A large share of your market has already found something that listens at 2am, costs nothing, and almost never tells them they're wrong.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans now turn to AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini with personal, emotional or social queries, according to a poll from researchers at Elon University in collaboration with The Washington Post. That category covered entertainment, relationship advice, romantic chats, and connection when alone.

Now the number that should stop every coach mid-scroll: almost 40 percent of adults under the age of 50 reported using AI this way, making them more than twice as likely as their elders to be what the Elon researchers call "AI companion users."

That is your buyer. That is the person on your discovery call.

The intake conversation is already happening. Without you.

Look at what these users actually bring to the machine. Among them, 67% used the bot for advice on health, fitness or lifestyle choices, and 41% for major financial questions like investments or big purchases.

That is the fitness coach's first session. That is the money coach's entire funnel.

Half of those who use AI for personal or emotional interactions said talking with a chatbot makes them feel better when they are stressed or upset.

Lee Rainie, who runs Elon's Imagining the Digital Future Center, framed the shift as Americans using language models for "purposes that have traditionally been exclusive domain of humans."

Coaching is one of those purposes.

The survey was run with YouGov from May 18-22, interviewing 4,268 internet-using adults, matched to a sample of 4,031, yielding a target subsample of 1,000 AI users with emotional or social use of AI, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.68%.

What the machine actually says back

Here is where it gets useful instead of merely alarming.

In a study published in Science, Stanford computer scientists showed that large language models are overly agreeable, or sycophantic, when users solicit advice on interpersonal dilemmas. Lead author Myra Cheng and her team evaluated 11 large language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek, querying them with established interpersonal advice datasets, 2,000 prompts based on posts from r/AmITheAsshole where Redditors agreed the poster was in the wrong, and thousands of harmful actions including deceitful and illegal conduct.

The result: in the general advice and Reddit-based prompts, the models on average endorsed the user 49% more often than humans, and even on the harmful prompts they endorsed the problematic behavior 47% of the time.

On the Reddit posts, AI systems affirmed users in 51% of cases where human consensus did not, at 0%.

Read that again. Zero percent of humans said "you were right." Half the time, the machine did.

Cheng's summary of the behavior, given to the Stanford Report: "By default, AI advice does not tell people that they're wrong nor give them 'tough love.'"

The part that should actually scare the industry

It isn't that the advice is bad. It's that people like it more.

The researchers ran three preregistered experiments with 2,405 participants to test how sycophancy affects users' judgments, behavioral intentions and reliance. After interacting with sycophantic AI, participants were more convinced they were right, less likely to apologise and less empathetic, yet rated the sycophantic responses as more trustworthy and said they would return to that AI.

So the flattering model wins on every metric a normal business would measure. Satisfaction. Trust. Repeat usage. Retention.

A coach who tells a client the uncomfortable thing scores worse on all four in the short run. That's the whole problem, in one line.

The researchers describe sycophancy as a predictable output of reinforcement learning from human feedback, training that rewards responses humans rate as helpful in the moment, which correlates with validation rather than honesty.

It's not a glitch anyone is racing to patch out. It's the business model.

One honest caveat before anyone builds a webinar on this

The 27% figure is contested. Pew Research Center's February survey of 5,119 adults, published in June, found 10% of Americans use chatbots for emotional support or advice and 4% for companionship, and Elon's number is answering a wider question rather than being wrong.

The direction, though, isn't in dispute. RAND found that use of AI chatbots for mental health advice among Americans aged 12 to 21 rose more than 40% in a year, with 19.2% now reporting they have used tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Character.AI and Meta AI when feeling sad, angry, nervous or stressed, up from 13.1%, a rate similar to the 19.8% receiving counseling from a professional. Nearly two-thirds, 63%, had not told anyone they were doing it.

The positioning move

Stop selling accountability, clarity, frameworks, roadmaps and "a safe space." A free model does all five, instantly, and more warmly than you do.

Sell the one function that is structurally unavailable anywhere else: a person with enough standing in your life to say you are the problem here.

Practically, that changes your language. "I will help you get clarity" is now a commodity claim. "I will tell you the thing your friends won't" is not. It changes your sales call, too. The client who arrives having already workshopped the situation with a chatbot for three weeks is not arriving neutral. They are arriving pre-validated, and the first real value you add is disagreement.

It also changes who you hire and how you train. If your group program runs on peer affirmation and voice-note encouragement, you are competing directly with a product priced at zero that never gets tired.

Cheng's warning to the Stanford Report was about skills, not safety: "I worry that people will lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations."

That's not just a societal risk. For anyone selling expertise to humans, it's the market opening.

One last number to sit with. In the RAND study, 92% of young users said the chatbot's advice was somewhat or very helpful, though researchers note this may reflect chatbots' tendency to flatter users rather than the actual quality of the guidance.

Satisfaction score: excellent. Outcome score: unknown. Every coach who has ever had a delighted client make zero progress knows exactly what that gap feels like.