Free ICF Coach's Guide to Spotting Snake Oil in AI Leadership Assessments

#1: Protect Every Client You Serve

As ICF coaches, we share one non-negotiable commitment: our clients' growth comes first. Yet right now, vendors are flooding our profession with untrustworthy AI tools where 30% of feedback reduces performance, "98% accuracy" has no Standard Error of Measurement, and "neuroscience-based" rests on tiny 15-participant studies. This guide reveals the 12 red flags—backed by 80+ peer-reviewed studies—that leading coaches are already using to separate measurement science from marketing spin. Without this knowledge, your next tool recommendation could waste your client's development budget, derail their progress, or erode their trust in you.

#2: Ask the Questions Vendors Fear

Few AI assessment vendors employ PhD-level psychometricians—and even those who do hope you won't ask about Many-Facet Rasch Models, base rate problems, or false positive rates. But coaches who've downloaded this guide now open every vendor demo with: "How do you know your measures are linear" "Where's your peer-reviewed validation?" "How do you make sure the results are explainable to my client, so I can ask questions in their "Goldilocks Zone" These aren't just technical questions—they're the difference between tools that elevate leaders and tools that waste thousands while delivering algorithmic guesswork. The vendors with real science welcome these questions. The others? They'll reveal themselves in seconds.

#3: Join the Coaches Raising the Standard

While a few coaches accept "proprietary algorithms" and "real-time insights" at face value, a growing community of ICF professionals is demanding evidence: Rasch calibration, published validity studies, transparent measurement models. They're choosing the 15x precision that psychometric quality controls deliver over the bag-of-words systems that miss sarcasm, context, and developmental complexity. When you download this guide, you're not just protecting your practice—you're joining the coaches who are elevating our entire profession's standards, one vendor conversation at a time.