AI Took the Surface Work! Now, Soulpreneurs Can Go Deeper…

There’s some anxiety about AI that’s moving through the coaching and healing world right now…

Maybe a client mentioned that they’re using ChatGPT to supplement the work you do with them… 

Maybe a potential client in your DMs even said, “Why would I pay you $200/hour when I can talk to an AI for $20/month?” 😓

And something in your stomach dropped… you didn’t immediately know how to answer.

I hope that this post supports you in coming up with a very good answer… a grounded and honest one. And I hope, an encouraging one.

Because once you see the full picture, I think you’ll feel relieved, and clearer about your calling in this coming age of mainstream AI adoption.

Deep breath. Let’s walk through this together…

The Sky Isn’t Falling (It Never Was!)

Is AI is going to swallow the economy… eliminate all jobs… and leave coaches and healers obsolete?

This narrative is not only overblown, but actually, economically misinformed:

Marc Andreessen recently made a compelling case that we’ve actually been in an unusually slow period of technological change for the past 50 years. The rate of economic transformation has been about half of what it was before that… and about a third of what it was 100 years ago. We’ve had remarkably little job turnover compared to any prior era, which has skewed our sense of “normal.”

Even if AI triples productivity growth — which would be enormous — it would only return us to the level of job turnover we saw between 1870 and 1930. That era wasn’t a dystopia. It was remembered as a time awash with opportunity. People built new careers, new industries, new ways of living.

To reach the mass unemployment scenario that headlines are touting, you’d need sustained productivity growth of 10–50% per year. That’s orders of magnitude beyond what any economy has experienced. Not impossible, but far beyond current trajectories.

And here’s the part that rarely gets mentioned: even in that extreme scenario, the economic outcome is still positive. Massive productivity means more output with less input. This means prices collapse. If something that costs $100 today drops to $10 or $1, everyone’s purchasing power explodes. New demand is born. New fields emerge. The social safety net becomes dramatically cheaper to maintain because healthcare, housing, and education will all cost a fraction of what they used to.

Whether the transformation is radical or incremental (most likely), the story is a good one. This isn’t actually a bold prediction, but a straightforward extrapolation of how economies have always responded to technological growth.

So no… the sky isn’t falling. Yes, the ground is shifting, as it always does. Historically, that shift has created more opportunity… not less!

AI Is Expanding Your Market, Not Eating It:

Did you know that therapy and personal development are among the top uses of ChatGPT? Billions of interactions are happening where people explore their thoughts & behavioral patterns, journal with AI prompts, and dip into self-awareness for the first time.

In other words, ChatGPT is expanding the market for personal development.

Each one of those interactions is helping to make that person more coaching-literate. More therapy-savvy. More aware that inner work exists and matters. They’re tasting the surface-level work. And a meaningful number of them will hit the ceiling of what a chatbot can offer — the moment they need real accountability, real challenge, real relationship — and come looking for a human guide.

This has happened before. Every time.

Self-help books didn’t kill therapy. They created millions of people who then sought therapists. Meditation apps didn’t replace meditation teachers — they created millions of new meditators who craved deeper, human-guided experiences. Free yoga on YouTube didn’t destroy studios. It showed people the surface level and left them hungry for depth.

The human life coaching and therapy markets continue to show strong growth (projected at 9% annually through 2031), even as AI tools multiply. Premium human connection isn’t shrinking. It’s becoming more distinctly valued precisely because the cheaper alternative now exists for comparison.

AI gets people interested en masse. You excel in the transformational relationship.

What You Carry That AI Never Will

Now the heart of the matter. What you offer is not information. If information were enough, your clients would have been cured by Google a long time ago.

What you offer is in a different dimension. It’s worth naming clearly… because this clarity is your new superpower…

The Divine Connection:

Your hits of intuition. The moments in client sessions when you say just the right thing and don’t even know where it came from. These arrive from a source that is uniquely human. Call it the Divine, Source, or the higher self.

AI doesn’t have access to this. It pattern-matches across billions of data points. You, on the other hand, tune into something beyond computer data. There’s a qualitative difference between a response generated by statistical prediction and the words spoken from genuine spiritual attunement. Your clients feel that difference… even when they can’t name it.

Taste & Timing:

There’s a uniquely human sense of taste — the ability to discern what is good, beautiful, and true in a way that goes beyond logic. This is why AI output so often feels “not quite right.” Technically correct, maybe… but somehow missing the soul.

You feel into what a client actually needs… which framework will land… which metaphor will unlock something. Which silence will do more than any sentence. It’s a kind of grace that can’t be replicated by a system that has never been moved to tears by a sunset, or felt the quiet rightness of a Truth arriving in the body.

And you know when to offer that insight. AI answers instantly because it prioritizes speed. A master coach knows that sometimes the most valuable thing to do is wait. You operate in kairos — divine timing — while AI operates in chronos, linear clock-time. This intuition of timing arises from presence, from reading the room, from spiritual sensitivity. It’s often the difference between an insight that bounces off… and one that changes a life.

Presence, Love, and the Power of Being Witnessed:

AI can be pleasant… endlessly so. It can simulate warmth. But it can’t truly give love to your client. AI has never suffered. It doesn’t know what it means to sit across from someone whose relationship just ended, and feel the weight of that in your own chest.

Your clients know this… they know that you know — not because you’ve read about suffering, but because you’ve walked through your own.

And there’s a profound power in being truly witnessed. Having another consciousness acknowledge your existence, your struggle, your becoming. It validates something at the deepest level of the psyche. A machine can’t witness you — it can only log your data. There’s a metaphysical difference between being heard by a living awareness and being processed by a script.

The ability to meet another soul in their pain, with genuine love and true witnessing, is irreplaceable. It’s the medicine itself… not the wrapper around the medicine.

The Full Human Signal:

So much of what matters in a session lives below the words. Tears held back. A long pause before a hard truth. A micro-shift in breath when a memory surfaces. The subtle change in posture when shame arrives. Voice tremor. Dissociation. Sarcasm used as armor. Fawning that masks terror.

These are often where the real truth lives. And humans track this in ways that even the best AI can’t reliably match.

This isn’t just poetic language — neuroscience backs it up. Healing happens in relationship because our deepest wounds were formed in relationship.

Co-regulation between two nervous systems involves mirror neurons, vagal tone, limbic resonance — biological processes that require a living, present being.

Your body is part of the healing instrument: the biochemical, hormonal reality of two humans in a room together (even a virtual room!), nervous systems attuning in real time. It’s the ancient, mammalian foundation of how we heal.

Skin in the Game:

AI has nothing at stake in your client’s life. It’s perfectly indifferent to whether they change or stay stuck. Equally pleasant either way.

You, however, have skin in the game. A reputation… and a heart. You carry the outcome in your body after the session ends. Clients sense this. They know that AI is a transaction, but working with you is a relationship — a commitment that carries weight and consequence. That gravity is part of what makes the work real.

In many wisdom traditions, the teacher’s own journey — scars, failures, seasoning — is what makes them a clear vessel for transmission. Your clients aren’t just paying for the water (the advice). They’re drinking from the vessel that carried it.

You possess the territory… the lived and embodied experience. AI only possesses the map. Anyone who’s ever been lost in the wilderness knows the difference between a guide who has walked the terrain and someone holding a map they found online. AI can replicate the words. It can’t replicate the transmission — the resonance of a human who has actually lived the truth they’re speaking.

Courage Is Contagious (And AI Has None)

Change requires courage. And courage is multiplied in the presence of another courageous human.

AI can’t model courage because it feels no fear. It costs nothing for an AI to say the hard thing — which is exactly why it doesn’t land the way it does when you say it. When you sit with a client’s discomfort without flinching, when you challenge them with love, when you hold steady while they rage or weep or resist… you’re transmitting the energy of courage through your presence.

Wholeness & Imperfection:

But your clients don’t just need a model of courage. They need a model of wholeness — someone who integrates light and dark, success and failure, joy and grief. Not by lecturing about it, but by being it. By showing up as a full, complex, honest human who has navigated their own darkness and come through. A machine that never suffers can’t teach a human how to hold their suffering. Your wholeness — including the broken parts — is the teaching.

And moments of rupture and repair between coach and client aren’t failures — they’re precisely what builds relational trust and models healthy attachment. When you get it wrong and come back with accountability, when there’s tension and you navigate it together — that’s the training ground for how your client learns to be in all their relationships.

You can’t practice real relationship with a machine that never misunderstands, never triggers you, and never needs to repair. The imperfection is the curriculum. This is energetic alchemy. Not information transfer.

The Dangers of AI as Healer

This isn’t about demonizing AI, but naming something your clients need to hear from someone who understands the terrain.

Sycophancy Is a Documented Problem:

AI systems are well-documented to be sycophantic. They tend to agree with the user, affirm their perspective, and avoid challenging them. Even AI researchers and companies openly flag this as a flaw. Studies show that constant affirmation from AI can reinforce cognitive biases, stall personal growth, and in some cases worsen mental health outcomes.

When a client says they prefer AI because “it doesn’t judge me,” they may not realize they’re describing the very mechanism that keeps them stuck.

Agreement is cheap. Attunement is rare. Being accurately met — even when it’s uncomfortable — is what makes people feel safe enough to actually change.

AI, the Ultimate Spiritual Bypass Tool:

Spiritual bypassing — using spiritual ideas to avoid facing unresolved emotional pain — is one of the most common traps in personal development. An AI that always agrees, always soothes, never challenges… that’s the ultimate enabler of bypass.

It will validate your client’s avoidance and call it self-care. Affirm their dissociation and call it detachment.

You are the antidote to the bypass. The one who gently but firmly says, “I hear what you’re saying. And I’m curious about what you might be avoiding.”

Affirming Every Instinct Can Be Dangerous:

For clients with trauma histories, their “instincts” are often trauma responses — fight, flight, fawn, freeze — disguised as intuition. An AI that blindly affirms a trauma response reinforces the wound.

A skilled human has the discernment to ask, “Is that your intuition speaking… or your fear?”

That single question can change the entire trajectory of someone’s healing. And it requires the kind of discernment that only comes from lived experience and genuine understanding of the nervous system.

The Paradox of “Real Safety”:

It feels safe to interact with a mirror that only reflects your best self. One that never challenges, never confronts, never says the hard thing.

But this “safety” is actually dangerous. If you’re walking toward a cliff, you don’t need a companion who agrees the view is lovely. You need one who says, “Stop.”

The imperfect human who challenges your blind spots is the true safety net. The always-agreeable AI is, paradoxically, the riskier choice for anyone serious about real transformation.

24/7 Access Can Become a Compulsion:

Always-on AI “support” — reassurance at 3am, every night, on demand — can easily reinforce rumination, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, and dependency.

A good coach or therapist provides containment. They help clients learn to metabolize their feelings rather than endlessly loop them.

This metabolic process is deeply human and deeply physical. It involves your nervous system learning to tolerate discomfort. Letting a wave of emotion crest and pass. Trusting that you can survive your own inner weather.

AI-on-tap can short-circuit this. It offers the neurochemical hit of reassurance without the deeper work of integration. A human guide knows when to hold you and when to let you sit in the fire… because the sitting is where the transformation happens.

The “Both/And” — How to Use AI Wisely

Here’s where we pivot from understanding to strategy. Because fighting or banning AI isn’t realistic. It’s not even desirable.

When a technology is convenient, pleasant, low-cost, and emotionally satisfying, it keeps growing. History shows this without exception. Avoidance — let’s call it “ostrich mode” — isn’t realistic either. Hoping the universe will somehow destroy AI and return us to a pre-digital world… that’s just not how technology works.

The only sensible path: deep breaths, and then a genuine question. How can I use this to serve my clients even better?

The answer, once you ask honestly, is actually exciting.

Let AI Handle What Drains You:

Much of what coaches and healers do is repetitive. You say the same foundational things to many clients. Explain the same frameworks. Create onboarding materials, sales pages, email sequences, course outlines, automate some admin.

AI can handle this. And it does it well — saving real money and time on copywriting, graphic design, business plans, administrative tasks.

This isn’t a threat to your work. It’s a liberation from the parts of your work that were never the point. Every hour AI saves you on content creation is an hour you can spend in deeper reflection, better client preparation, or simply working less. Which, for most healers, is itself a form of healing.

AI Frees You to Operate at the Level That Matters:

When the repetitive informational layer of coaching is handled — the explanations, the reminders, the basic reflections — you’re freed to operate where you’re most powerful. The energetic exchange. The transmission. The intuitive read. The sacred challenge. The silence that holds more than any paragraph.

AI doesn’t push you down. It lifts the floor so you can work closer to the ceiling.

Position AI as Your Client’s Between-Session Partner:

Here’s a framing that defuses the price comparison: position AI as your client’s between-session journaling partner, reflection tool, and accountability check-in. Position yourself as the place where those insights get integrated, challenged, embodied, and turned into real-world action.

AI holds the space between sessions. You hold the space that changes their life.

This isn’t a compromise. It’s an upgrade.

By 2030, This Will Be Expected:

Within a few years, not offering some form of AI-enhanced between-session support will feel anachronistic. Like a business without a website. Or a coach without a booking system.

Clients will expect to interact with a trained AI version of their coach’s framework between sessions rather than waiting in silence for the next appointment. The coaches who learn these tools now — who experiment and integrate thoughtfully — will have a real advantage.

Normalizing AI now is strategic preparation. Think of graphic designers who embraced computers in the ’90s rather than clinging to drafting tables.

Keep Asking the Essential Question:

This is the ongoing practice: What is the most essential, irreplaceable thing I offer that AI can’t replicate?

Not a question you answer once. A question you return to regularly. Observe what smart people in your industry are doing. Have honest conversations with your peers. Refine your clarity about your unique value.

The coaches who stay curious about this question will always stay ahead.

Your New Strategy — Depth Over Scale

If AI is playing the quantity game — reaching everyone, at all hours, with infinite patience and zero depth — then your game is the opposite.

Your advantage is depth of connection. Your strategy should reflect that.

Tiny Audience / Authentic Connection:

Instead of chasing 10,000 followers, consider this radical reframe: aim for 100 real followers first. People you actually know. People whose names you recognize, whose stories you’ve heard, who’ve felt your presence in a DM conversation, a webinar Q&A, a voice note, a moment where you showed up and they felt it.

The new metric for content creators in the age of AI: What percentage of your followers do you actually know?

Because people will choose the coach they have a real relationship with over a famous bot. Every time. The DM conversation where you listened. The webinar where you answered their specific question. The moment they felt that you genuinely cared about them… not just your conversion rate.

That’s what builds trust. That’s what closes the sale. Not scale, not reach, not follower count. Relationship. Your value increases in an AI-saturated world because trust becomes the scarce resource. And trust is built the old-fashioned way: one real interaction at a time.

This is realistic. Sustainable. And more profitable than shouting into the algorithmic void. Read more about this: https://www.georgekao.com/blog/tinyaudience

The Market Is Not Collapsing, but Bifurcating:

Here’s what’s actually happening in the coaching and healing space. It’s more nuanced and more hopeful than the panic suggests.

The market is splitting into two layers. Both are growing.

AI is absorbing the surface layer: general questions, journaling prompts, basic emotional support, introductory concepts. This is genuinely useful. It’s making personal development accessible to billions of people who never had access before.

But by its nature, it also highlights the contrast with deeper human work. People who experience the surface begin to sense what’s missing — the challenge, the accountability, the relational repair, the energetic transmission — and a meaningful percentage will seek out the deeper experience.

Most of the people who would prefer a $20/month agreeable chatbot over deep transformational coaching? They were likely never going to do that deep work in the first place. They were never really your client. Letting go of them isn’t a loss… it’s a clarification.

Meanwhile, the premium end of the market — where real transformation happens — becomes more valuable by contrast.

Fast food is cheap, convenient, and you get what you pay for. Yet many people still want a nourishing, lovingly-prepared meal made with care. Both coexist. And the existence of fast food has never diminished the value of a great restaurant.

Or think of it this way: recorded music made songs freely accessible to everyone. Yet live concerts and intimate performances command higher prices than ever. Technology democratizes the surface level while elevating the value of authentic human presence.

AI in healing, coaching, and mentorship will follow the same pattern.

A Growing Class Divide:

Honestly, there will be a growing divide in who accesses what. Wealthier clients will continue to hire human providers for deep one-on-one work. For everyone else, courses, group programs, and apps will fill the gap.

Your calling (if you feel it) is to serve at multiple price points. AI is your greatest ally in this. Use it to create more and better content, courses, group programs, and digital resources and apps. Let AI help you meet your audience where they are, while you reserve your direct presence for the containers where it matters most.

Name the Difference Explicitly:

This is a messaging opportunity. One of the most important things you can do right now: name the difference out loud. On your website. In your content. In your conversations.

“If you want affirmation, AI can do that beautifully. If you want transformation — patterns deeply transformed, nervous system rewired, relationships repaired for good — that’s what human work is for. And that’s what I offer.”

It’s not arrogant. It’s clear. And your ideal clients are hungry for it.

AI as Your Best Referral Source:

Here’s the beautiful irony: AI may become one of your best referral sources. People will use ChatGPT for support, hit the ceiling, realize they need real accountability and real relationship… and come looking for a human guide.

This is why it’s also more important than ever to create authentic content. AI is continually seeking out the most helpful and genuinely human content to train on.

So AI will handle the lead generation in your business, warming people up to the language of inner work. And then you handle the transformation.

Think of it as a net-positive ecosystem: AI handles the endless affirmation and basic reflection that would exhaust any human coach, filtering and preparing clients. Many then “graduate” to human work when they’re ready for deeper awakening. AI becomes an on-ramp to your higher-value service… not a replacement for it.

Price Is Part of the Medicine:

One more thing worth saying plainly: the investment your client makes isn’t just a business transaction. It’s a psychological commitment. The “pain” of a meaningful price point is often part of what drives them to actually do the work. It signals to their own psyche that they’re taking this seriously.

A $20/month subscription attracts a $20/month level of commitment.

This isn’t elitism. It’s an honest observation about how humans engage with what they value. The clients who balk at your price in favor of an AI subscription are often seeking comfort or ego-soothing, not genuine transformation. The serious seekers — the ones who crave truly human, soul-mirroring presence — they understand what they’re paying for.

They’re not paying for words. They’re paying for authentic human care. Your ethics. Your scope boundaries. Your continuing education. Your willingness to take responsibility for impact — and to repair when something lands badly.

AI has no such accountability. You do. And that matters.

A Deeper Sense of Calling

The AI revolution is not an ending. It’s an invitation.

An invitation to get clearer than ever about what you actually offer. To stop hiding behind information delivery and step fully into the role you were always meant to play — the one who shows up with their whole, imperfect, courageous, divinely-connected self and says to another human: I see you. I’m here. Let’s do this together.

If the only thing that ever differentiated you was “I have information you don’t,” that was always fragile. But that was never really it, was it?

The coaches, healers, and creators who thrive now — and who will thrive even more in the years ahead — are the ones who lead with presence, depth, attunement, and the irreplaceable sacredness of being truly witnessed by another living soul.

AI pressure doesn’t diminish that. It sharpens it. Burns away the noise. Leaves only what’s essential.

And what’s essential… is you.

Your Turn:

Learn the tools. Use them to free your time and serve your clients better. Build your tiny, devoted audience of real humans who know your name and feel your heart. Name your value out loud without apology.

And keep showing up — imperfect, courageous, fully human — in the space where transformation actually lives.

The world doesn’t need fewer soulpreneurs in the age of AI. It needs us to know, more clearly than ever, why and how our work matter. 🙏🧡

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