I’m replacing facilitators and coaches with AI

Ok, at least that’s what people assume when they hear about our new peer group platform. It’s a natural conclusion, given how AI is reshaping industries. But it’s not quite right.

I’m not replacing facilitators with AI. Instead, I’m rethinking their role entirely.

For three years, I manually curated over 400 peer groups, involving more than 2,500 professionals. It started as a way to help people grow in their careers but it revealed something unexpected.

When you put the right people together, they don’t need constant facilitation.

This insight isn’t obvious. The professional development industry is built on the idea that growth requires continuous guidance. Coaches, trainers, and facilitators are seen as essential for every session. But what if they’re not?

In group after group, I saw the same pattern. With the right mix of experiences and personalities, people naturally step into leadership roles. They ask probing questions, offer insights, and hold each other accountable. As a result, the group becomes a self-sustaining engine of growth.

The key is curation. If you get the group composition right, everything else follows.

This realisation led to a question: Could we scale this? And could we make high-quality peer groups accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford expensive masterminds?

We’re building software to find out and it’s not about AI replacing facilitators. Rather, it’s about AI enabling connections that make continuous facilitation unnecessary.

But curation is just the start. We’re also automating the administrative tasks that bog down group interactions. Scheduling, agenda-setting, follow-ups — the software handles it all. None of this is to replace human interaction. Instead, it’s to remove the friction that prevents it.

Some will argue that AI can’t replicate the human touch of a skilled facilitator. They’re right. It can’t.

But that’s not the goal. The goal is to create conditions where that human touch emerges organically from within the group.

Think about the best conversations you’ve had in your career. The ones that shifted your perspective or solved a nagging problem. Chances are, they weren’t facilitated. They happened spontaneously, with peers who understood your challenges.

We’re trying to make those conversations the norm, not the exception.

This approach solves several problems at once.

It makes peer groups more affordable by reducing the need for constant facilitation. It makes them more scalable — no need to recruit and train an army of coaches. And it makes them more resilient. When groups can function without constant guidance, they don’t fall apart if one person leaves.

…………………

But here’s where it gets interesting. As groups mature and build trust, they often encounter challenges that require specialised expertise. That’s where facilitators and coaches become invaluable — not as constant presences, but as precision instruments.

One way to do this, once we’ve nailed the core experience, is to build an expert marketplace to address this need.

Here’s how it might work: After about 3–4 meetings, groups that have built up trust typically start exploring deeper topics where they might need an outside expert opinion. Because our system has been tracking the group’s conversations, it will notice when they’re discussing topics that could benefit from an outside perspective.

As a result, it will suggest relevant experts based on the group’s specific needs.

When a group selects an expert, that person will receive an overview of the group’s challenges — nothing too personal, just key information. Consequently, when the expert joins the next session, they have all the context and can dive right in. No time wasted.

But the AI’s role goes beyond just connecting groups with human experts. Our AI facilitator works within the context of each group’s onboarding data and ongoing conversations. This means it can provide highly relevant, non-hallucinated suggestions. For instance, if a member asks, “What book should I read?”, the AI draws from the group’s specific context to recommend truly pertinent material.

We’re also developing a proactive facilitator mode.

This level of personalised, context-aware support is something traditional facilitation models simply can’t provide at scale.

So no, we’re not removing human facilitators. Instead, we’re making their job more impactful because groups can summon an expert when they actually need one, and by sharing the cost among members, this makes high-quality facilitation more affordable and accessible for everyone involved.

If our goal is to scale this to a million peer groups (which we will) then the traditional facilitation models simply can’t support that.

Want to be one of the first to test this peer group model and not pay $10k?

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