What Happens When Inquiry Becomes Fully Automated?
As tools like OTTO evolve, a question arises: What if inquiry could be entirely automated? If AI can generate endless deep questions, does that change the role of coaching—or even make it unnecessary?
The reality is that automation doesn’t replace the human experience of inquiry. While AI can introduce powerful questions, the depth of exploration comes from the way inquiry is met, lived, and integrated.
What Automation Can and Cannot Do
- AI can generate endless inquiries, but it cannot engage with them – A question is only meaningful when someone fully sits with it, and that’s where human presence and awareness come in.
- Technology can prompt reflection, but it doesn’t embody insight – Realization isn’t in the question itself but in how it lands and unfolds.
- Automation may accelerate access to inquiries, but not the depth of exploration – The pace of realization is not something that can be controlled by more or better questions.
How This Affects Coaching
- The role of the coach is not just to ask questions – Even if AI provides the inquiries, coaching remains a space for holding, witnessing, and allowing insights to emerge.
- Clients may still need guidance in working with inquiry – Automated tools can deliver questions, but clients may struggle with resistance, intellectualization, or avoidance—things a coach can help navigate.
- It reinforces the self-less nature of coaching – If inquiry is not something that belongs to a coach or a tool, but simply unfolds, then coaching naturally shifts toward presence rather than instruction.
The automation of inquiry doesn’t remove the value of coaching—it clarifies what coaching has always been about: creating space for direct experience, beyond the source of the question itself.