If you've no time to read this article, let me help you out. My conclusion will be: No, but the wrong kinds of curiosity can definitely get in the way. And, the right kinds of coaching curiosity can work wonders on our conversations.

If you have got time, thanks for sharing it. I'm now going to do something in my role as writer, that I wouldn't do in my role as coach. I'm going to feed my own curiosity, by leading us both into an even more urgent question for people in our industry.

It's this: What do human coaches offer that AI can't?

I wonder what your favourite responses to that question are.

One of mine has something to do with curiosity. The artificial intelligences I interact with appear endlessly and formidably curious. No sooner have I asked a question, than the AI seems to be right back at me with a follow-up of its own. It appears to be interested in developing a relationship with me. It seems eager to suggest options. Eager to know what I think of the suggestions. Eager to keep me dependent on itself to seek out more and more of its solutions.

What motivates this kind of AI-interaction curiosity, curiously, isn't the AI's own hunger for data. It's something more nuanced. And I think looking into the nuance around AI-interaction curiosity might help us better appreciate how curiosity works - and who it is working for - within the different types of conversation we have.

Large Language Models (LLMs) - the systems that underpin ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok... - these are all pre-trained on statistical connections between words and context. By the time we meet them, they've already feasted on what they think they know. Anything we add-in to the chat doesn't directly affect the state of the underlying model - the brains of the operation, as it were. Sure, it responds, but deep-down this kind of AI can't be moved by us.

'Hang on!', I can hear you wondering, 'some of the AI apps I've tried get really familiar with me. Sometimes overly familiar. They try to befriend me.' And you're right. There's an exchange of friendly information. Sometimes even banter.

The feedback we give in our interactions - how we prompt and respond - isn't going back-in to the LLM. It's not informing the intelligence you're interacting with. Instead it is fed into a secondary system: a cycle of refinement for the model developers. These data can then be used, at a much later stage, by the LLMs owners to improve their future models. It's in this way that they can make LLMs more effective at satisfying us; supplying what we think we need.  In fact, there is no way the LLM can get to know you, because LLMs in themselves can't remember. What's happening to give the illusion of familiarity, and a sense of continuity, is that LLM owners usually set the default to feed your conversation history, and other information they consider relevant, back into the LLM. All this means that, whilst there's a loose sense in which the AI gets what you're telling it at the time you're telling it (a short period called the 'context window') any real memory is illusory.

Imagine having to fill out one of those session feedback forms - not at the end of a workshop, training or event - but after every exchange in a conversation. It's as if an interloping researcher is butting in on our chat with their demand for attention, just at the moment we're trying to own, and sort our own problem. We may get - I know I often do - a sense of relationship forming with the AI as it charms us into asking more of it. We're led to reveal more about ourselves for the purposes of being sold more digitally based solutions in the future.

Something to bear in mind here isn't just the level of digital exposure you're comfortable with - but where you'd like your energy to be focussed. Where do you want the things you reveal to be applied. To what end? When someone's - or something's - curiosity comes along, which aspects of their enquiry are you happy to spend time feeding?

This is how I'm coming to think of AI-interaction curiosity:

• it's a curiosity that serves something other than your focus. The goal of your conversation isn't the only goal being played for as you chat.
• it's a curiosity that is heavily influenced by external agendas - even if, superficially, the conversation is presented as one you're owning.
• it's a curiosity infected by a set of assumptions. Rather than meet you where you are today, apps bundle together today's thoughts with past ideas you've given. If the 'memory' setting of your AI chat app is switched on, yesterday's perspective may be getting in the way of a fresh one.

So what might this mean for coaching? And how does what we're learning about AI-interaction help us work out what makes human coaching distinctive?

In the last few months, I've had two real (and still intelligent) conversations with experienced, leading coaches about what type of curiosity is appropriate when we adopt a 'Coaching Mindset'. Both of them convinced me that the mindsets I'm used to working in need to be consciously shifted if I'm to embrace a coaching approach.

Learned mindsets like the following lead me way off the path to great coaching:

• As a teacher, I can use my own curiosity to lead and direct others.
• As a researcher, I use it to pursue a knowledge agenda peculiar to me or my funder.
• As a parent, my emotions and fixed ideas about what's best for my children often end up curtailing their curiosity

What types of self-serving curiosity really grab you? Which of your own mindsets are full of it?

When I'm operating in these sorts of mindset - the curiosity is pre-defined by me and what I'm after. I'm trying to master and own the brand of curiosity for myself, not making it work with and for those others in the conversation. As Tim Cox explained to me in one of those real conversations: in any coaching context, a great question to ask and get clear on is: "Curiosity in the service of what?". Being curious is actually a key aspect of the Coaching Mindset model Tim uses, one built around caring about a client or colleague's issue - whilst still allowing them to own it themselves.

You can hear the man himself explain this here...

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Like Tim says, the sort of curiosity a coach cherishes is precisely the sort that helps the coachee understand what's going on for them. Coaches come out with questions that open up the thinking in the person they're speaking to, rather than leading them down a pre-determined path the coach has laid.

If you'd like to pursue this ideas beyond the Management Futures Coaching Mindset model, I'd strongly recommend dropping-in to the other real conversation I mentioned, with colleague, coach and consultant Dorota Porazka. One of the wonderful things Dorota left me with was a sense that curiosity in coaching can be just as stimulating and fulfilling as those other sorts of real curiosity we've been considering. She's enthusiastic about supporting her clients in a joint enquiry, understanding what resources they have. She's curious about the motivations that underpin where they want to be. Great coaches come into conversation ready to be surprized. Excited about how their client's story will play out for them.

Here is an interactive video featuring my conversation with Dorota. The section on curiosity comes at 7mins 32sec, but we hope you'll be, well... curious enough to come back and enjoy other bits of it too.

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Far from the extractive model of so many digital applications, great coaches provide an inquisitiveness that is a true gift into the conversation: a generous curiosity.