AI Gives Clients What They Want, but Not Always What They Need

Artificial intelligence is transforming career guidance and challenging the profession because it fulfils the demand for quick and clear answers. However, the value of professional career counselling often lies precisely in asking uncomfortable questions. 

“Please, not another AI article” — that may be your first thought. The topic seems to follow me everywhere. Certainly, this is partly connected to the hype surrounding something new. AI, in its many forms — especially in the form of large language models currently dominating public attention — is here to stay. And it challenges us as career counsellors in several ways. 

Firstly, we need to develop AI competencies ourselves. This ranges from technological understanding of AI’s limitations to efficient prompting skills tailored to our professional tasks. Only then can we continue to engage competently with clients and use AI meaningfully in our own work (good examples can also be found in the Euroguidance Insights). Secondly, we increasingly observe that clients themselves are using AI for career orientation. 

Using AI for direct advise 

Last year, I conducted a small survey among upper secondary school students (n=128). The results showed that around half had already used AI — usually ChatGPT — for career orientation questions. So far, they have mainly used it as an efficient research tool for informational questions concerning study programs, occupations, financing, salaries, and applications, rather than for decision-making questions such as personal fit. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that AI is already indirectly influencing counseling processes, potentially acting as an invisible third party within the guidance interaction. 

This is where we increasingly enter a certain form of competition.  AI initially fulfils many clients’ expectations: it answers questions quickly, precisely, understandably, and in an action-oriented way. Anyone asking AI for career recommendations or advice on changing careers receives concrete suggestions and clear recommendations. Clients receive what they (apparently) want: direct advice. 

The Human Dimension of Counseling 

But, as you may quickly object, is direct advice really what they need? 

Professional counseling attempts to look behind the question itself and jointly explore the actual concern of the client. It aims to empower individuals to search for their own answers and to make reflective decisions. To achieve this, counseling disrupts established patterns of thinking, challenges assumptions, creates uncertainty, and helps clients endure that uncertainty.  

Counseling can be uncomfortable. Yet for this discomfort to become productive, it requires genuine human relationships, interaction, and resonance. Empathy, nonverbal perception, and the shared reflection of biographical experiences can still only be simulated technologically to a limited extent. This developmental relationship work shapes the pedagogical character of counseling, which aims at recognition and critical judgment. 

AI cannot be ignored. 

These are convictions shared by many career counselors. Nevertheless, I still find it remarkable how certain many professionals are that this core of counseling cannot be replaced by AI systems optimized for questioning techniques, connected to enormous knowledge bases, and soon likely trained in emotional recognition as well. AI is currently perceived more as a supplement than as competition. Counselors emphasize that guidance remains fundamentally an interpersonal proces. 

Yet there will likely be areas in which AI replaces counseling, areas in which AI and counseling complement each other in hybrid forms, and areas of counseling that remain AI-free. Many current projects are exploring how large these different domains may become. Already applicable are chatbots that prepare validated information from occupational databases. Equally promising are AI-supported matching processes, as well as AI-assisted application writing. Less clear, however, is how AI can support counsellor training and counseling in hybrid settings. 

One thing, however, is clear: from a career guidance perspective, AI cannot be ignored. It is therefore essential to keep track of current projects and developments dealing with AI and career counseling. A current overview for Germany and further information on the projects mentioned can be found here: 

Weber, Peter, Grüneberg, Tillmann & Ertelt, Bernd-Joachim (2026). “Künstliche Intelligenz in der Berufsorientierung und -Beratung.” In Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB) (2026), Datenreport zum Berufsbildungsbericht 2026: Informationen und Analysen zur Entwicklung der beruflichen Bildung, pp. 370–373. 

So this was not the last contribution on the topic you will read — let us remain curious about what comes next. 

Author: Dr. Tillmann Grüneberg, career counsellor and professor for communication and counselling