Let's address the uncomfortable question directly: should career counsellors be worried about ChatGPT?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that you should be worried about ignoring it.
A recent survey found that 52% of Americans now somewhat trust AI tools like ChatGPT for career advice. Students are already using it — typing their grades, interests, and anxieties into a chatbot before they ever book a session with you. And at the 2025 NCDA Conference, keynote speaker Sonny Wong showed what happens when they do: AI offering generic job search tips in response to emotionally charged questions, making assumptions about barriers for people with disabilities, and operating on stereotypes that would get a human counsellor fired.
That's not competition. That's a gap only you can fill.
What AI Actually Does Well (And Where It Falls Apart)
Let's give credit where it's due. AI is genuinely good at processing volume. It can scan thousands of job postings in seconds, identify emerging skill demands across industries, and generate a reasonable first-pass career suggestion based on a handful of inputs. For students who have zero career guidance — and in many schools, that's the majority — even a mediocre AI recommendation is better than nothing.
But "better than nothing" is a low bar. And the limitations are serious.
ChatGPT isn't licensed or certified in any professional field. Its recommendations tend toward the generic — a "one-size-fits-all" approach that falls apart when applied to real human beings with contradictory desires, family pressures, and half-formed ambitions they can't quite articulate. It can't read body language. It can't sense the discomfort behind a confident-sounding answer. And it certainly can't do what the best counsellors do instinctively: challenge a client's assumptions about themselves.
As we've explored in our work on career blind spots, people systematically filter out careers they'd excel at based on stereotypes, limited exposure, and identity narratives. Surfacing those blind spots requires trust, rapport, and the kind of uncomfortable question a chatbot will never ask: "You say you hate sales — but have you actually tried it?"
The Real Threat Isn't Replacement. It's Irrelevance.
Here's the paradox. AI won't replace career counsellors, but it will replace career counsellors who do what AI does. If your sessions consist mostly of sharing labour market information, reviewing CVs, and running students through a personality quiz — that's automatable. And it's being automated right now.
The counsellors who thrive will be the ones who move up the value chain. Not information delivery, but interpretation. Not assessment administration, but the conversation that happens after the results come in. Not "here are your options" but "let's talk about why you keep dismissing the option that fits you best."