A few weeks ago, I spent three hours with someone who sits in the top 10-20 ambassadors for Claude, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) model built by Anthropic. He described what he actually does: he walks into organisations with 5,000 to 7,000 people and shows them how to downsize to seven or eight people - each one working alongside multiple AI agents that now do the work entire departments used to do. The agents aren't assistants sitting next to employees. They are the employees.
One organisation's annual outflow, he told me, dropped from roughly $7 million to somewhere around $7000.
I've been in the coaching and creator economy for eight years. I've watched three technology waves reshape how knowledge gets sold - social media, the funnel-and-webinar era, and now agentic AI. Nothing I've seen has made the ground shift as fast as that one conversation. And it's why I think the coaching industry, as most people are still building it, is about to become obsolete.
What he's describing isn't automation in the old, narrow sense of shaving off a few repetitive tasks. It's agents absorbing entire categories of manual, repetitive work which changes who becomes valuable in this economy. The people who learn to direct AI, rather than compete with it, come out ahead. And there's a second effect that gets less airtime: as jobs disappear into this kind of restructuring, a wave of people are being pushed into entrepreneurship - not out of ambition, but because they lost the job that used to define them, and building something of their own is the only option left.
I don't say this to be dramatic - I say it because it's been a pattern in my own career, and patterns are worth naming. I was in sound engineering in 2001, before it was even a recognised career. I was testing on mobile devices years before smartphones existed. I started a digital marketing agency in 2011, riding the social wave three to four years before it peaked. I moved into digital coaching in 2018, two years before COVID pushed an entire industry online overnight.
{{/usCountry}}I don't say this to be dramatic - I say it because it's been a pattern in my own career, and patterns are worth naming. I was in sound engineering in 2001, before it was even a recognised career. I was testing on mobile devices years before smartphones existed. I started a digital marketing agency in 2011, riding the social wave three to four years before it peaked. I moved into digital coaching in 2018, two years before COVID pushed an entire industry online overnight.
{{/usCountry}}Each time, the same thing happened: I wasn't smarter than the market, I was just early enough to build before the crowd arrived. That's the position I want every coach reading this to understand exists right now, with agentic AI, before it becomes the obvious move everyone else makes in 2027.
Here's the model I use to explain where we've been and where we're going.
From roughly 2000 to 2020, coaching operated in the age of the expert. The coach was the product. Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield - authority came from personal charisma and direct access. Revenue was tied to the coach's calendar. If the coach wasn't in the room, nothing happened. It was, by design, a business that could never scale past one person's time.
From 2020 to now, we've lived through the age of the creator. The course and the personal brand became the product. Webinars and funnels let one coach reach thousands. Automation made delivery scalable - a five-person team could now run a 15,000-member community, something unthinkable in the expert era. But the ceiling of this model is showing: coaches are scaling information distribution, not scaling actual transformation. Content is abundant. Implementation is still rare.
What comes next - and what I believe defines 2026 to 2035 - is the age of transformation ecosystems. The product is no longer the coach, and it's no longer the course. It's the community, the system, and the measurable transformation a member goes through. The coach becomes an ecosystem architect rather than a lecturer. AI agents handle the repetitive layer - customer support, personalised learning paths, first-line responses. Human coaches focus on the one thing AI genuinely cannot do: connect with another human being.
There's a question I hear constantly right now: if AI can build your funnel, your course, your ads, and your customer support in a single prompt, what's left for a coach to do?
Everything that actually matters. Bots don't buy from bots. AI doesn't want money, doesn't feel lonely, and doesn't need belonging - humans do, increasingly so, in a world where technology is accelerating and human connection is thinning out. The coaching businesses that will matter over the next decade are the ones that treat AI as the layer that removes friction, not the layer that replaces relationship. My prediction: by 2027, most of the operational work in this industry - webinars, ad management, sales follow-up - will be running on autonomous systems. The coaches still standing will be the ones who used that freed-up time to get better at the human-to-human part of the job, not the ones who tried to automate their way out of it entirely.
\The person who showed me the $7 million to $7000 transformation isn't an outlier working on one project - he's doing this repeatedly, downsising and "agentising" one organisation after another. The uncomfortable implication is that job security, in its old form, is disappearing for anyone who isn't either irreplaceable or equipped to work alongside AI at the output level of a hundred people. Most employees were never trained for that. So a meaningful share of the population isn't going to choose entrepreneurship - they're going to be pushed into it, because the job that used to define them no longer exists. For them, the question isn't "should I start something," it's "how do I sustain my family without a paycheck." They will need to learn entrepreneurship out of necessity, not ambition.
That reshapes where the next opportunity sits for coaches. The sectors set to absorb the sharpest displacement over the next decade aren't abstract: AI and data science, robotics and automation, drones and autonomous transport, aerospace, healthcare, and environmental sustainability. Somebody is going to have to teach a first wave of newly displaced professionals how to build businesses, careers, and communities inside those fields. That's a coaching opportunity most of the industry hasn't even noticed yet.
If there's one practical takeaway, it's this: don't wait for the technology to feel finished before you start building around it. The instinct in every one of these shifts - sound engineering, mobile, social, coaching - is to wait for certainty. Certainty arrives after the opportunity has already been priced in by everyone else.
The move right now is to build the three-layer stack early: a real knowledge base, a real community (not a broadcast list), and AI-driven systems layered on top of both. Coaches who get this combination right in the next 18 months will have a multi-year head start on the ones who wait for the "safe" version of AI adoption to arrive.
The coaches who win the next decade won't be the best performers on stage. They'll be the ones who built the most vibrant, most trusted ecosystem behind them.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Siddharth Rajsekar, founder, Internet Lifestyle Hub.