AI: What Role, If Any?

A client of mine recently asked me, at the end of a session, whether I use AI for supervision. Since then, it’s a question I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Although the simple answer is no, it led me down a rabbit hole of ethics, boundaries and humanity.

My immediate internal reaction was total aversion. How could anything artificial come close to the intimacy of supervision? Supervision is its own kind of therapy. You are exposed. Your biases surface. Your insecurities show themselves in the room. There is nowhere to hide, because your clinical work is so entangled with who you are as a person.

Why did you follow that thread rather than another?
Why did you pick up on that word?
Why did that moment land the way it did?

So much of it lives inside you as much as it does within the client. The idea of doing that delicate, relational dance with a piece of code feels almost unfathomable. How could something without lived experience replicate something so layered, so nuanced, so human?

And yet.

I cannot entirely reject AI either. I use it to check over my CV. I might use it to build a meal plan or organise a budget. Despite my original resistance, it is, perhaps reluctantly, part of my life. And it is not disappearing. For many, it has become the first port of call for questions, reassurance, even emotional struggles. Sometimes for things people do not feel are “big enough” to bring to therapy.

This is where it becomes complicated.

My instinct is to reject the idea of AI in therapy spaces altogether. But if I go a layer deeper, there are uncomfortable questions waiting there. What about accessibility? What about cost? What about the people who will never sit in a therapy room for all kinds of reasons? Is some form of support better than none at all?

I can see the person wondering whether their problems are “enough” to justify therapy. The single mother weighing up a session fee against a small treat for her children. The person raised to just get on with it, to minimise, to cope quietly. For them, typing something vulnerable into a chat box might feel less exposing than sitting across from another human being.

And maybe, just maybe, that small interaction with some code could be the thing that nudges them towards something more. A first step. A rehearsal. A quiet confirmation that what they are feeling matters. That they matter. That they deserve to take up real space in a real room with a real person.

I don’t know where this will land for me. But I know the conversation is not simple.