Putting AI Into Career Coaching: The Effectiveness of A Career Coaching Intervention Conducted by A Chatbot | Journal of Vocational Behavior - BRIAN HEGER

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I recently had the pleasure of having Dr. Anna Tavis, Chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU and author of The Digital Coaching Revolution (2024), join my private community, Talent Edge Circle, for a 90-minute discussion on how AI-enabled and digital coaching are reshaping how organizations develop employees at scale. As this topic continues to generate strong interest among Talent Edge Weekly readers, I’m sharing this new research study. Researchers compared employees who used a career-coaching chatbot (just one small example of broader AI-enabled coaching capabilities) with a waitlist group that had not yet used it. The results found that a single conversation with a chatbot significantly reduced participants’ negative affect (how anxious or distressed someone felt about their career situation) compared to the control group, and that this emotional relief was linked to greater clarity about their career goals and stronger career optimism. One implication is that a strength of this one capability is that it can help people feel less anxious about their careers, enabling them to think more clearly about their career options. While this is just one study, its randomized design still makes it a useful contribution that can help inform more research-backed evaluations of AI-based coaching technologies. For more on the topic of AI-enabled coaching, check out Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s article, Does AI Coaching Work? And if you missed it, here is the 2026 Coaching Futures Report by the International Coaching Federation, which also covers AI-enabled coaching.