The coaching industry
Passmore, Saraeva, Money, Diller and Mitchell, with EMCC Global · August 2025 · Free to read
The developing landscape of coaching in the 2020s: Exploring coach attitudes towards digital, AI, team coaching, CPD, supervision, risk taking and fee rates
A 2025 open-access study of 556 coaches across 52 countries, conducted with EMCC Global, finds coaches adding digital, team and group work while remaining cautious about AI, with fees varying by service, funder and country.
Also listed under AI & technology for coaches.
This is practitioner research rather than a market-size study. The survey was run in 2023; the peer-reviewed paper was published in August 2025 in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring.
556 coaches across 52 countries responded. 57% offered team coaching and 42% offered group coaching. On generative AI, 46.1% thought it would augment practice and 37% saw it as an existential threat to some or all of their work.
Fee rates varied by service, by whether the client or an organisation paid, and by country. That combination — new services, uneasy AI, uneven pricing — is closer to how coaching businesses actually feel than a single industry headline.
If many coaches are adding team and group work, that may be a response to income, demand, or both. It does not mean you should. It does mean the competitive set around organisational work is not only other one-to-one coaches.
The AI finding is a split, not a consensus. Building a business on ‘AI will never touch coaching’ or on ‘AI will replace us’ both go beyond what this survey shows.
The fee variation is a practical warning. A number you heard at a conference may describe a different service, funder or country from the work you actually sell.
This is an external source. Four Corners Coaching did not produce the original report.
The coaching industry · Registration required
ICF and PwC · September 2025
ICF’s sixth global study, conducted with PwC, estimates 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide and $5.34 billion in annual coaching revenue, with many coaches already earning from work beyond coaching itself.
Why we picked it. The market is growing, and so is the number of coaches — which makes the business around the craft harder to ignore.
AI & technology for coaches · Free to read
OECD · 5 November 2025
An OECD survey of more than 5,000 SMEs across seven countries, including the UK, finds generative AI in use in 31% of SMEs, with marketing and sales the most common application.
Why we picked it. It is one of the clearer pictures of how small businesses actually use generative AI — and marketing and sales come first.
The coaching industry · Free to read
ICF Thought Leadership Institute · January 2026
ICF’s first futures report uses strategic foresight, not prediction, to explore five drivers of change and four possible futures for coaching by 2036.
Why we picked it. It is more useful as a set of scenarios than as a forecast, especially on technology, access and professional standards.