Jonathan Passmore: we’ll see AI-powered celebrity coach avatars in 2026

Chartered psychologist, accredited coach and supervisor, Jonathan Passmore was inducted into Thinkers50 Coaching Legends in 2025. He holds professorship titles at Henley Business School and the University of Reading in the UK and the University of Évora in Portugal. His current research interests include AI and coaching, digital coaching, the potential and risks of Coachbots, diversity, coaching ethics, coach impact and evaluation.

“I hope that my work over the past three decades in coaching has encouraged a greater focus on evidenced-based practice, firstly providing evidence that coaching works, and more recently exploring factors to enhance coach training and development and the organisational application of coaching,” he says. “This commitment has led me to give away as much as possible of my work for free through my website, and to support colleagues who share this aim.”

One of his concerns for the industry is that many of those who practice in the area have no training, no background in psychology, and focus more on hyping their personal excellence and uniqueness rather than on what is at its heart a simple process: “one human being engaging with another human being in service of their learning and growth.”

Another challenge is how the industry uses AI. Jonathan notes that the past three years have seen an explosion of AI coaching and learning tools and, as in any new industry, the quality varies.

Looking ahead to 2026, Jonathan identifies three trends for executive coaching. One is the increasing popularity of ‘outdoor coaching’. Like AI, he says, outdoor coaching – walking and talking outdoors – has grown over the past three years. While he believes it will be more of an underground movement, it will become just as popular as digital and AI.

He also forecasts the prevalence of group coaching and AI-powered celebrity coaches. “If team coaching was 2024, group coaching will be 2026 and 2027; then there’s AI-powered celebrity coach avatars. For some while I have talked about the creation of celebrity avatar coaches. Marshall Goldsmith took the first step with his last year, but this will become more popular in 2026 and 2027.”

“We are still at the dawn of a new age and over the next decade AI tools will become integrated into work – so it will be hard to imagine a time when AI was not part of the way we work,” he says. “Our challenge is to leverage this power in a sustainable way, in planning for eco-power generation, sustainable water usage for cooling, and incorporating recycling of materials from last year’s tech hardware and products for the creation of this year’s.”