When AI Coaching Becomes a Change Agent: From Micro Interventions to Emergent Organizational Change

The coaching “ripple effect” describes how individual coaching spreads through workplace relationships and influences organizations. AI coaching may scale this effect by providing context-aware conversations during everyday managerial work. This paper argues that AI coaching becomes an algorithmic change agent when managers enact its guidance and the effects spread, interact, or recur to shape organizational routines, norms, and practices. Initially, change agency is hybrid: managers initiate coaching and decide how to act, while AI helps frame problems and responses. As AI systems learn to anticipate coaching needs and initiate interventions, they assume a more prominent role in change. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems theory, the paper explains how people and AI shape local actions that may produce unplanned change. Although AI coaching may enable continuous change without formal programs, it may also standardize judgment, intensify surveillance, and obscure accountability, requiring governance of interventions and their organizational consequences.