Garmin's Paid-Tier AI Doesn't Seem to Be Doing Much

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Garmin unveiled a subscription tier for its app last week featuring an AI that promises to provide insights on your training. I liked the company’s policies around training and privacy, but hadn’t seen much of the actual AI output when I wrote about it. Now, I’ve spent a week with the feature, which Garmin says is still in beta. Here are my impressions.

The AI insights are just one of the features that rolled out with the new $6.99/month Garmin Connect+ subscription. Some of the other add-ons look a lot more useful, like the Live Activities feature. I have a full rundown here on what you get if you pay for the upgrade. The subscription only covers new features—not existing app features, and not specific features that come with the watch you buy.

AI insights only appear in one limited part of the app

I’ve been poking everywhere in the Garmin Connect app, and I can only find AI insights in one place. That would be the home screen, where I get a little “active intelligence” paragraph right at the top, above my usual workout and health metric cards.  

If you don’t check your Garmin Connect app frequently, you’ll miss out on most of the insights. They don’t pop up on your watch or in notifications on your phone. There’s no chat interface like with Whoop or Oura, where you can ask questions about your data. 

I expected the AI to be more like Strava’s, where a little description/motivational message appears on each activity you do. Strava’s AI is notorious for restating the data from the run description, with added errors, though, so perhaps it’s best they didn’t try to mimic that. 

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The AI "insights" aren’t very insightful

My first few insights were pretty basic—just comparing my intensity minutes to a goal that I didn’t realize I had—but I figured more interesting analysis was yet to come. 

After a week, though, I haven’t seen it. The most exciting moment was when I caught the AI in a flagrant math error. “You logged two activities today: running and indoor cycling for a total of one hour and twenty-seven minutes,” it said. My activities were noted in their usual place, immediately below this “insight,” and the run was 40:10 while the bike ride was a quick test of this gadget that took less than three minutes. That’s 43 minutes, silly robot. (I'm not the only one who has encountered some bad math: Two scuba divers posted on Reddit that the AI told them they spent more than a month underwater in a single day.)

The AI’s obsession with intensity minutes may be to blame in my case. I can’t make the math work out for this example, but in some other cases, the AI seemed to be adding up intensity minutes and not always including the word “intensity.” (One minute of vigorous exercise counts for two “intensity minutes,” an idea that comes from public health exercise guidelines.) 

Otherwise, the messages were just basic summaries of data that was already viewable elsewhere in the app. I did my best to screenshot every insight I saw, and here’s the tally of topics: 

• 5 messages about intensity minutes, either comparing them to my goal or weekly or daily averages

• 3 messages about my stress level or “sleep stress,” a metric I’d never heard of and still can’t figure out what it means

• 2 messages about my Body Battery (a number that goes up with sleep and down with exercise or stress)

• 2 messages about steps

• 2 messages about run activities (with my mileage, pace, and/or time)

• 2 messages about bike activities (with my time, heart rate, cadence, and/or power)

• 1 message about my training status being in “recovery”

After a sentence or two with the metrics it’s describing, there would be a sentence generically encouraging me to keep up the good work. I could give feedback as to whether the insight was interesting or not, but there was no way to ask questions or get more information. I still don’t know what “sleep stress” is, or how to get a quick overview of my intensity minutes if I did want to keep track of them. 

It doesn’t seem like anyone is enjoying the AI feature

I’m always the wet blanket on AI hype, so I checked Reddit and Garmin forums to see if anybody is having a better time with it than I am. I couldn’t find anyone who admitted to liking Active Intelligence or gleaning any useful insights from it.

“There is so much that could be done with AI and training software, but all Garmin does is using AI to simply rephrase existing data,” a Garmin forum user said. “Seems like 'Active Intelligence' is basically just the most basic summary of your workouts possible,” said a redditor, adding, “I was really hoping that it would be an actual chatbot that you could discuss training with etc to create plans.”

Other redditors wondered why the AI doesn’t create or adjust training plans, possibly even analyzing users’ data to find which workouts tend to correlate with fitness increases. Garmin hasn’t publicly said what future plans they have for AI, just that the feature is currently in beta. 

“I received messages from AI throughout the day and I can say that they have no practical or informational benefit for me,” one redditor said. I’m afraid I have to agree.

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