What is AI in the Group?
AI isn't just a tool you query — it's becoming a participant. What happens when it sits at the table as a member, not a servant?
I’ve been trying to name something I keep noticing.
In coaching sessions, in team retrospectives, in strategy workshops — AI keeps showing up not just as a note-taker or research assistant, but as something that’s in the room. It shapes what gets said. It changes the social dynamics. It holds a kind of memory that shifts how people relate to each other.
That’s a different thing from AI as a tool. And I don’t think we have good language for it yet.
“AI in the Group” is my attempt to think out loud about what happens when AI becomes a participant in human systems — coaching relationships, facilitation processes, organisational design. Not AI about people, but AI with people, as a node in the network.
The frame that keeps helping me is sociometry: the study of who relates to whom, and how. When AI enters a group, it introduces new choice patterns. Athletes start CC’ing their AI assistant on training reflections. Teams share meeting notes with AI before they share them with their manager. Coaches use AI to triangulate their gut read with something quantitative.
These aren’t just efficiency moves. They’re changes in the structure of the group.
The athletes who are comfortable with that triangulation are getting something different from coaching than the ones who aren’t. The teams who’ve made AI a legitimate part of their decision loop are working differently than those where it’s only used by individuals in private. The structure of information flow — who knows what, when, and why — is changing.
I’m not making an optimism argument here, and I’m not making a pessimism argument. I think both framings get in the way of noticing what’s actually happening.
What I’m trying to do instead is be curious about the specific dynamics. Not “is AI good or bad for coaching?” but “what changes when an AI can remember everything an athlete has ever told it and reflect that back at a key moment?” Not “does AI help organisations?” but “whose voice gets amplified when AI is the first thing that processes a meeting?”
These are group dynamics questions. They’re facilitation questions. They’re systems questions. And they happen to require some understanding of how large language models actually work.
This site is where I work through them. I come at it from a few directions: 16 years coaching runners, some years working on org design and complexity at The Adaptavist Group, and a fair amount of hands-on AI building — pipelines, tools, home systems, this site itself.
None of those domains give me the answer. But each one gives me a different lens on the same question.
What does it mean for AI to be in the group? I don’t know yet. But I think it’s the right question to be asking.