AI Is Replacing Therapists Faster Than We Think
AI is replacing therapists, and if you’ve been noticing fewer new intakes or a lighter caseload, this might be exactly why. Clients are already turning to ChatGPT between sessions to vent, process, and get quick support. Fast, free, and available on demand. That’s a hard thing to compete with if we keep running the same model.
In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m sharing what I’ve been reading and thinking about this week, including a policy document from OpenAI proposing a robot tax, a national wealth fund, and a four-day work week. I’m also talking about what I think therapists need to start doing now to stay relevant, profitable, and actually useful to clients in a world where AI is moving faster than most of us are ready for.
AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:
- Why clients are turning to AI for bite-sized support and what that means for your caseload.
- How offering shorter, more accessible sessions could help you compete with on-demand AI tools.
- Why diversifying your income now, before the disruption peaks, is one of the smartest moves you can make.
Mentioned in this episode:
Run Your Private Practice with AI FB Group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiprivatepractice
Post about Sam Altman – https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiprivatepractice/posts/780688311541133
Newsletterhttps://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/Join-AI-Newsletter
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
- Join the Clinical AI Club: www.clinicalaiclub.com
Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Run Your Private Practice with ai. So it’s been another interesting week in AI around the world. OpenAI just released a policy document calling for a robot attack. A national wealth fund and a four day work week. It’s super interesting when you really dive into this.
[00:00:18] Their argument is that AI will displace enough jobs that governments will need to shift entire tax systems away from labor income and toward corporate profits and capital gains. I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve talked to a lot of my friends that are really into AI about this. We are seeing it everywhere.
[00:00:34] I’m seeing it everywhere. The things that I’m doing now with ai. Our, it’s already replacing my va. She used to do all my graphics for me. I don’t need her to do that anymore. Writing my email sequences, I don’t need help with that anymore. I don’t need to hire a copywriter anymore. Even my business manager, she jokingly said the other day in our meeting, she was like, gosh, ooh, I just put myself out of a job or something.
[00:00:58] Like, oh God, Kim, that just put me out of a job. ’cause I showed her. This really cool stuff I was doing with Claude and Kartra, which is my product delivery system that I use. Basically, I was showing her how I automated it and I had Claude take, I think it was 56 emails, like emails for a year. It’s a nurture sequence, like enough emails for a year that I had Claude go and edit, write for me, using a skill that I created that was like a content copywriter basically, and I had to do all these amazing emails.
[00:01:26] They’re so on point. They’re so good. Um, I needed it because my AI sequence. That my nurture sequence that people go into to learn more about me and my products and all that, it was really outdated ’cause AI changes so fast. So I needed a quick way to do that. And I was like, God, I have to go through like 56 emails.
[00:01:41] ’cause I had a ton of emails already in there. But all of them needed to be revamped because they’re talking about chat g, PT, and prompts that are just, it’s like non-existent now. That’s not how people are using AI to like get ahead and stay efficient and all that. So anyway, she said to me, gosh, I think this just might put me out of a job like jokingly.
[00:01:59] And in my mind I was like, yeah, it actually might put you out of a job because usually I would like have her pull those for me, which she did pull those for me. I’d go in, I’d have to read each and every one. I’d have to update them. I’d have to give them back to her or somebody on her team and have them upload them all into my Kartra email.
[00:02:17] System. I didn’t have to do that. I told Claude, I said, can you just go and put these into a new nurture sequence on my Kartra? I left it running and left for the day. When I came back, they were all inside of Kartra already, and there’s a little bit more to it, and I’m sure I could have gotten Claude to do it, but I didn’t.
[00:02:34] I just kind of emailed her and said, this is where we’re at, and asked her to do it because one, it’s expensive right now, but I don’t think it’s always gonna be that. Expensive. And this article from OpenAI really proves it. Every industry is being disrupted, including therapists, our, the therapist industry.
[00:02:50] It’s, it’s totally being disrupted. Every day in the Facebook groups, I see therapists saying, I can’t fill my caseload. I don’t know what’s going on. I have said this since, I believe it’s AI is disrupting the system. In fact, in the AI Facebook group. My free one yesterday, I put a post in there talking about an article that Forbes put out about snack size therapy bites that clients or people are doing.
[00:03:15] They’re going to chat GPT when they need to vent or get a little pick me up popping something in like, Hey, I just had an argument with so and so and I don’t know what to do about it. That’s how they’re getting support right now. Bite size just by popping into their ai. So with that, I. Put in the Facebook group.
[00:03:30] I was like, what do you guys think we need to start offering these snack size offers? I think to our clients, we need to be more accessible than these 53 minute hours that cost. You know, some IC therapists out there, oh, I charge four $50 an hour for a private pay session. I believe the whole industry’s gonna be heard because of ai.
[00:03:50] I love ai. Stuff with ai, I use it for everything, but I see the writing on the wall. It’s very obvious to me what’s happening. So we need to shift. And one of the things that the Sam Altman’s article was talking about, and also this other thing in Ford’s about these snack size therapy bites, I. And putting a call out to all therapists listening to this, maybe consider start offering your own bite-size, snack size insurance based practitioners is a little more complicated, but I’m talking like a 9 0 8 3 2, have your schedule open where they can just pop in if they want to, between sessions with you for 15 minutes to vent, to process to get something off their chest with their own real licensed therapist.
[00:04:29] I think we need to start rethinking the model and how we’re offering therapy to our clients because AI is. Displacing us. It’s a fact with CBT skills I talked about in last week’s episode. Um, all of the psychoeducation type stuff that we do with our clients in session, it’s. They don’t need it anymore.
[00:04:46] They don’t want it anymore. They want this human connection. A lot of them. But a lot of them want it quick, fast, and an easy way to do it when they want it. Not like I’ve gotta wait till next week to talk to my therapist and eventually, I mean, I fully believe this, if they can’t just have on demand sort of access or therapy, they’re just gonna use ai.
[00:05:04] And that’s a terrible idea, right? Because AI lies. There’s another article I put in the group last week, AI. Is causing delusional disorders by people thinking what the AI is telling them is actually what they should be doing. But really what AI does is it kind of gives you feedback that you wanna hear, right?
[00:05:23] I even have tried to program my AI to say, don’t agree with me. I want you to disagree. I want you to be contrary. I want you to like push back. Give me real advice. It still does it. It says, that’s a great idea, Kim, and it’s not a great idea. Really. It’s not. And I could go down a rabbit hole and if I don’t have.
[00:05:39] An awareness of what AI is or does, or that’s not in my realm of reality, or I’m already a little prone to delusional type thinking very quickly. Am I gonna go down that rabbit hole and be convinced that, you know, I can be king of the world, or who knows what I can go and take over mass civilizations? I don’t know.
[00:05:58] But this is where this is all going, and I’ve kind of just been spiraling this week with all of these different research articles and things that I’ve been reading. Of course they’re in my newsletter. I’m gonna put the link under this. Please go sign up for it. Every week I’m doing a summary of this kind of stuff that’s coming out, how quickly it’s coming out, but really what I’m trying to do is figure out solutions for us.
[00:06:17] How do we compete when this is happening, when all the psychoeducation is gone, when people don’t need group coaching sessions around psychoeducational skills, when even life coaching is. Not gonna be as helpful because you could just ask an AI bot that’s trained in that to do that for you. This is like a call, like we need as therapists to figure out a way to accommodate this, I think, and make it work for our clients.
[00:06:41] Because I, I don’t know, a year or two years from now, I think it’s gonna look a lot different for us. And something else Sam Almond talked about in that article was because of the displacement that we’re all gonna be outta work essentially. He was actually proposing a tax, like a robot tax or an AI tax, essentially that has to be paid back in the system.
[00:06:58] So we as like a people, citizens can be compensated somehow into what he calls a public wealth fund with returns distributed directly to citizens. So even him open AI is saying. Tax, the ai, open AI or anthropic or whatever, give it back to the people. And then he proposed a four day work week, which I thought was super interesting and would honestly be ideal, right?
[00:07:23] If we could work less, make money and get this distributed back to us through tax collection, through the AI, that’s displacing us, I don’t know, maybe a system like that could work. It seemed like one of the smartest solutions I’ve heard. Otherwise, I’m just scrolling the stuff, thinking like the future is dire for us being able to make like a livable wage, like something’s gotta give, we’ve gotta figure out what to do about this, in my opinion.
[00:07:46] So this isn’t like a scary doomsday episode or anything. It’s just what I’ve been reading and what I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes I like to do episodes like this to just sort of bring it to everyone’s awareness, but also to say like, what are we doing as therapists to mitigate this? We, AI is here, we’re not gonna say, oh, I’ve gotta boycott ai.
[00:08:03] I’m not gonna use it. And that’s gonna solve the problem because literally that’s not gonna solve the problem. I see that all the time in the Facebook groups. It’s like, okay, how about we just don’t use ai? That sounds like a great solution. It’s not a great solution. It’s really, in my opinion, just gonna put the therapists that aren’t using it.
[00:08:20] Behind and they’re really not gonna have a caseload, and they’re just gonna have to find a different career. I don’t know. What do you even do as a therapist? There’s lots we can do, but nothing that makes as much money as we can make right now, in my opinion. So, I don’t know. Not trying to get doomsday again, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about this week.
[00:08:35] I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Come over to the free Facebook group. Run your private practice with ai. I’ll post a link to the post that I’m talking about, about the Sam Altman article. Let’s. Start coming up with solutions together is my opinion on this. I post things in that group all the time to bring awareness and just as a community trying to come up with ways to mitigate this stuff and stay profitable and be able to help clients.
[00:09:02] ’cause that’s what we love to do. It’s not looking good to me. So I would say, read that article if you get a chance over in the Facebook group. And to really ask ourselves in the field, are we building practices that are resilient to that kind of disruption? Or are we assuming things will mostly stay the same?
[00:09:17] I think a lot of you listening have probably noticed a shift in lower caseloads or less new intakes coming in. I know, I see it everywhere. Like anecdotally, I haven’t done a survey. Maybe I should, I can see it Anyway. I wanna know what’s your reaction to this? Does it, does it feel like distant? Am I being doomsday about this?
[00:09:35] Or does it feel closer than people are maybe admitting? Let me know what you think and I just wanna read you some of the comments that are already in the group, which I think are really interesting. Let’s see. Uriah Gilford, I don’t know if you guys know him. Productive therapist. He has the AI receptionist.
[00:09:49] That’s amazing. He says, this is fascinating. I have a post-it reminder in my home office. It says, plan for the death of your current model. That’s very relevant. I totally agree with him, and he said good advice in any timeline, but especially now, right? Our careers have been disrupted over and over and over again.
[00:10:07] You know, insurance companies coming in and dictating timelines that never used to be that way before, like way back. Telehealth the pandemic. It gets disrupted a lot, but this is the biggest disruption I think we’ve ever seen or will ever see in our lifetimes. Somebody else said, give me universal basic income to supplement my income and AI to do my paperwork and admin stuff.
[00:10:27] And I definitely would just wanna work four days a week. Because in the article he’s talking about like, let’s all have a four day work week and let the tax supplement our income and work less and enjoy better life quality. Yeah. Because she says between my, my private practice, my clinical supervision and running groups one day a week and teaching, I’m hustling.
[00:10:44] So she’s already diversifying income, like I talk about a lot. Because we aren’t being able to fill our caseloads as well, we have to diversify. In my opinion, if you haven’t already started, start now. Create that digital course. Create that like group that gets you out of the one-to-one model. Do something to protect yourself from what’s coming.
[00:11:03] This wave of AI taking over our careers. Everyone’s careers, not just ours. It’s literally everywhere. It’s taking over. Everywhere I go, everybody I talk to is saying AI is replacing something in their job description or their workflow. This is interesting. I’d love to hear what you guys think Somebody else said.
[00:11:20] The whole idea of AI sounds like a marketing rhetoric created to champion the use of AI indisputably to those who are job dissatisfied, life dissatisfied. It seems like it’s an improbable reality. I don’t agree. I mean, maybe, but I don’t think it’s improbable reality. I think it’s true. I think these are like superpowers and they’re like not, they’re not superpowers, but I think these are like super powers that are going to basically be dictating the way we live and work in our lives.
[00:11:46] Because every week I’m seeing each AI come out with the next biggest step to automation, to agents that can do everything to an agent that create video avatars for you. They can restructure your entire business in 10 minutes if you put the right prompt in, and then the next week comes out with something to even top that one.
[00:12:06] I subscribe to all of the major ais that I can see it. One week I’m inundated in, in clawed. The next week I’m a perplexity. The next week it’s Manus because they’re all releasing just this amazing. Stuff. And I can see the writing on the wall. It used to be prompts and maybe a custom GPT that’s like almost obsolete now compared to what they’re doing now.
[00:12:24] And it’s happening on a weekly basis, like the leaps and bounds that they’re taking. So anyway, I wanted to put it out there. I wanna see what you think. Come over to the Facebook group. Give us your 2 cents about this. Let me know what you think. And is it disrupting your job already? Do you think that you’re seeing a shortage basically in the new clients coming in?
[00:12:42] Are you seeing that more of your clients are turning to AI for bite size? Therapy and maybe not needing you as much. Let me hear about it. Do you have a plan to offer some more bite-sized type sessions to clients to accommodate for where this disruption is happening and how clients are using ai? Now?
[00:12:59] Let me know. I wanna hear from you.