Not long ago a coach told us, half joking, “I keep wondering if I should even bother. By the time my website’s up, won’t people just ask the robot?”
We laughed. Then we got quiet, because we’ve had the exact same thought about our own business. We build websites for coaches. There are tools now that can create a pretty decent website in minutes. If anyone in this conversation should be sweating, it’s probably us.
And yet, the more we work with these tools, the less we think the story is simply, technology comes in, humans move out. To us, it’s deeper than that.
So consider this a note from people standing in the same weather, trying to figure out which parts require an umbrella and which parts are just a little rain.
Here’s what we’re noticing.
Many of the coaches we meet are saying this part quietly, usually late, usually after reading one more headline about what AI can do now.
“What if people don’t need a coach anymore?”
“I finally got certified, and now the whole landscape is changing.”
“I signed up to help people. I did not realize I was also signing up to relearn technology every six months.”
That last one may deserve its own support group. And if some version of this has crossed your mind, you’re in pretty good company.
Some of us have been in creative work for thirty-plus years, and we’ve heard “this will replace you” a few times already. Desktop publishing was going to replace designers. Then the web was. Then templates were. Then Canva. Now AI has entered the group chat.
Each time, the tools changed. Some parts of the work changed with them. And the people who stayed close to what humans actually needed usually found ways to keep going, often with better tools and, if we were lucky, slightly less carpal tunnel.
AI tools can do some genuinely useful things.
They can help organize ideas, summarize information, generate options, create a rough draft, brainstorm headlines, sort notes, and help us get unstuck when the blank page has been staring back for twenty minutes.
They’re fast. Sometimes impressively fast. Sometimes confidently wrong fast, which is its own special personality trait.
It has also never met your client.
Picture the session where someone says “I think I’ve wasted twenty years,” and then nobody talks for a while. You watched their hands. You knew the silence was the most important part of the hour. You stayed in it. A tool can write a lovely paragraph about silence. Holding one is a different job, and it’s yours.
This is where we’ve landed for now, and we say that as people who use AI tools pretty regularly:
Let them help with the parts that were never the heart of your work in the first place.
They can be useful for things like:
We’ve noticed something similar in our own work. When the administrative clutter gets lighter, there can be a little more room for the part that actually needs us.
And yes, occasionally that room is created after arguing with the tool for ten minutes about why we do not need another exclamation point.
We’ve been paying close attention to this part, partly because we’re curious and partly because we have skin in the game.
There are still things we see happening between people that technology doesn’t really reproduce in the same way.
We don’t have to turn our lives into case studies. But what we’ve lived often changes the way we listen, the questions we ask, and the amount of compassion we bring into the room.
For those of us who believe our gifts come from something greater than ourselves, there can be something reassuring in that too.
Maybe we weren’t given those gifts by accident. Maybe somebody is still going to need them.
Sometimes we hear coaches talk about AI as though the choice is: me or the technology.
We’ve been trying on a different picture ourselves. The tools are the desk. You’re the person at the desk.
A nicer desk makes the work easier to get to. If a tool takes the formatting, the scheduling, and the first draft off your plate, your calling just got more of your afternoon.
And here’s the empowering way to hold it, the sentence we’ve been saying around our office this week: I am willing to be the human in the room. The one who’s actually there, Paying attention. Listening.
That feels like a pretty worthwhile job description.
Your website still has a very human job to do. It helps the right people find you, get a sense of who you are, understand how you might help, and decide whether they want to take the next step.
And in a world where more content is being generated quickly and cheaply, sounding like an actual person may become even more valuable.
That doesn’t mean every sentence needs to be handmade with a fountain pen while sitting under an oak tree. We use technology too.
The goal is simply that, by the time someone reaches your website, they can still feel you there. Your perspective, your warmth, your experience, your way of seeing the people you serve.
We’ll keep handling the technology side, whatever it turns into. Today, a lot of that still involves WordPress. Tomorrow? Who knows. We may all be communicating telepathically through our refrigerators.
But whatever the tools become, our job is still to translate the technical part into something useful and understandable, so coaches can get back to the work they actually came here to do.
We know this truth from doing this work: “Inspiration without action is merely entertainment.” So in that spirit, here are three things to try. And yes, we’re stopping at three. Nobody needs homework from a blog post.
Relief? Resistance? An eye roll? All valid data.
You came here with gifts nobody can automate. Somebody needs them this week.
The tools will keep changing. We’re watching it happen to our own business in real time, and we’ve decided to take the advice we give you: keep going, Learn the tools that help. Keep the human part human, and let the machines help carry the boxes.
Get Going.
