Three coaching solopreneurs are revolutionizing their businesses by leveraging AI tools to handle administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on what matters most: their clients. Career and executive coaches face a persistent challenge—turning breakthrough insights from one-on-one sessions into actionable follow-up materials without sacrificing their presence during conversations or spending countless hours on administrative work.
Kim Surko, founder of Surko Coaching, found herself overwhelmed by the administrative burden of running a solo leadership coaching practice. “Trying to juggle it all on my own wasn’t an option—it was just impossible to build a sustainable business,” Surko explained. Her solution? Embracing AI tools to handle the responsibility of note-taking, transcription, and client follow-up.
The impact has been transformative across multiple dimensions. Surko reports saving almost an hour per client per day by using AI for notes and summaries, nearly doubling her coaching capacity. She uses Kanbanchi supported by Gemini to create visual progress boards that help clients appreciate their incremental wins, which has significantly improved her client renewal rate.
Katharine Campbell Hirst, founder of KCH Coaching & Advisory, uses AI note-takers and ChatGPT to transform session transcripts into concrete deliverables like pitches, résumés, website copy, and positioning statements. “What used to take weeks of agonizing refinement now takes minutes,” Hirst said. She’s even used AI as a coaching partner, uploading transcripts to receive feedback on her own performance—getting “surprisingly concrete, pattern-based, and immediately actionable” insights.
Liz Morrison of LM Strategic Storytelling built custom projects in Claude to create “Story Banks” from session transcripts, extracting three to six usable narratives per session that clients can immediately deploy for interviews, networking, and social media. She’s also developed a custom ChatGPT tool called Story Explorer that walks prospective clients through story-coaching exercises, often uncovering additional narratives they want to explore further.
Beyond administrative efficiency, AI is enhancing the quality of coaching sessions themselves. Surko used Gemini within Google Docs to create a searchable archive of exercises and prompts collected over her decades-long career, allowing her to pull relevant materials during sessions rather than hunting for them afterward. This improvement enables more progress in each session and maintains momentum with clients.
Key Quotes
Trying to juggle it all on my own wasn’t an option—it was just impossible to build a sustainable business. Leaning into AI was the most natural solution to help with all of that responsibility.
Kim Surko, founder of Surko Coaching, explained how administrative overwhelm threatened her business sustainability before adopting AI tools. This quote captures the existential challenge many solopreneurs face and positions AI as an enabler rather than a luxury.
What used to take weeks of agonizing refinement now takes minutes.
Katharine Campbell Hirst, founder of KCH Coaching & Advisory, described the dramatic time savings from using ChatGPT to transform session transcripts into deliverables like résumés and positioning statements. This illustrates AI’s compression of traditional workflows.
I’ve saved almost an hour per client per day by relying on AI to take notes and summarize them for me.
Kim Surko quantified the specific time savings from AI note-taking tools, adding that she nearly doubled her client capacity as a result. This provides concrete metrics on AI’s business impact for solopreneurs.
The feedback is surprisingly concrete, pattern-based, and immediately actionable—effectively giving me a reflective practice partner I wouldn’t otherwise have access to as a solopreneur.
Katharine Campbell Hirst described using AI to analyze her own coaching performance across client transcripts. This highlights an unexpected use case: AI as a professional development tool for the coaches themselves.
Our Take
What’s particularly compelling about these examples is how they challenge the narrative of AI as a job destroyer. Instead, we’re seeing AI as a capacity multiplier for skilled professionals, enabling them to serve more clients without sacrificing quality. The coaches aren’t using AI to replace their expertise—they’re using it to eliminate the friction between insight and action.
The custom tools these solopreneurs have built (Story Explorer, Story Banks, searchable exercise archives) demonstrate an emerging pattern of professionals becoming citizen developers, tailoring AI to their specific workflows rather than simply adopting off-the-shelf solutions. This suggests the real AI revolution may not be in replacing workers but in empowering them to design their own productivity systems.
Most intriguingly, the improved client renewal rates suggest AI-enhanced coaching may actually deliver better outcomes, not just more efficient processes. When clients can see visual progress and receive immediate, actionable materials, the coaching relationship becomes more tangible and valuable—a reminder that the best AI applications enhance human connection rather than replace it.
Why This Matters
This story illustrates a critical trend in how AI is democratizing business scalability for solopreneurs and small service providers. Traditionally, coaches faced an impossible tradeoff between being present with clients and handling essential administrative work—a challenge that often limited their growth potential or forced them to hire expensive support staff.
AI tools are fundamentally changing this equation, allowing solo practitioners to compete with larger firms by automating time-consuming tasks while maintaining the personalized touch that defines their value proposition. The nearly 100% increase in client capacity reported by Surko demonstrates AI’s potential to transform business economics for knowledge workers.
More broadly, this represents a shift from AI replacing workers to AI augmenting human expertise in high-touch, relationship-based professions. Rather than threatening coaching jobs, AI is enabling coaches to focus on their core competency—human connection and insight—while delegating transcription, organization, and content creation to algorithms. This pattern likely foreshadows similar transformations across consulting, therapy, education, and other knowledge-work sectors where personalized human interaction remains irreplaceable but administrative overhead has historically limited scalability.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/3-coaching-solopreneurs-how-ai-help-their-businesses-grow-2026-1