Abstract
This study explores how professional coaches perceive and navigate the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into their practice. Twelve professionally trained coaches, with between 3- and 22-years’ experience and working across seven countries, were interviewed, and the data were analysed using Constructivist Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis. The study generates a substantive, exploratory theory of paradigm negotiation: an active, recursive process of boundary-setting, value clarification, and identity reconfiguration through which the participating coaches made sense of AI. Rather than adopting binary pro- or anti-AI positions, participants distinguished between operational augmentation and ethical substitution and articulated what is here termed the absent self as the boundary they drew between human and artificial coaching. Across the accounts, AI operated as a stress test that, for these participants, exposed the limits of behaviourally focused competency models. As a small qualitative study, its findings are offered for analytic transferability rather than statistical generalisation.