The ICF held their annual Converge conference in San Diego, CA this past October. It was a well-attended conference pulling in people from 50 countries. There was a wide range of content, but one topic stood out among the various subject areas: AI.
There were numerous AI sessions, which isn’t surprising since coaches are either afraid of, curious about, or actively working to integrate AI into their practice and/or their coaching approach. Personally, I’m curious and working to integrate AI into my practice and coaching approach.
What I learned in the sessions are that there are absolutely use cases for coaches to use AI to accomplish work behind the scenes that can be profoundly impactful. For example, one session hosted by Tim Harrison, who is a young man already blazing a trail in the world of coaching (he beat me out to get his session accepted at Converge), shared one case study where a coach used AI to build out a leadership development program in an afternoon.
I sat there and thought about that for a minute. In an afternoon? This type of work would have previously taken months. Knowing what I now know about AI, I can see how this could be done with just a few prompts.
Speaking of prompts, they are the keys to the kingdom. If you’re treating AI like a search engine, putting in phrases like “what’s the best way to exercise when I only have 15 minutes?” you’re missing the point.
I attended another session where the presenter, James Varnham, shared a prompting framework that will greatly increase the quality of your responses from AI. He called it CIDI, which stands for Context, Instruction, Details, and Input. When you follow this flow for adhoc prompting you will get much better responses.
James also shared another acronym, RAT-FEET, which is more detailed and is good for projects or system prompts. That’s a bit beyond my pay grade at this moment, though, so I’m going to stick with CIDI.
James also encouraged us to start making our work with AI more efficient by using features within the AI tools to create mini projects that you can turn to again and again for support when needed.
As a Google Workplace user, I have access to Gemini and Gems. I just watched my first video tutorial from Google to learn how to create a Gem. I called it “LinkedIn Poster Child” – having fun with it – to support the creation of engaging posts on LinkedIn. I described who I am professionally, what services I provide, what my style is when posting and who I’m targeting. My saved Gem will now help me anytime I need some fresh ideas for what to post.
The point here is we need to start using AI in some way that makes sense for us. I don’t know that you want to have a full-blown AI coach sitting alongside you in coaching sessions and weaving in and out of your conversations, but behind the scenes, you can probably do a lot more to add efficiency to your week.
It was a good experience learning about AI and coaching at Converge. I understand why the ICF chose those topics over mine, since the sessions I attended were standing room only. There’s clearly a sense of urgency in the coaching community to figure out this AI thing. I look forward to being one of the people who get it and are using it very actively in 2026.
One statement I heard that resonated with me was that AI is forcing us to be more human. That’s where coaches can thrive in an AI-driven world, because we fully embrace being human.
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