there. And specifically, I looked at new technologies like AI, virtual reality, and even taught courses on that. with the London Mayor's Office and the Olympic Legacy Initiative.
But the most significant thing that came out of that was working for NASA at the base for the International Space Station and designing training to improve the performance of astronauts that are going up to the space station. And that included using biometrics sensors to detect emotion and then use AI to see what emotional state the astronaut was in and whether it was the right one for the task that they were doing. And if it wasn't, then to give them coaching to improve that.
And that also included holographic technologies where we project holograms into the space and the astronauts can work on things as if something real is actually there. And the other mission we worked on was actually a future manned Mars mission as well. So in Italy they've got these giant hangars and they have mock-ups of the space station. things and they've also got a giant hangout where they've got a mock-up of the marshland terrain as well. And it was just amazing to work there.
But everything I learned from there and the work that I was doing and using my own AI coaching platform with entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, I've been working with about a hundred women entrepreneurs over the last few years with the AI coaching platform. I left the university a few years ago and I thought I'm going to chase up my coaching qualifications.
I went to Henley Business School and did a professional certificate in executive education there, executive coaching I should say. So although I've been an executive coach for 20 years, I've been training other coaches and creating my own AI coaching platform, but I'd never got any credentialing from any of the governing bodies. So I thought I'd better get that out of the way, which I did.
And then last year, having joined Jonathan Passmore's AI kind of hackathon at Henley Business School, I realized there was nobody teaching on the use of AI in coaching. And because I'd been doing it for 16 years and I've been doing research into AI and ethics as well as what I was doing and publishing on that papers, I thought people need a course. So it's around the time that EU AI Act kicked in around December. And I realized that this is a big issue.
If a lot of coaches were using AI and they weren't using it in a legally compliant way, there's a big threat. that their professional indemnity insurance and liability insurance could be affected, in which means they could not have claims paid against them, their premiums might go up, and worse, the insurer might cancel their policy or even write to other underwriters and say, you can't insure this person. And that's the end of that person's career.
And that's when I realized coaches really need to get ready. December this year is a deadline for when Organizations that use AI, they've got to ensure that people who are using AI, whether individual practitioner or one that's working with an organization, if you're not literate in a way that's aligned to the EU AI Act, after December this year, you can be subject to legal action. So I've been in big campaign this year to try and get coaches.
Not just to play with AI and get competent and using things like chat GPT or things like that. There's an urgent call for coaches to know how to be ethical, inclusive, and also legally compliant as well. So the effects kind of culminate this year in me setting up the AI Coaching Alliance, which is a cross-body group of coaches and researchers who are interested in getting AI formalized and coaching.
And then in April this year, I took the various competencies for human to human coaching from the ICF, the MCC and ICF, first rate AC, and I integrate them together into a single set and reframe them for use in AI. And that led to the standard being produced, AI coaching line standard, which respects all those competencies, but also aligns to the legal aspects of the EU AI as well. So that's what I'm putting out into the world right now.
That's what I'm really campaigning, helping coaches get ready for what's going to happen after the end of this year. Wow, what a journey and I love that it started in the technical space and that then you've pushed out into the conversational space. If I can offer you bit of feedback, I think you undersell yourself. Because when you asked me to join the Alliance, sorry, this sounds really awful. I thought you were a student at Henley who had an interest. Well, I was at the time.
Yes, but you're also an expert. I've been doing this a long time. And when you see the human condition through a human spirit and soul, and then you also see it encoded in the digital form on a computer with working with it using an artificial intelligence machine learning, you get very different perspectives. You can feel what's going on for people, but you've also got evidence, you've got data for what's going on as well.
And for coaching to become a science, you really need both of those things to join together and become some kind of coherent way of working with human beings. So I would love you to come back and talk about decolonializing coaching and what you've learned from that. And the reason I'm naming that now is that there's so much to talk about in both of those spaces that I just think we probably need to say we won't talk about that today. We'll talk about that on another episode. Is that okay?
Yeah, certainly. It's something I'm hoping my PhD proposal will center on and looking at how coaching, if it's going to be complete and comprehensive, it's got to include models of thinking and practices from all cultures. can't just limit it to Western ideas, even especially with AI. AI is very much driven by psychological models of consciousness, which are very Western.
I think it would be amazing if it got included things such as the models from Ayurvedic practices in India, Taoist practices and mindfulness from China. We've been to practices from Africa. It would be amazing. Imagine an AI that was truly diverse in its consciousness. So he'll be back listeners soon. That's a big or something, that's a whole PhD right there.
To talk about that bit because you know the thing that when I read that about you I thought you know my passion for democratizing supervision and your passion for democratizing. In fact we should probably have you on with Charmaine. Yeah I was with her just a week or so ago she was presenting the Black Voices in Coaching conference and we were talking about thing about how are things going to unfold in the next 10 years.
And I've done a LinkedIn article about it, which saying that I won't go into decolonization right now, but I'll say that the future of coaching, especially the use of AI in coaching, is going to follow three stages. Right now, there's a big effort to try and get AI available to people. There's a big digital divide, digital poverty, with regards to conventional digital technologies, let alone AI.
So the first challenge is how do we democratize the use or disseminate the use of AI out into the world? Once that accessibility has been addressed, the next thing to do is look at how we can do diversification of AI. As I said, very Western oriented countries like those you find in the African continent or others, they're beginning to create their own AIs that are in alignment with their own culture. people, especially places like China and India.
And then hopefully once each country's got its own AI aligned its own culture, we're going to see for coaching purposes, we're going to, also for AI, we're going to see a decentralization happening where people will no longer depend on like open AI or Microsoft or those centralized providers of AI that we've currently got because every country will have their own. In fact, every person will have their own.
because they're compact enough now that you can run them on your own phone independently of the internet. And that's true decentralization now where everybody's got their own local little AI in the pocket and it's not connected to the internet unless the person wants it to. So those three stages, that's the future of AI. First, democratization, second, diversification, and third, decentralization.
And hopefully if that goes well, along with that, especially with the diversification stage and decentralization stage, we're probably going to see decolonization as well. Wow. So AI is quite a hot topic amongst coaches. Coaches who know quite a lot about it and coaches who are afraid of it because they think it's going to take their job off them. So the human coach And the AI coach, what's the difference?
I summed it up, I was at the Association of Business Psychologists conference a couple of weeks ago, and we were asking them more or less the same question about business psychologists. the talk that I was giving, the title of it was, will AI replace business psychologists? the long and short of it is that you need to look at it in terms of the common denominators of change, helping people through change.
it turns out that AI is pretty good at handling what I would call the lower common denominators of change. But the higher common denominators of change, they seem to be very much the sovereign territory of human cages. So the lower common denominators of change are the things which involve change in the moment, transactional forms of change.
You might join a few transactional bits of change together into a transition of some kind and that those might be joined up together into some kind of transformation.
So all these things, the transactional, transitional and transformational kinds of change, they're the kinds that a lot of coaches do regularly work with and I know Anima has put a LinkedIn post recently which put those things in the tier like a pyramid and then others like David Drake said, no we need to consider this more like quadrants and stasis. but I'm not really concerned about the layout at the moment. I'm concerned about the categories.
and what I found was that when you're doing the transactional, transitional and transformational change, you're helping people with, them changing what they're doing and how they're doing things. All right. But as soon as you go through a significant kind of transformation or significant number of transformations, they eventually add up to someone wanting to change who they are.
And that transcendental change, that boundary between transformational and transcendental change is a boundary between coaching and therapy. And when you're getting into helping change who someone is, you are effectively altering their consciousness. You are altering possibly their personality and the expression of their character and how they're managing their ego, all these kinds of things. And that space requires lived experience of a human being to work with.
It's also when you cross that boundary, there's a grey zone. And if you're not careful in that grey zone between coaching and therapy, there's hidden minefield of triggers and trauma and all sorts of other things that coaches absolutely do not want to go into if they're not trained therapeutically and haven't contracted for that. They have to signpost a person off at that point. And it means that you really have to ask, you want AI to be digging around in that?
If you did, then you need to make sure that AI had its own lived experience, rather than borrowing what human beings provided. And of course, AI doesn't have that. It doesn't have its own lived experience. It needs its own lived experience in order for it to have empathy, in order for it to have compassion, in order for it to have the consciousness to connect with another consciousness. So AI doesn't have any of those things.
Now, even with the most fantastic technologies in the future, if there were such a case that was an AI that was conscious and intelligent like a human being, it turns out that EU AI probably won't allow for it to go into that space, because there's too much risk, subliminal risk to emotional interference and deception, all sorts of things. So the EU AI Act has got two categories of risk out of the four that it has that are really important to look at.
There's unacceptable levels of risk of using AI and then there's high. And then if you look at them, there's about 11 categories of risk in those two sets. And of those 11 categories, when I first talked about this last year and June last year, it's been a year since I first brought this to the coaching community. And I said, do you realize that of the 11 highest risks of the EU AI Act. Nine of them apply to coaches who might want to use AI. And nobody flagged this up.
And of course, as I said earlier, if you're not compliant and you're not mitigating against those risks, you're at risk of causing psychological harm, invisible harm. At which case someone could come along and say, you did harm, I'm seeing you. And they're going to endurance if it doesn't go through, if you're not compliant. So that space also means that even if AI wanted to go there, it might actually be illegal for AI to go there.
And that means that space is more or less the sovereign territory of human coaches, that transcendental space. So that's an important thing to recognise about the difference between AI and human coaches. I did a post on LinkedIn called The Spectrums of Coaching. You can look at it in my articles.
and explicitly explores that spectrum, going from transactional, transitional, transformational, and then it shows you this big grey line, which is the boundary between that transformational way of helping people and that transcendental way of helping people. And if we're not careful, that grey zone won't be so thin. it'll start to get wider. We've already seen this for social media and how it's helped influence and affected people's mental health.
If you go into that grey zone between coaching and mental health, doing transformation or transcendental, if you get things wrong and you start triggering people, and you start bringing trauma up in a way that can't be handled, then that thin little band, that thin little barrier between coaching and therapy and mental health is going to start getting wider. And we're going to be in a big grey zone.
which is not going to be good for anybody, especially for the clients who are going to start getting risks of invisible psychological harm constantly. So we have to be really, really careful. We can't play with AI because of that gray zone. We can inadvertently trip into it and cause harm and you legally could have action brought against you if you're not careful. You've got to be professional. You've got to have compliance first.
when you do these things in place and not being in a rush to develop your competency first. And that's my banner, if you like, my flag that I've been waving for the last year saying, I know you want to get competent. I know you want to look like you're up to date and modern, but do everything within a frame of compliance and ethical and inclusive practice first, safety first. And anyway, you get your safety goggles on and your hard hat.
And you've ensured protection for your client and for yourself. The motto for the AI Coaching Alliance is linked to that. It's protection with progression. So you protect your client and yourself first through compliance-based approaches. And only then do you progress in the use of AI and hopefully use it to progress what you're doing in your coaching with your client and also your own professional developer. Well...
It's interesting because the physicist said that, I knew I heard the goggles, kept the goggles on first, then do the stuff. And you know, you're coming, aren't you? As you talk, I can really hear that thread of lived experience and learned experience coming together in a really beautiful way. As you were talking, I was thinking about holding, holding space, noticing. timing and those things that really are very unique to the human engagement.
And actually how important it is for coaches to really refine their capacity and skill and transformational coaching when the transactional space may be really well served by the AI. If it's done well, there's an interesting feature for coaches. If we're just left with the higher common denominators of change to work with, the transcendental stuff, it means we're going to be ultimately focused on advancing the consciousness of the human race. That will be our day job.
We won't be doing so much with the transactional or transitional stuff because AIs will take care of all of that. But the real important stuff to do with lifting ourselves up as a race, as a species and taking ourselves a more elevated and enlightened level of consciousness, where the human race doesn't just have compassion for its members between one another. But we move from not just a human centric way of doing things, which is what a lot of people in AI want AI to be focused on.
We actually move into what I would say is an earth centric consciousness. And of course, there's lots of issues going on with the climate. A lot of coaches, especially people like Jonathan Passmore and others are looking at outdoor coaching and working with the climate and how important it is to work with our clients to press home the need to work with the climate in a way that's more respectful.
The fact is we won't be doing any coaching at all in a few decades if we don't get our planet sorted. So I used to say human-centric was a thing to do and then I said, well, maybe we should be looking at ethics. I think ethical centric or value centric approach. And certainly the AI coaching alliance was based on that premise. But then I remember being at the UN about 20 years ago, I was presenting on climate change because of my background as a scientist.
And I realized that if people can't breathe because the atmosphere has changed, if people are dying because of floods and fires and all sorts of other things, I don't think they're going to be worried too much about coaching. They're just going to be trying to survive. And if we want coaching, not just to be a science, but to be also something that's a genuine service, we have to provide environments within which people are going to be able to be coachable.
And it's all very well considering whether a client is coachable before you take them on. But the other thing that we have to consider about is the relationship we have with them and this environment space that we're doing, caging in. And it isn't just about what you're doing in your office or in your organization anymore. No, it's to do with the world that we live in. And I don't talk about the human world. I'm talking about life on Earth.
the astrophysicist in me, who's always been interested in outer space and always been interested in they're just majesty and magic of life at all, consisting in this universe. When I work with people and I've got a client in front of me, I'm not just looking at them as a human being, I'm looking at them as this unique collection of stardust that I'm somehow having to work with the consciousness of, you know, and I never ever disconnect from that.
And it means you do have to take a wider systemic, ecosystemic perspective of coaches and Currently AI doesn't do a good job of that. Considering how much water it uses, how much power and energy it uses to, in order to do any, respond to any prompt, it's ridiculous. It's like as much as one single phone charge is possibly used in electricity for certain highly inefficient AIs that are out there.
And the amount of water that you use, you might be interested that you're using the equivalent of a teaspoon of water every time you do a prompt. Okay. And over a year, that can add up to an awful lot of liters per person. And over billions of people, that's an awful lot of water. There's a lot of water scarcity in world. So as much as I love to talk about AI, I'm also conscious of its context that it's being used in.
And I have to ask coaches every time you use an AI in the future, do you want to spend a teaspoon of water? Do you want to spend a phone charged worth of electricity and affect the climate? It may be that in the future that we just can't afford it. And the big demand for the use of AI will plateau out because we just don't want to risk the environmental costs every time we enter a little prompt.
So coaches need to look at things from an ethical perspective and ask themselves every time I'm using this to help my client, it's costing the client, it's costing the client. Do I want to do it this way? You know, it's powerful and it's, you know, innovative. could, it could be in terms of. the suggestions it could give you for coaching. Is it worth it? I love the clarity that you have about how the systemic is so much bigger than it's often spoken of.
I think that's the reason that I have the passion for waving the flag the way that I do, because I'm not looking at it as an intervention which involves just helping someone with a goal or helping them realise their potential. I'm having to look at it at a global level and not just at a local level. But then again, I also have to look at it at local level, especially when it comes to diversification. the colonialization. can't just look at things from one culture's perspective, you know.
So that more kind of wider perspective is important for the future development of coaching as a discipline. Because if coaching is too narrow in its approach, especially culturally in terms of diversity, then it's not going to have a respectable future. one that we can all look up to. fact, in fact, it all, it's already kind of beginning to happen in a way that's not good. The ICF recently produced The Standard and that was for using AI in coaching.
I'm not going to go too much into it except for saying two things. It was created about April, 2021 within 11 months of George Floyd's And just after the ICF proclaimed they were fighting against inequality, racism and things like that, like a lot of corporations did around that time.
11 months after that statement, a month after Joy Floyd died, 11 months after that, they put together a team to cultivate AI, a standard, and they were all white, they were all men, they were all Western, and I looked at that and thinking, hold on a moment, where are the women? Where are the people of color? And then this year they put together another team to promote the use of AI and adopt it into coaching in addition to that standard.
And collectively the authors of the standard and that group task force, just 14 people in all. Bear in mind, the ICF has got 150 countries, 60,000 plus coaches that it represents. Of the 14 people that represent AI's adoption, which is known to have issues around bias and racism and things like that. Of the 14 people, 13 are white.
12, I'm in, one person of color, and of the countries that are represented, remember there's over 150 ICF represents, of those 14, nine were from the USA, two from the UK, two from Europe, sorry, France, and there was one person from Africa, and he was white. That's not degrading or undermining the people involved. It's looking at the people at the ICF who signed off on these kinds of optics in the days that we're actually in. And you have to ask, well, was the standard any good?
At least because it's meant to be protecting coaches, hopefully in how they use AI in the future. And it turns out it's completely focused on people who produce AIs and helping them get a foothold into coaching. And it looks, if you read the language, it looks as if coaches are an option or second, human coaches. And you'll see language like a client has the right when using an AI to have the option to request for a human coach. And I see that language throughout. I'm what's going on here?
Why is AI the default here and human coaches a second? So it really riled me up a bit. So putting the diversity element to one side, which is The optics of that was bad enough. But when you see that the standard doesn't even include reference to the EU AI Act over the three years, it's entirely US centric. It refers to the American Disabilities Act and the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Nowhere, anywhere in there, apart from one reference to GDPR, do you see anything?
It's a regulatory document, but you don't see any reference to law, especially AI law. And then you have to ask, you spent three years doing this. got dozens of people. You said it's a hundred page document, 24,000 words, and this is supposed to help coaches with AI into the future. And there's only eight references provided. If it was an ICF assignment, it would fail.
When I did my self-reflection assignment, I needed to put at least a dozen references in for a couple of thousand words assignment. This is 24,000 word document and over three years, a hundred pages, and there's only eight references provided. I'm thinking. How can this be acceptable? So it worries me that governing bodies are producing standards in a way that's not collaborative, that the ICF has done something on their own. They're not taking that cross-body approach.
They are, you can't work with it on your own. You have to come together and have a consensus amongst the different governing bodies. You don't want three different standards, a hundred pages each for coaches to deal with in order just to... do a prompt in a coaching session. You know, it's just, it's just crazy. so the other flag on waving at the moment is trying to get the different governing bodies.
So please come together and not reproduce and reinvent one another's wheels and put this huge burden on coaches of reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of regulatory document. The AI coaching alliance standard I set up, put it It's on one page, right? It's a combination of all those. competencies and also alignment with the UI. But it's something you can read on one page and go, all right, that's what I need to work with for my practice. It's what needs to be included for teaching coaches.
It's what's needed for supervision for people who do supervision of coaches who use AI. At least they can look at it and go, I'll use this as a reference. So things are changing so fast with AI. any learning curve to do with it has got to be small. can't be spending six months learning something and then by then find out everything's already out of date.
So that's the attitude that we need to approach AI and how coaches need to get literate in a way where they're not going to get into trouble and it's not going to cost them the earth in terms of their time. And AI isn't for all human coaches, is it? No. The thing to bear in mind is a lot of coaches say, well, it's not for me. I've, I've, I've recognized that. However, your coaches may be using it.
Your coaches and clients might be using AI and it's your responsibility and duty to at least have the consciousness and awareness of what's involved. Because if there are any legal risks for the clients who using AI, because you've been helping them. The question there is where does liability rest? Does it rest with your client? does rest with the AI producer or provider, or does it rest with you? So there's three levels of liability there.
And you can't just go into this thinking you can innocently use AI and there's no consequence. There are. From the December this year, you can be pretty sure there's three levels of liability. There's your own, there's your clients, and then there's the people who produce the AI itself. The question is, who's going to take responsibility when harm gets caused? who's going to get sued. yeah, AI has got lovely benefits, been working for 40 years, seen lots of great things come from it.
Only though, only though when you've taken a safety first approach, because then at least you're protecting people even if things go wrong. Yeah. And my encouragement to coaches is to really refine and develop your capacity to be transformational and to work on that edge because there you will always have something to do while we have a human race.
Yeah, it'll allow us to transcend, go from transforming what we're doing with clients and ourselves and hopefully in a safe way transcend that grey zone. into a space where we can still engage with the consciousness of our clients and elevate the level of compassion and empathy they have for themselves.
So that they have that psychological bravery they need to actually cultivate their own potential and realize their goals, but not just for themselves, but extended and transferred out to the people in their lives, in their world. Well, Jazz, I could talk to you all day, although I think I need to go have a cup of coffee and process all the things that you said, because there's so much there to think about and reflect on and wonder about in relation to the work that all of us do.
And what a beautiful introduction from somebody who's got a really good foothold into AI and into coaching and into conversations and all those other things around really the ethics of introducing AI into this space. So. I really would like you to come back with Charmaine to talk about decolonializing coaching and we'll sort that out after this call. Meanwhile, how do people find out more about coaching and AI and ethics? Where do they access the professional body?
The best place to go is the AI Coaching Alliance's website, which is simply AIcoachingalliance.com. they can always, you'll find a connection to me as well there. You'll also find the link to the LinkedIn group. which currently stands over about 380 members from all over the world, all levels, and from different governing bodies, researchers, coaches, business people. It's a huge mix.
I should say that when I set up the AI Coaching Alliance, I made a concerted effort right from the word go to specifically invite members who were women, who were people of color, and were from different cultures and different countries. because I was totally conscious that if there was going to be any debate or consensus on this, we needed to have the right social diversity, but we also needed the right cognitive diversity too.
And lastly, we needed people of different levels of technical diversity. You're going to have people who are beginners, you're going to have people who are experts, you're have people who are academics and people who actually use it for their business. And it's important to have all those different, that full spectrum of consciousness.
in order for us to ensure that any use of AI in the future is not some narrow band single frequency way of thinking, but actually is a full spectrum way of engaging with intelligence that as closely as possible, at least respects the breadth of human consciousness and human culture.
So go to AIcoachinglines.com to see all the reports I've created around AI and Also links to lots of videos and briefings and things that we've done over the last year with the ICF, EMCC, AC and also places like Henley Business School. And you'll find additional resources from other members as well on the platform. And you also see the AI coaching alliance standard, ACAST and all of its points if you want to use that as a reference as a starting point for yourself. Fantastic.
What a generous, generous share, Jas. Thank you so much for coming to the Coaching In. Listeners, thank you all for listening. I think there's probably another coach that you know who needs to hear this episode. So please do share this episode with them to get the word out. And we'll be back next week. Thank you Jas so much. Thank you Claire. No need to be here. Bye bye. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share the podcast with friend or leave a comment on social media.
And if you'd like to become a regular at The Coaching In, you can subscribe on Podbean and all major podcast channels. We look forward to welcoming you next time. You've been listening to The Coaching In, 3D Coaching's virtual pub. For more information, check out 3dcoaching.com.