What this is, and what it is not
Starbuck Coach is software. It is not a person, it has no qualifications, no experience and no feelings, and it is not one of our coaches.
It is not accredited, and neither is anything else
The International Coaching Federation, the EMCC and the Association for Coaching accredit people and training programmes. No professional body accredits coaching software. There is no certification, no register and no quality mark for an AI coach anywhere in the world. Any product claiming otherwise is either misusing the word or describing the credentials of the humans standing next to it.
What we can honestly say is this. Starbuck Coach is built on the ICF Core Competencies (2025), the same framework our coaches train against and are assessed on. Its design has been informed by the ICF Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coaching Framework and Standards, published by the International Coaching Federation in November 2024. This does not mean that the software is accredited, certified or endorsed by ICF. Its behaviour is reviewed monthly by our Director of Coaching and Leadership Development, who changes how it works when it falls short. Monthly review begins at the end of September 2026. No review has been completed yet. Those are all things you could check.
What it will not do
- It will not diagnose anything or offer therapy, counselling or treatment.
- It will not give medical, legal, financial or investment advice.
- It will not work through trauma or your past. That is a therapist's job, not a coach's.
- It will not measure, score or track your mood or emotional state. It may ask how you are. It will never infer it, and no analysis of your feelings is generated, stored or sent anywhere.
- It will not tell your employer anything about you.
It can be wrong
The model that generates its replies can produce things that are inaccurate, out of date or simply made up, and it can do so confidently. Treat what it says as a prompt for your own thinking, not as fact. Check anything that matters with a qualified person before you act on it. Where the question is a professional one, that means a professional.
When it will stop
If you say something that suggests you are at risk, or that you are dealing with something clinical rather than something coachable, it will stop coaching. It will not ask you assessment questions and it will not try to help you plan for your safety, because those are things a trained human should be doing and software should not. It will tell you plainly that it is out of its depth, give you the numbers below, and offer you one of our coaches.
Nobody is watching this conversation. There is no alert, no dashboard and no person on the other end. That is deliberate, and it is why the routes below matter.
In the UK:
- 999 if you or anybody else is in immediate danger.
- Samaritans, 116 123. Free, day or night, and it does not appear on your phone bill.
- Shout. Text SHOUT to 85258.
- NHS 111, option 2 for urgent mental health support in England.
- Your GP.
Outside the UK, findahelpline.com lists free crisis lines by country.
You are always told it is an AI
You are told before you start, you are told again inside every session, and the label sits in the header of every page. That is a legal requirement and it is also just the decent thing to do.
Who built it
Starbuck & Associates Limited, using a large language model provided by Anthropic. The coaching design, the questions it draws on, the boundaries it holds and the decision about what it refuses to do are ours, and we are accountable for them.
Version 1.2, last updated 27 August 2026. We review this page whenever the service or the way information is processed changes. If a change materially affects you, we will update this version number and date.