Your AI Wrote Your Development Plan. So Whose Growth Is It?

A coaching case study argues that when AI writes an employee’s development plan, it can undermine the purpose of the exercise: ownership of growth areas. The article describes a client, Nikhil, whose leadership development document arrived polished and structured after he reviewed stakeholder feedback, only to later admit that AI had produced the content. During a video call, the coach found Nikhil struggled to explain the first development area, instead reading from the document. The piece explains that the plans are meant to be presented at a checkpoint meeting so alignment can be reached with a manager and buy-in built around a growth agenda. It stresses the problem is not AI itself—AI can summarize interviews and draft materials—but that treating AI output as a substitute for reflection eliminates the “reckoning” required to translate feedback into first-person ownership. The article also contends that iterative drafts, typically two to four, build that ownership.