How should you use your AI Coach?

Honestly, it depends on what you need in the moment.

Most of the time, your coach will throw questions back at you. That's on purpose: it's built to make you reflect, because only you know your real context and what's going on in your head. That question-first posture isn't a quirk: it's the defining trait of coaching itself, and it's what the research says a machine coach must preserve to deserve the name (Graßmann & Schermuly, 2021). If you're still wondering what that makes an AI coach in the first place, start with what is an AI coach, really?

But "it depends" is a lazy place to stop. So here's what a real week looks like.

A manager's week, with an AI coach in it

These five scenarios come from what we see most often in our coaching sessions. None of them takes more than fifteen minutes. All of them start with a prompt you can copy as-is.

Monday, 8:50, prepare a 1:1 with a team member who's struggling. You have ten minutes before the call. Instead of walking in with a vague sense of "we need to talk," open a session:

"I have a 1:1 in 10 minutes with someone whose performance has dropped for a month. I like this person and I'm afraid of demotivating them. Help me clarify: what do I actually want from this conversation, and what's my opening line?"

The coach won't give you a script to recite. It will make you separate the facts from your story about the facts, usually the whole problem.

Tuesday, 17:30, debrief a tense meeting. The steering committee got heated. You said one sentence you regret. Vent first, unfiltered, that's a legitimate use, not a guilty one:

"Let me vent for two minutes, then help me sort out what's actually mine to fix. Here's what happened..."

Once the pressure drops, ask the harder question: "What was my part in this escalating?" If the follow-up requires a real conversation, prepare it properly, we've written about navigating difficult conversations.

Wednesday, 9:00, prepare a discovery call. If you lead a sales team or still carry deals yourself, this is the highest-leverage fifteen minutes of the week:

"Discovery call with a CFO at 11. Their likely pains: X, Y. Play the CFO. Answer the way a skeptical CFO would, and rate my questions: which ones make you think, which ones waste your time?"

Roleplay is where an AI coach shines: infinite reps, zero social cost. Pair it with discovery in 13 dimensions to know what you're probing for.

Thursday, 14:00, stress-test a decision before announcing it. You're about to reorganize two teams. Before the announcement:

"Here's my decision and my reasoning. Argue against it. What am I not seeing? Who loses something, and what will they say in the corridor afterwards?"

Ten minutes of sparring beats two weeks of cleanup.

Friday, 16:45, close the week deliberately. The cheapest ritual with the highest return:

"Three questions: What did I do this week that only I could do? Where did I react instead of choosing? What's the one conversation I'm avoiding for next week?"

Want it to move faster? Just ask

Sometimes you don't want questions: you want a perspective, advice, best practices. Even if it's not 100% spot-on, that's fine. Here's the hack: ask for it explicitly.

• "How do you see things?"
• "Give me some advice in my situation."
• "What are the best practices?"
• "Show me my blind spots."

You can even play: "What would [someone I admire] say if they were giving me their wisdom right now?"

And when you want to cut to the chase: "Let's wrap this up, give me 3 actions to take away."

One caution from our own practice: don't outsource the thinking. If you notice you're collecting the coach's advice the way you'd collect articles you never read, switch back to question mode. The sessions that change something are the ones where you said the surprising sentence, not the machine.

Does this actually change anything?

A fair challenge. The evidence so far says yes: in randomized controlled trials, AI coaching matched human coaching on goal attainment, with both beating no coaching at all (Terblanche et al., 2022). We unpack the full research picture, what's solid, what's still open, in does AI coaching work?. What the studies also make clear is that regularity beats intensity, which is why every scenario above is short. On that, see how long a session should last.

At the end of the day, you're in charge. Trust your AI Coach, and trust yourself. That's the real key.

Pick one scenario from the week above and practice it with Lumia, your AI coach.