How Coach Training EDU uses AI without handing over the polish
John Andrew Williams is CEO of Coach Training EDU, which provides accredited coach training and certification alongside practical experience building a coaching practice. Williams discusses using AI to help build a platform for solo coaches, while keeping the final refinement in human hands, and explains how AI assistants are already bringing in leads.
AI can contribute substantial work, as it has with coding for Coach Training EDU’s Hubabble platform, but the final 10 to 15% of refinement still needs human judgment. Williams also reports that about one in ten new leads comes from AI assistants, mostly ChatGPT.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
CTEDU has been bootstrapped from the start and has grown step by step. I was a high school Latin teacher when I found coaching, and I saw it as the way to move education from delivering knowledge to delivering empowerment. Knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips now. The premium is understanding your inner world: how you work, what motivates you, and which perspective helps you do what you’re called to do. Coaching is the map to that inner geography, and it starts from optimization, making the most of who you already are. I’ve spent over 20 years on that, first in my own practice, then training coaches. About a quarter of my work is now with colleges and universities. What makes us different is the combination: an empowerment-based approach to coaching, plus the credential and business skills to build a practice around it.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
More than half of our new leads come from organic search, about 15% from Google Ads, about 10% from AI assistants, and most of the rest from referrals and word of mouth. The wish is to dominate executive and wellness coach certification in the U.S., and to see Top Coach, our new coaching reality series, gain traction. That will take time, but the production system is in place, season 2 is happening, and season 3 is planned.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We’re building what chess players call centaur systems: a person and AI working as one team. Many people expect AI to take work off their plate. We’re working more, side by side with it. On Hubabble, the all-in-one platform we’re building for solo coaches, we’ve handed much of the coding to AI. The last 10 to 15%, the polish that makes it truly useful, is where we take it back and tune it by hand.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes. About 1 in 10 new leads now comes from AI assistants, mostly ChatGPT. We still do well on Google, and our referral base is strong at this point.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Focus on helping people. Get clear on your purpose and what you’re best at, and put your energy there. Mine is empowerment: staying on the cutting edge of executive coaching and bringing those insights to students. Then ask yourself the question I ask myself: if I wanted to have an impact on 100 people this week, what would I do, and who would I need to connect with? Lean into your network. Ignore AI content written in volume. It doesn’t work. Ignore the news and follower counts, too. Quality beats quantity, in followers and in interactions. We just held our conference in Denver with 70 people. We focused on what people are capable of and kept the noise out, and it was probably the best conference I’ve attended.
Thank you to John Andrew Williams and the team at Coach Training EDU for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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