The coaching industry has long operated under a fundamental constraint: high-quality coaching has been largely the domain of executives and senior leaders. While organizations recognize the transformative power of coaching, the economics simply don’t work for extending this service to the broader workforce. A typical large enterprise might spend several hundred million dollars annually to provide coaching to 100,000 employees – a non-starter for most organizations.
CoachHub, a global leader in digital coaching with over 3,500 certified business coaches across 90 countries, believes it has cracked this code with AIMY™, its AI-powered coaching solution, which has just reached general availability. After two years of development and extensive testing with over 40,000 research users, AIMY represents CoachHub’s ambitious vision to democratize coaching and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Overview of CoachHub and AIMY
Founded in 2018, CoachHub has established itself as a leading platform for enterprise coaching, having raised $330 million in funding with backing from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Sofina. The company’s human coaching services already support 15-20% of the workforce in client organizations – primarily managers, high-potential employees, and executives. AIMY is designed to extend coaching support to the remaining 80% of the workforce: the individual contributors who form the backbone of most organizations.
Built from the ground up with AI at its core, powered by Microsoft Azure, AIMY leverages behavioral science frameworks, partnership with the International Coach Federation (ICF), and insights from CoachHub’s extensive coaching database to deliver personalized, contextually relevant coaching conversations. The solution integrates with CoachHub’s existing platform, creating what the company positions as a comprehensive coaching ecosystem that serves employees at all levels.
Unique Value Proposition
What sets AIMY apart is its foundation in proven coaching methodologies rather than generic AI assistance. As Hilary Aylesworth, CoachHub’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, emphasized during a recent briefing, “ChatGPT is not peer-reviewed. It’s going to find information from any corner of the internet and spit it to you. There isn’t a framework in place to understand how a coaching principle aligns with the leadership styles that a particular business wants to promote.”
AIMY addresses three critical market needs:
- Scalability: Organizations can now provide coaching-level support to their entire workforce without the prohibitive costs of human coaching. The solution maintains coaching best practices while making them accessible at scale.
- Personalization: Unlike generic development tools, AIMY learns individual communication styles, career aspirations, and professional contexts to deliver truly personalized coaching experiences.
- Integration with existing workflows: Rather than being another standalone tool, AIMY integrates into the flow of work, making coaching a natural part of daily professional development rather than an occasional formal exercise.
Key Features and Capabilities
AIMY offers several distinct coaching modes designed to meet different workplace needs:
- Situational coaching helps employees navigate specific workplace challenges, from difficult conversations to performance issues. The AI coach uses established frameworks to guide users through reflection and action planning, making it particularly valuable for addressing in-the-moment workplace situations.
- Goal setting and tracking break down broad professional aspirations into actionable milestones. This feature embodies what Aylesworth calls “just one percent better every week” – the idea that small, consistent improvements aggregate into significant professional growth over time.
- Role play and practice provide a safe space for employees to rehearse challenging conversations or scenarios. During beta testing, 74% of users leveraged role play for delivering feedback, while 52% used it to practice conversations with their managers, highlighting the demand for safe practice environments.
The platform’s personalization begins with an onboarding process that assesses communication styles, career stage and professional goals. Users can select from different AI coach avatars and voice options, creating a coaching relationship that feels authentic and engaging. The system supports over 60 languages and adapts its communication style to match individual preferences.
Advanced analytics and integration give organizations visibility into development trends across their workforce. HR leaders can see anonymized data about coaching topics, engagement levels and skill development patterns – valuable insights for broader learning and development strategy.
Innovations
CoachHub designed AIMY with artificial intelligence as the foundational technology. This approach enables more sophisticated personalization and contextual understanding.
The platform’s emphasis on behavioral science and proven coaching frameworks differentiates it from generic AI assistants. AIMY incorporates peer-reviewed coaching methodologies and maintains ethical boundaries – for example, it won’t provide advice on health or mental health issues, instead directing users to appropriate professional resources.
The integration with CoachHub’s existing ecosystem creates a unique value proposition. Organizations can provide AI coaching to their broader workforce while maintaining human coaching for senior leaders, creating a coherent coaching strategy across all organizational levels.
Benefits for Potential Clients
The platform addresses common organizational challenges around professional development. Many employees report that their managers don’t understand their career goals. AIMY helps bridge this gap by facilitating career vision exercises and providing frameworks for development conversations.
For HR leaders, AIMY provides valuable workforce insights while requiring minimal administrative overhead. The platform’s analytics capabilities help organizations understand skill development trends and identify areas where additional support might be needed.
The rapid implementation timeline – weeks rather than months – makes AIMY attractive for organizations needing quick wins or facing urgent development needs due to retirements or skills gaps.
Market Context
Most AI coaching solutions fall into two categories: those that add AI features to existing platforms (like performance management or learning systems) and those built specifically as AI coaching platforms. The latter category remains relatively small but is seeing increased investment and interest from enterprise clients seeking scalable coaching solutions. Here is an overview of selected solutions:
Attensi is an AI-powered gamified simulation training platform that focuses on “learning by doing” in virtual 3D environments. AI coaching comes through Attensi REALTALK, which allows users to practice conversations with realistic virtual humans powered by generative AI.
BetterUp leads the coaching market with over $1.7 billion in valuation and launched an AI coaching offering in January 2025, positioning itself as “the only platform to offer a complete approach to development” by combining always-on AI access with human coaching expertise. BetterUp’s AI has been core to their platform for over a decade, using insights from 4+ million coaching sessions and a network of 4,000+ ICF-certified coaches.
CAISY by Skillsoft was released in 2023. It is an AI-powered coach that creates a supportive environment for practicing challenging work-related conversations. Like AIMY, CAISY provides direct AI coaching experiences where users engage in conversations with AI coaches rather than just receiving insights from human coaches. CAISY focuses specifically on practicing challenging workplace conversations in a “safe environment” without fear of consequences.
Marlee, based in Australia, was launched in 2020 and is the first AI coach. Based on 20+ years of evidence-based research, Marlee offers both assessment and development capabilities, with a focus on collaboration and performance coaching. Unlike other platforms, Marlee provides extensive free offerings and uses AI to provide fully tailored coaching pathways for both personal and professional goals.
Nadia by Valence is specifically designed as an AI leadership coach that provides always-on, personalized, and actionable guidance. Available in 50+ languages, Nadia uses voice-driven interactions and is designed to learn who you are, how you work, and how to help.
Rocky.ai is an AI coaching platform that offers business coaching solutions. It provides a white-label AI coaching platform that allows coaches and companies to create their own branded AI coaching apps, with features like leadership development, communication skills mastery, onboarding, mentoring, and role-play simulations.
Torch offers a program-centric approach that combines individual coaching with group learning, using AI-powered insights to analyze coaching sessions and provide anonymized insights across organizations. Torch differentiates itself by embedding coaching into structured development programs rather than just providing standalone coaching services.
What Makes AIMY Stand Out and Areas for Development
AIMY’s primary differentiator lies in its deep coaching heritage and AI-first architecture. CoachHub built AIMY from the ground up with artificial intelligence as the core technology, enabling more sophisticated personalization and contextual understanding.
The partnership with the ICF and extensive testing with over 40,000 research users provides credibility that pure technology companies often lack. However, AIMY has some development challenges.
The voice recognition capabilities, while functional, require refinement to match the polish of consumer AI assistants that users now expect. The platform would benefit from deeper HR system integrations beyond basic implementation. While AIMY can be deployed quickly, more sophisticated integration with performance management systems, skills frameworks, and career progression tools would strengthen its enterprise value proposition. AIMY’s analytics capabilities, while solid, could be enhanced with predictive insights about employee development trajectories and career progression recommendations.
Who Should Consider CoachHub’s AIMY
AIMY appears well-suited for several types of organizations:
- Large enterprises struggling with the economics of coaching will find AIMY’s scalability compelling. Organizations with 10,000+ employees can provide coaching-level support to their entire workforce without the prohibitive costs of human coaching.
- Companies undergoing rapid change, whether through growth, digital transformation or industry disruption, will benefit from AIMY’s ability to provide consistent development support during periods of uncertainty.
- Organizations with limited L&D resources can leverage AIMY to provide sophisticated development planning without requiring extensive internal expertise or program management.
- Companies emphasizing internal mobility will appreciate AIMY’s goal-setting and career development features, which help employees understand advancement pathways and required skill development.
- Mid-market organizations that have outgrown basic HR tools but aren’t ready for enterprise-level complexity represent a particular sweet spot for CoachHub. These companies often need more sophisticated development capabilities than basic platforms provide but lack the resources for extensive human coaching programs.
CoachHub’s AIMY represents a step toward democratizing access to high-quality coaching. By combining proven coaching methodologies with AI-powered personalization and scalability, the platform addresses a market need while maintaining the quality and ethical standards that effective coaching requires.
