AI-isms: Coaching | Pam Baker | To Infuse AI into Coaching or not

AI-isms — Ep05: Pam Baker, CoachingIn this episode of AI-isms I sit down with Pam, CEO and founder of Women's Coaching Alliance, the organization she built out of her husband's question. Young women get recruited, interviewed, trained, paired with a co-coach, given an adult mentor, paid, and then handed a team as head coaches. Not assistants. Head coaches. They run the practices, manage the parents, lose some games, and course correct with each other. It is leadership development disguised as a Saturday morning.Then I did what I always do and dragged a beautiful human conversation into AI.The idea that stayed with me came from one of Doug's friends. Two coaches at a sales meeting, and one asks the other how his season went. The answer: I don't know. I'll let you know in 30 years. Pam's point is that a coach is not looking at the scoreboard, she is looking at who these kids become. Sit with that next to every AI business case you have been asked to defend inside a quarter.What we get into:Why the barrier every young woman named was not the game, it was the difficult parents, and why that is the same muscle you use on a difficult stakeholder at workWhy Women's Coaching Alliance pays its teenage coaches, and how Pam connects that to the gender wage gapWhere AI genuinely helps a small organization: synthesis, and turning long manuals into something a 16-year-old will actually readWhy reading off an AI script makes you blind to the person in front of you, the eye contact, the shoulders, the thing that tells you it is working or failingThree real scenarios, Pam as coach: the 20-year-old who feels like she is reading someone else's words, the parent with the wearable data, the company swapping human mentoring for AI coachingAI is sycophantic. A real mentor tells you that will not fly hereWhat happens when someone discovers a new AI capability and cascades it everywhere without asking whose job it wasWhy Pam does not use AI for parenting, and the line underneath it: there is no way AI knows more about my kids and me and our relationship than I doChapters00:00 Where are all the women coaches?01:10 Meet Pam Baker01:52 The question Doug kept asking02:44 Great coaching is great leadership04:27 Eighteen young women raise their hands06:09 She will not raise her hand on her own10:17 Why every coach gets paid10:35 A hard pivot into AI11:38 How a coaching organization actually uses AI13:05 No AI knows what is happening in front of you13:33 "I'll let you know in 30 years"16:13 Case 1: the coach who feels like she is reading a script19:43 Case 2: the parent with the wearable data21:58 An amazing player is not a great team24:08 Snatching someone else's agency25:44 Case 3: swapping human mentors for AI coaching28:13 AI is sycophantic. A mentor is not.33:08 What AI cannot know about your kid39:09 The two things that stayed with meThis is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world. AI can build your practice plans. It is never going to be the person who believes in you before you believe in yourself. Ask yourself who that person was for you, and whether you are being that person for anyone.Topics: coaching, leadership development, mentoring, AI coaching, AI mentoring, sycophancy, youth sports, women in sports, gender wage gap, culture, team culture, human-AI collaboration, AI adoption, parenting and AI, future of work, Women's Coaching Alliance, Pam Baker