Your fitness app is becoming an AI wellness overlord

Whether it’s giving you workout plans or summarizing your sleep, AI has hit fitness apps hard.

In the race to add artificial intelligence features to everything from your music playlists to your weather app, the fitness world has also become flooded with new AI-powered services promising to take your workouts to the next level. Earlier this year, Strava launched Athlete Intelligence, which uses generative AI to create summaries of users’ activities, offering neat little roundups of things like heart rate and pace during runs, bike rides, or walks.

Whoop AI, powered by none other than Sam Altman’s OpenAI, leverages biometric data to offer recommendations meant to optimize not just your gym session, but your entire day. Last October, Peloton released its own AI-powered workout planner, Peloton IQ, which offers workout recommendations and live performance feedback. And Apple Fitness+ also, shockingly, gives subscribers custom diet and exercise plans based on their Health data. It costs $9.99 per month.

These services all focus on one thing: offering something tailor-made for users, whether that means recommendations to optimize a daily routine, summaries of what’s happening inside the body, or personalized workout plans designed to help people reach the next stage of their fitness journey.

“The industry is moving towards the theme of integrated intelligence,” Nick Caldwell, Peloton’s Chief Product Officer, tells Fast Company via email. “Individuals are collecting far more data about themselves than they ever have before and now, they want to apply it to their entire wellness journey, not just to fitness.”

It’s true: everyone is tracking everything, all the time. Fitness data collection once offered only a high-level snapshot of performance, but the rise of wearables and wellness apps has created countless new ways to peer into the body and attempt to assess the full picture. Wearing a pedometer now feels quaint. Today, people can track how many steps they take, how much sleep they get, how many calories and grams of protein they consume, and their average heart rate from dawn until dusk.

With all of that data already being collected, the next frontier is personalization, which is why so many of these AI features are focused on delivering individualized experiences. Caldwell says the goal now is to build an ecosystem that acts as an all-encompassing operating system for a user’s overall health journey.

“As people become more aware of how to harness the power of their health data, they don’t want a generic plan; they want something more tailored,” Caldwell says. “Your workout should adapt to your sleep, your stress, and your specific goals in that exact moment and with Peloton IQ we can be that intersection of data and action that is specific to you.”

In the fervor for companies to churn out any and all AI-powered tools, skeptics naturally wonder which products users actually need in their pockets, and what we risk losing when personalization is handed over to the algorithm. Moreover, if users can become their own dietitian, personal trainer, life coach, and wellness guru, what does that spell for the rest of the industry?

A Whoop spokesperson tells Fast Company that AI coaching represents the next phase of the industry: turning previously stagnant data into a more active layer of wellness products. “This approach reframes fitness tracking from passive measurement to active decision support, effectively creating a real-time health operating platform,” the spokesperson says. “WHOOP is helping lead this evolution by building one of the first continuous health records and applying AI to support longer-term health and performance outcomes.”

David Swartz, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar who specializes in sportswear companies, says that many players across the fitness industry feel pressure to incorporate AI into their business models.

“There’s a feeling that companies that don’t use AI may be left behind,” he says. “Companies want their employees to learn AI and to incorporate it into their daily work. Investors are also pushing companies to use AI as they believe that it will increase efficiency and raise valuations.”

The growing focus on individual health and wellness has coincided with the arrival of a controversial federal Department of Health and Human Services leadership team. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, has frequently found himself at odds with medical professionals and public health experts, fueling confusion and concern among Americans who increasingly feel their health is in their own hands. At the same time, interest in private companies and apps that monitor personal health data has surged, whether through wearables like the Apple Watch or ŌURA Ring, or apps like Strava and Apple Fitness that help users track enormous amounts of personal data.

And with interest in fitness tech growing among both consumers and political supporters like RFK Jr., some companies appear to be aiming far beyond a personalized AI coach. “WHOOP AI will continue to evolve, becoming more predictive, more personalized, and more powerful over time,” the Whoop spokesperson says.

The quantified self, it seems, is no longer content just counting steps. Now it wants a coach, a strategist, and maybe even a second opinion.

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