When communications worker Suzanne Selkow decided to open her own consulting practice, she realized that going solo meant fewer opportunities to “turn to a colleague for a gut check,” she says.
Knowing herself to get bogged down in “decision paralysis,” she figured she needed some kind of outside perspective as she launched her business. So she turned to a different kind of mentor—she created an AI career coach using Anthropic’s Claude.
“I figured that was actually a practical use case for an LLM—to be able to take some of those bigger-picture ideas that I had workshopped with a human coach, and turn it into a week-by-week [business] plan,” she says.
Now months into her solo career, Selkow, 36, says she still turns to her AI career coach for certain mentorship-style tasks, like direction for what tone to use with clients.
More and more people seem to be relying on artificial intelligence as an effective career coach. Per 2025 research from business-focused think tank The Conference Board, 96% of workers felt AI was able to give them “customized” coaching, while 91% who had used AI for career coaching said they would use it again. Senior employees, too, are noticing its prevalence across younger workers.
“Junior folks are using AI for career questions very often; I’d say every day,” says Jasmine Singh, general counsel at the legal tech company Ironclad. “Whether they would have turned to more senior folks for those questions or not . . . is the debatable part.”
With so many job-focused worries around AI replacing humans, it’s a bit startling to see the technology being used for mentorship—a uniquely human activity that relies on interpersonal connection for professional growth. But even as more workers look to AI for professional advice, they insist the technology’s role is supplemental to their interactions with human mentors. The AI, according to those who use it, simply helps to fill in gaps that humans wouldn’t want to be bothered with, anyway.
“You are my business coach”
Selkow’s AI coach began with a straightforward but involved prompt.
“You are my business coach. I’m launching a strategic communications advisory business. Here’s my website, which has details on the services that I offer . . . the type of industries that I work in,” she describes. “I need a thought partner to ask questions to help me figure out how to build and scale this business. I need both practical and strategic advice. I’m starting at square one . . . I need you to be firm but supportive, and don’t shy away from telling the hard truths.”
That last instruction was key for avoiding the signature sycophantic language expressed by large language models, as Selkow worries that empty congratulations could give her the wrong ideas by propping up unsound decisions. She also uses her self-tailored Claude career coach to ask about when and how it’s appropriate to follow up with business leads, and has fed it some client call recordings to elicit feedback on how to improve those interactions.
“I found that the feedback echoed things I’ve heard before from coaches, mentors, and managers,” she says, reiterating her own weak points.
Others use AI coaches to teach them how to do their jobs.
When Abby Hegland, 29, started her new role in December as an account executive at Yoodli, a company that offers AI-powered communication role-plays and has a chatbot of the same name, her colleagues were bogged down with end-of-year tasks and had little time to train her. “I knew that I had to be independent and proactive when it came to . . . getting up to speed,” she says.
Hegland closed herself in a phone room at the company’s office and decided to use its own AI product to practice her job. She asked Yoodli things like, “How would you sell to this customer? How would you explain this product feature?” Less than a week in, she says, she was taking customer calls, and even closed a deal.
Another example of junior associates using AI for mentorship that Singh has seen is for career development. “I am currently in this role, doing this thing. I want to be in that role, doing that thing. What are the steps I follow to get from point A to point B?” she’ll see them ask AI. They’ll ask about specific courses they should take to arrive at B, and what experiences they’ll need under their belts. “It’s actually using it as a little bit of a mentor, plus an educational path,” she says.
No awkward moments with AI
Another Yoodli user, Curency Reed, a tenant representation broker at real estate firm Flinn Ferguson Cresa in Seattle, uses the AI to “practice before a big meeting” or to “work through a tough scenario.” While these are activities she could do with the help of a human mentor, she likes that the AI coach meets her where she’s at, she says. “No scheduling, no awkwardness, no waiting for the right mentor to have an open calendar.”
The not needing to wait for or bother superiors and colleagues is big for those seeking AI-generated mentorship. “It felt really good to not have to feel like a burden to some of my other sales colleagues who were trying to close out the year strong,” Hegland says of when she started her job at Yoodli. It also meant that when she did go to those colleagues with questions, they were more strategic, because she’d already done the background research. “I had the opportunity to get some of my basic, entry-level questions out of the way,” she says.
It also helped her practice customer calls exhaustively—an activity a living mentor will eventually tire of. Not AI. “When I’ve done mock calls with managers, typically you just do one,” Hegland says. “It’ll last for 15 to 30 minutes, you get feedback, and then have to wait for the next day to implement it on another mock call.” With AI, Hegland says she was able to “instantaneously hit practice again and redo that demo,” enacting the feedback she’d received right away.
Reed, 25, notes that an AI career coach can make up for where representation in mentorship is lacking in her field. “For someone building a career in commercial real estate, an industry with a very real generational and representation gap,” she says, the “accessible, honest coaching [provided by AI] matters.”
In some fields, like law, there’s a culture in which higher-ups expect junior employees to do their own research before coming to them with queries. In Singh’s experience, junior associates using AI mentors are often “pre-asking questions, so that when they go to their human mentors . . . they’re asking more tailored, specific questions”—kind of like doing a preemptive Google search on a topic, but more efficient.
“The people above you are incredibly senior, and their time is precious,” Selkow says, “especially as you get more senior in your career” and “given how busy everyone is.” Making the most of their time means answering lower-level questions on your own, perhaps with an AI career coach, so you can maximize your moments with flesh-and-blood mentors.
AI doesn’t care about your success
While AI mentorship can ease awkwardness, save juniors workers time, and even help facilitate human mentorship, its glaring lack of humanity raises understandable red flags.
In Psychology Today, for example, psychologist Priya Nalkur writes: “With AI . . . I am never made to feel uncomfortable.” But discomfort is a huge part of work and human relations in general.
“And it’s a skill,” Nalkur continues, “we are dangerously close to losing.”
She insists that assets like “emotional maturity” are “hard-won” through interpersonal experience, not by reading AI-generated feedback on a screen. “The emotional support and personal validation that mentors offer cannot be replicated by algorithms,” echoes Andy Lopata, a professional relationships strategist, in a different post.
Singh agrees. By relying too much on an AI mentor, “you potentially undercut your ability long-term, not only to succeed in your profession because you have not had that skilled experience of asking for help and getting mentorship, but it makes it harder for you yourself to be a mentor,” she says. “All my best mentors came from people who I reached out to proactively, sometimes nervously.”
Plus, AI makes mistakes. Besides hallucinatory responses to fact-finding questions, the technology can “oversimplify situations,” Selkow says, as well as ignore critical points in your back-and-forth. That’s why many opt for AI career coaches as a supplement to human mentors, not a full-on replacement—like Selkow, who has a breathing business coach and regularly talks out work scenarios with former colleagues.
“Human advice is sticky in a way I haven’t experienced with an LLM,” she says. “I can hear the person saying the thing to me, and it surfaces exactly when I need it.” You can also trust that a person’s advice is grounded in real experience, not an aggregation of suggestions online.
Ultimately, the human element just feels different. “My manager actually cares about my career,” Hegland says. “Yoodli [the AI-powered chatbot] doesn’t.”
