The Best AI Tools For Coaches

I dislike it when people start with “People are always asking me…” because it’s usually bollocks.

But, ya know, seriously, people are fucking always asking me what AI tools I use!

Even my wife asked me the other night.

And about the only two things she ever asks me are, “What do you want for dinner?” and “Are you really going out dressed like that?”

So, in the spirit of giving you what you actually want, here are the AI tools I use regularly, what I use them for, and what I pay.

Quick note: I’m not listing tools like Canva, MailerLite, Zoom, or Loom. I pay for all of them, and they all now have AI built in, but I was using them long before AI became a thing.

The Best AI Tools For Coaches

As a heads up, I’ll update this post as I discover new tools that I think coaches like you can benefit from.

So bookmark the page and pop back.

Last updated 18th November.

ChatGPT Pro – £20 per month

This has been my go-to since it launched at the end of 2022, and it’s still the one that I’m least likely to ever give up.

I was a little bit underwhelmed with the release of ChatGPT-5, but now I’ve got used to using the reasoning model. I think it’s excellent.

It will default to the quicker model, and for most jobs, that’s the best option, especially if you don’t want to sit twiddling your thumbs while it goes through the much slower thinking process.

I really like the voice option, and I use it quite a lot when I’m out walking the dogs.

In that role, ChatGPT essentially becomes my own coach, allowing me to bounce ideas off of it.

Having said that, my biggest concern with ChatGPT at the moment is the frequency with which it gives me subjectively not very good answers.

Fortunately, I almost always know when this is the case, but many coaches do not.

On several occasions, I’ve had clients suggest ideas that originated from ChatGPT, which would fall somewhere on the scale between catastrophic and not helpful to their coaching practice.

Only this week, a client told me that ChatGPT had said images for LinkedIn posts weren’t that important. They are essential, and my client wasn’t going to use them.

As such, using ChatGPT without a background knowledge in the topic for which you’re using it is a recipe for disaster at worst, or looking a bit silly or inefective, at best.

I also very much like the image creation capability in ChatGPT that has come on leaps and bounds in the last 12 months.

It can be a bit slow, and if you don’t provide it with much direction, the results aren’t always great, but it can be handy for creating copyright-free images.

I think the next real breakthrough with the LLMs is when they release ChatGPT-6 which Sam Altman has said will include infinite memory.

Claude – £18 per month

I must have cancelled my Claude subscription four or five times now, but I always end up going back.

And the reason I do so is that, despite all the updates and upgrades, ChatGPT still isn’t as good a writer.

I’m currently not using it because I’m doing very little writing with LLMs, but for any coach just using chatbots for writing, this is probably the best tool.

Google Gemini 2.5 Advanced (included with Workspace – $19.99 otherwise)

Google Gemini has shown significant improvement over the last six months.

In fact, I’d say Gemini’s Deep Research is now better than the ChatGPT version.

I was already paying for Google Workspace because my email is all tied to my domain, so I’m fortunate that I got 2.5 Advanced rolled into that.

I’m sure power users would suggest that ChatGPT is better for some tasks and Gemini is better for others, but to me, they seem much the same.

As I do with Claude when it comes to writing. I often run projects in parallel with ChatGPT and switch over when one starts to yield better results.

I’m also starting to use Gemini more for search because it uses Google rather than ChatGPT, which uses Bing.

I would encourage any coach to experiment with Google Gemini, as the free Pro version appears to be more effective than the free version of ChatGPT.

So, if you’re on a budget, it may be a viable option.

NotebookLM – (included with Workspace)

I have shared 7 reasons coaches should be using NotebookLM here, and I highly recommend every coach get familiar with it.

You don’t need to pay for Workspace or Google products to get access to the free version, which will be sufficient for the vast majority of coaches.

Every coach should be using NotebookLM

Perplexity – free

A few months ago, I was running to Perplexity for almost every search.

However, now that ChatGPT and Claude can go online, and given how much I use Google Gemini, I bounce around, sometimes depending on nothing more scientific than which tab I notice first.

Perplexity utilises both Google and Bing APIs, as well as its own web crawler, which explains why it was so effective at retrieving current information when others struggled.

It also favours YouTube and video content in general quite heavily, so if you prefer to consume your information that way, it’s undoubtedly a great option.

There was a time I’d have been genuinely upset to lose access to Perplexity, but now I barely notice when I’m using something else instead.

What felt revolutionary 12-18 months ago now feels routine.

Perplexity Pro provides access to ChatGPT, Claude, and other premium models, along with advanced research capabilities.

So, if you’re a coach who wants everything in one place and to only pay for one tool, it’s worth considering.

Note: Perplexity, we’re running a deal that I signed up for that gave me Perplexity Pro for 12 months. The deal was available to anybody who had a PayPal business account.

Grok

Other than occasionally for image creation because it’s so fast, I rarely use Grok.

And that’s mainly for ethical reasons and because Elon Musk is a wanker.

I don’t like the way xAI releases new models that clearly haven’t been red-teamed properly (the process of testing something for safety purposes.

From what I have read, Grok is on a par with the other models, so if you want to use it, knock yourself out.

Willow Voice – £15 per month (£12 if paid annually)

Typing has always been one of my top incompetences.

But no longer, thanks to seeing a demo of Willow Voice on the Marketing Against the Grain podcast.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this Mac plugin has had the most positive impact on my business since the arrival of ChatGPT.

It is an AI voice-to-text tool that allows me to write by holding the Control key (you can set up any hot key) and speaking.

It works anywhere I can type, including documents, forms, email, WhatsApp, social media platforms, and even Spotify.

It took me five minutes to set up, required no training, and, unless I babble insanely, is very accurate.

It’s helping me crush it with prompts.

However, possibly the most significant improvement it has allowed me to make is with my AI prompting ability.

I no longer worry about not putting as much into the prompt as I would like because of how long it takes me to type everything.

I simply talk until the LLM has everything inside my head.

It ignores my ums and ahs and filters the bollocks, which suits someone who talks a lot of bollocks.

If I plan to reuse a prompt, I ask the AI to tidy it and save it so that I can run variations in parallel.

I have tried plenty of voice-to-text tools in the past, and nothing has worked anything like as well as this does.

If you want to try it, here’s my affiliate link. If you use that, not only do I get a month free of charge, but so do you!

Captions – $9.99 per month

If you have seen any of my YouTube videos, then the captions I add are all generated by this piece of software.

As subtitles are an absolute necessity on YouTube, this is a no-brainer for me.

It also now has a feature that allows it to go full AI mental mode for videos of less than one minute.

You can see an example of it in action here, which I created in about a minute.

Fathom – (free)

I have been using Fathom for recording my Zoom meetings for a couple of years, and I absolutely love it.

There was a period when I used the paid version because it generated a brilliant summary with next actions that I then sent to clients.

However, It soon became just as easy to take the transcription and drop it in either Notebook LM or ChatGPT and do the same thing from there using a custom prompt.

Just remember to get the okay from any clients before using their transcripts. I get the okay now on my intake form.

Other tools I have trialled

ElevenLabs – $11 per month

I have wanted to turn The Clarity Method into an audiobook for a number of years.

After watching an ElevenLabs demonstration of someone cloning their voice, I signed up for a month.

It was reasonably good, but I couldn’t get the clone to be close enough to me for me to feel comfortable asking it to narrate the book.

Having said that, that was a year or so ago, and perhaps the technology is now available to do this. It’s certainly worth taking a look at.

Midjourney – $10 per month

I used Midjourney back when it was only available on the Discord server, and it was pretty good, but slow.

That’s no longer the case, and it’s now much faster, with incredible results.

However, I have no need for high-quality image production.

I suspect that if I were just starting out as a coach, this might be an area I’d spend more time on, because it could make my branding stand out.

AI Carousel – $14.99 per month

There’s no doubt that carousels perform much better than static posts on LinkedIn.

I paid to have a couple made by a VA at the end of last year, and my reach tripled.

But they feel like vanity metrics because they certainly didn’t bring in any additional clients.

Having said that, I thought it was worth trying out AI Carousel because if I could create carousels in 20 or 30 minutes, then it might be worthwhile to put one or two out a week.

The Interface is clunky and not very user-friendly, with constant editing necessary, it was a bit laborious.

The first one took me over two hours to do, and the second one wasn’t much quicker.

I did get it down to under an hour and a half for the third one, but that’s an expensive AI Carousel when I charge £200 per hour!

For a new coach who’s got lots of spare time and wants to target LinkedIn, I think AI Carousels is worth checking out.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother, and almost all the offerings in this blog post offer more bang for your buck.

Video production

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t said anything about video production.

I did give HeyGen a month-long trial and got mixed results.

That’s not HeyGen’s fault, though, because I have seen some brilliant videos done using their software.

It’s just that, like LLMs, you need to invest proper time learning how text-to-video actually works.

The video above was knocked out in Google Gemini in no time at all.

It’s supposed to show someone getting loads of clients.

Let’s be honest, it’s a bit bollocks.

But that’s classic “garbage in, garbage out” territory because I spent all of 20 seconds crafting the prompt.

Right now, it comes down to where I focus my energy. I’m choosing LLMs over video production. Simple as that.

But here’s what I’m seeing: there’s a real opportunity for coaches who want to dive deep into text-to-video for their marketing.

The Bottom Line, (an unedited summary from Claude)

AI isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s accelerating faster than most coaches can keep up with.

You can either embrace it now and gain a competitive advantage, or you can wait until everyone else figures it out and spend the rest of your coaching career playing catch-up.

The tools I’ve listed here aren’t just shiny objects to play with. They’re business tools that can genuinely help you get more clients, create better content, and run your practice more efficiently.

But here’s the reality nobody talks about: having access to these tools doesn’t automatically make you successful.

You still need to understand your niche, know your ideal client, and be able to market yourself effectively. AI can amplify what you’re already doing well, but it can’t fix fundamental problems with your coaching business.

Start with one or two tools that solve your biggest pain points. Master those before moving on to others.

And remember, your clients don’t care what tools you use. They care about results.

Give them those, and you’ll be fully booked regardless of whether you’re using the latest AI wizardry or a fucking typewriter.