The most expensive executive coach in the world will take your questions for nothing.

Marshall Goldsmith — Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, the only two-time Thinkers50 #1 leadership thinker, author of books that have sold more than three million copies — built an AI trained on his own writing and voice, put it at MarshallGoldsmith.ai, and charges nobody a cent for it.Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is the only two time Thinkers50 #1 leadership thinker in the world. He has been recognized as the #1 executive coach in the world for over a decade. He is the #1 New York Times best selling author of books that have sold over 3 million copies including What Got You Here Won't Get You There, MOJO, Triggers and The Earned Life.

Guy Kawasaki put the stakes in one sentence when he introduced Goldsmith on his Remarkable People podcast: "You don't have to be a 400,000 dollar client to get to Marshall's brain."

That number came from Goldsmith himself, in the same conversation. He told Kawasaki his coaching starts around $400,000 a client, and that he essentially operates two fees: nothing, or a lot.Marshall Goldsmith: Well, I'd say I'm starting at about 400,000 bucks a pop. So do you really think anybody that's going to pay me 400,000 dollars a pop is going to sit there and talk to a computer? I have two fees, either nothing or a lot. The nonprofits, the children's hospital people, the head of the DEA — "Now I do a lot of work for free. For example, I'm working right now with the nice woman who's head of the DEA. I don't charge her money. I don't charge money to the children's hospital people or all those people. I do that for nothing."

The bot sits on the free end of that barbell. Permanently.

Twenty years of failing at this

This was not an AI-hype impulse. Goldsmith told Kawasaki he had spent two decades trying to give his knowledge away and failing at it, including an era of clunky $3,000 interactive video machines that went nowhere.I have been trying to figure out how to give away everything I know for twenty years with total and abject failure up until now. I tried interactive video, which is clunky 3,000 dollar machines which didn't work. I tried computer programs that had branching and all kinds of nonsense. We're talking complete and abject failure here for twenty years. This thing has just gone through the roof in the last year.

What finally worked was volume of source material. Now what I have fed MarshallBOT is I've fed MarshallBOT about a million and a half words. What I do is it's everything I've ever written, videos. All kinds of stuff have been transcribed to put in this thing but knows me very well. The build partner was Fractal, and the roadmap Goldsmith described runs text, then voice, then video, then multiple languages.Now, the sequence of events is text first, then voice, then video, then video and multi languages, and then, ultimately, the metaverse.

Goldsmith's own assessment of the machine is not modest. In Fractal's write-up he said that "60 percent of the time, it can answer a question about my area of expertise better than I can."

And on the Brainfluence podcast with Roger Dooley, he shut down the obvious suspicion before it was raised: "I'm 75. I want to give away everything I know to everyone in the world for free, as best I can… There's no cost… There's no upsell, there's no trick."

The distinction most coaches are missing

Here is the line every coach panicking about AI should tattoo somewhere. Asked how he expects people to use it, Goldsmith told the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast: "MarshallGoldsmith.ai is an information and knowledge bot. It's not really a coaching bot as such. It's information and it's knowledge through the prism of me."

He does not think it replaces him. "Basically, I'm not threatened that I'm going to be replaced by my computer bot."

That is the whole argument in miniature. Goldsmith gave away the information layer of his business because the information layer was never what the $400,000 buys. What it buys is a process with consequences attached — he has described getting paid only after results."I always get paid after the results. This keeps the focus where it belongs—on the client's success, not mine."

A bot cannot interview your colleagues. A bot cannot make you apologize to your team. A bot cannot decline to invoice you because you didn't change.

Why almost nobody else can copy this

On Robert Glazer's Elevate podcast, Goldsmith laid out what a project like this actually requires: a large body of content, a large following, the willingness to hand it over, and real money behind the build. His filter on the third item was blunt. "I'm willing to give it away. That eliminates about 99% of people right there."

Most coaches building a bot right now are doing the opposite. The bot is the lead magnet. The bot qualifies you. The bot routes you to a call. Goldsmith removed the funnel entirely, and in the same breath removed the reason to distrust it.This is my philanthropy project. The trick to this is there isn't a trick. I'm not trying to sell something.

He is still pushing it, every week

Two and a half years after launch, this is not an abandoned press-release project. Goldsmith's LinkedIn headline still leads with the bot, he has around 2 million followers there, and his posts — including one this month — end with the same invitation: "Please visit MarshallGoldsmith.ai and ask as many questions as you wish!"{"datePublished":"2026-09-10T15:46:03.000+00:00","headline":"Let it go."}

The industry has noticed the template. Coaching researcher Jonathan Passmore, writing for Thinkers50 about what is coming next, named celebrity avatar coaches as a 2026 trend and credited Goldsmith with moving first, predicting the format will "become more popular in 2026 and 2027."

Which leaves the uncomfortable part. If the man at the very top of the profession can hand over his entire knowledge base and feel no threat to a $400,000 engagement, the question is not whether AI will commoditise what you know.

It already has. The question is what you were charging for underneath it.