Why ChatGPT Feels Like Walmart (And What Coaches Actually Need)

ChatGPT can do anything, which is exactly why it often feels useless for your coaching practice.

You walk into Walmart to buy a hammer. Three hours later, you're in the cereal aisle questioning your life choices. Using ChatGPT for coaching works the same way. You opened it to help analyze a session transcript. Now you're debugging a prompt, copying and pasting between five tabs, and wondering if there's a better framework for asking questions about frameworks.

General AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are remarkable. They can write poetry, debug code, explain quantum physics, and generate recipes. That's exactly the problem.

Every time you open ChatGPT for coaching, you're starting from scratch. The tool doesn't know you're a coach. It doesn't know your methodology. It doesn't remember your client's journey. You have to explain everything, every single time. It's like walking into Walmart and having to tell every employee what a hammer is before they can point you to hardware.

The hidden cost isn't the subscription fee. It's the mental energy you spend becoming a prompt engineer instead of a coach. You shouldn't need to master the art of talking to machines. The machines should already understand coaching.

Remember Radio Shack? You'd walk in, tell the person behind the counter what you were trying to build, and they'd hand you exactly the right component. They knew electronics. They knew their customers. You got what you needed and left.

Specialized AI tools work the same way for coaches. You walk in, get what you need, and walk out. There's no prompt gymnastics, no re-explaining your methodology, and no copy-paste workflow between six different browser tabs.

A tool built for coaches already understands coaching. It knows what matters in a session transcript. It recognizes patterns across your practice. It speaks your language because it was designed for your world.

The "ChatGPT is free" argument misses something obvious: your time isn't free.

Consider what happens when you try to use a general AI tool for coaching work. You export a transcript. You open ChatGPT. You write a prompt explaining what coaching is, what you're looking for, and how you want the analysis structured. You read the output, realize it missed the point, and rewrite your prompt. You format the results into something useful. You repeat this for every session, every client, every week.

Meanwhile, a specialized tool does the thinking for you. Upload a session and get insights that actually matter for coaching. Your frameworks are already built in. Your clients' histories are already there. You spend your time coaching, not configuring.

The math is simple: if a general tool takes you 30 minutes per session to get mediocre results, and a specialized tool takes you 30 seconds to get better ones, the "free" option is actually the most expensive choice you can make.

Not all tools that claim to be "built for coaches" actually are. A few key differences separate the real thing from ChatGPT in disguise:

Does it understand coaching? A tool that just transcribes and summarizes is ChatGPT with a coating of paint. A coaching tool should recognize the difference between giving advice and asking powerful questions. It should understand concepts like client breakthroughs, patterns over time, and the coaching relationship itself.

Is your context built in? Every time you have to re-explain your methodology or re-upload client history, that's a sign the tool wasn't designed for ongoing coaching relationships. Your context should accumulate, not evaporate.

Can your clients use it too? Coaching isn't just about what happens in sessions. It's about what happens between them. If the tool only serves you, it's missing half the picture.

JourneyLoop was built around these principles. Not because we're anti-ChatGPT, but because we've seen coaches waste hours trying to make general tools do specialized work. The tool already knows how to analyze coaching transcripts because that's what it was designed to do.

For a while, it looked like the future would be one giant AI that does everything. Walmart for all your intelligence needs.

But it's shifting. The real future looks more like a neighborhood of specialists. Tools that know one thing deeply. Products built by practitioners who understand the work because they do the work. You get the power of AI without the overwhelm because someone already did the hard work of making it useful for your specific world.

We can have all the benefits of new technology and still support the specialists who build for our communities. That's the future worth building.

The next time you're tempted to open ChatGPT for coaching work, ask yourself: do I want to spend the next hour becoming a prompt engineer, or do I want to spend it becoming a better coach?

General AI is powerful. But power without focus is just noise. Your coaching practice deserves tools that understand what you're trying to accomplish, remember what matters, and get out of your way so you can do the work that actually matters.

You don't need Walmart. You need a shop that knows exactly what you came in for.

The JourneyLoop Accelerator is a 30-day hands-on program where you'll work directly with our founders and other coaches to integrate AI into your coaching practice. No prompt engineering required. By the end of four weeks, your entire view of AI will change.