This week, we advance our series, The AI-Powered Professional, by exploring the “AI Coach.” We’ll dive into how AI is moving beyond simple task automation to becoming a force multiplier for personal transformation, focusing on “Accountability and Behavioral Design.” We’ll explore how these tools leverage data, psychological principles, and customized nudges to help us close the intention-action gap, consistently execute goals, and build lasting, productive habits. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/152 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you’d like to continue discussing The AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | The AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Loss aversion Stickk Positive reinforcement ELIZA Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:17 Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:24 And I’m Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade | 00:25 I’m Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks | 00:26 And I’m Art Gelwicks. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:27 And welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we basically advance ourselves in our series, our ongoing series, The AI-Powered Professional. And we’re going to be exploring today basically everything that we want to dive into how AI can move beyond simple task automation, simple task completion, to more of helping you with personal development, but just accountability and behavioral design. So let’s talk about some of the tools we can use, some of the principles behind it, And we’re going to start off with really discussing why we need… Technology to coach us in the first place. So Let’s go ahead and dive into what the problem is, and then we can opine on whether or not AI can help us. So why would you need an AI coach? Who cares about having an AI coach? Francis Wade | 01:22 I had a friend who was a master’s in exercise physiology. Shed clients. She was training them and she was meeting them at the gym every morning and She eventually gave it up because she said that with her Exercise Physiology Masters She was doing nothing more than bringing them all to bed. And delivering them to the gym. And standing by while they exercise. In other words, she wasn’t actually applying anything she learned. All she was doing was being an accomplished nanny. It illustrates the reason why we do need this kind of assistance is because we’re not, left to our own devices, we’re not reliable. And there’s a whole part of the coaching experience or delivering coaching experience That really is just about reminding on the one side and then holding accountable on the other. All the words. A lot of it has to do with just creating structure. And if that could be outsourced to AI, then, hey, Hold to us. Art Gelwicks | 02:22 AI coaching to me is… Better defined as coaching light. It doesn’t carry any of the gravitas of an actual human coach. You can ignore an AI if it’s telling you something that you don’t really want to do? Yeah, it’ll prompt you. It’ll bug you. It can do all the things, but it’s really… It’s a way to get those reminders without the confrontation possibility. As part of the exercise. And I’ve seen people start to use AI in that kind of coaching approach and seen applications where they start to integrate this AI reminder into a process to encourage you to go through. And that’s nice, and that’s convenient. But it is still a device. So… I would definitely qualify AI as… Coaching light. A true coach is going to look at you and go, Yeah, but you can ignore that. You can’t ignore me. Ray Sidney Smith | 03:17 Yeah. So stepping back to the core problem, which is that humans are really good at… Accomplishing things, utilizing accountability as one of the motivational paradigms. So we don’t want to feel like we have reputational harm by not completing something. And so we can use accountability for that purpose. As I’ve talked about before, we have four layers of accountability that we can really think about. And the framework is that you have kind of self-accountability where you can keep yourself accountable to do something. You can have one-to-one accountability, whether that’s a friend, a family member, or a professional. A professional coach, professional trainer, service provider and you are having them hold you accountable to do that thing, then you could step up to a group of then you can step up to what I call public accountability, where you claim publicly you’re going to do something so that a vast majority of people beyond your close network know about you doing that thing. And so with these four layers of accountability, we know that we can get things done. And with AI coaching, we’re really in that one-to-one accountability space. And I, like Art, really fundamentally believe that right now, at least as the technology is evolving, and how it’s designed. Can’t really replace a human coach. It can fill in gaps really well. I think that humans have the challenge of self-reporting We tend to be poor judges of our own consistency. We are not objective. And the AI can provide that objective, nonjudgmental, data to you on your actual behavior versus your stated goals. And since we have a human coach. Has a limited ability. To be available? The AI coach can basically provide nudges To be at a precise moment and place so you can have it monitor where you are, when you are and say, here goes this thing that you said you wanted to do and help you define whether or not you want to deviate from that plan. So say that I am in a particular application at work and I all of a sudden go to Instagram. The AI coach can now say, hey, Ray, I noticed that you went to Instagram instead of your work email. Is this a distraction? And now it can help just by that little nudge, helped me move myself toward the future. Planned activity as opposed to the unplanned activity that I was planning. We’ve had this indeterministic software for some time, but now we have AI versions of this, which is that it can block. Tools completely so that you can’t go to a particular And that’s a form of kind of coaching light, as Art was saying as well. So there’s this notion that we’re going to be able to do this. Providing a boundary to our access to things and that helps us stay on the pathway. So there’s a lot of different reasons I think that can help us here in the coaching space but it’s not a human. And even when we get to the concept of embodied AI, where we have robotics that are humanoid or humanoid-like robots, that then have AI embedded in them and they can be in your physical presence, I still don’t see them as being the same thing as a full-blooded, bag-of-meat-and-bones person in front of you with the potential reputational harm of not showing up to do the thing. There is just something… Human to human about that I don’t think a robot’s really going to replace. Francis Wade | 06:54 Interesting you say that because my experience is that an AI coach, and I’ve not used the Actually, I have used an AI coach for my writing. But an AI coach… Is somewhere between just a Blind reminder, an alarm clock. On steroids. And a real person. It’s moved up into that realm. But it’s not doing the moving. I am. So what I’m doing is essentially I’m empowering people A voice. An automatic voice. To be more human than an alarm clock. And I think I could do some of the things you’re talking about if I were to do it. I’m sure you’ve heard about the ideas around setting up a countermeasure mechanisms that involve creating a punishment for yourself if you don’t. Accomplished the task. And I think there was a website. Allowed you to set up these punishments. And it was extremely effective. So there’s nothing to stop us from having an AI persona. That For example, we say, if I don’t stick to my diet this week, AI, you have the full permission to go into my… For the record. And tweet out to the whole world that you’re punishing me in public for not… And you do something that’s that I don’t want you to do. And like, you praise up. Political party that I want to have no part of or something like that. But I sort of a punishment that creates a bit of a game that may not be necessarily dangerous or damaging in the long term, but it’s at least somewhat annoying. I think I would respond to a game like that because I don’t want my account tweeting out support for a party that I don’t support. If that were the punishment, That would be enough motivation for me. …