In early September ABC Fitness announced that it had acquired FitMetrics, an AI platform for personal trainers. Six weeks earlier, on July 27, it had bought Replify, a Seattle company whose AI agents handle prospect and member conversations by voice, text, email and chat for clubs such as Gold's Gym and UFC Gym. The price of neither deal was disclosed.
Replify's team of 12 joined ABC after raising 6.7 million dollars. FitMetrics was born in 2022, when Xenios Charalambous, a coach who used ABC Trainerize with his own clients, built an AI to take over the repetitive parts of his work; it grew into a business of its own and was already sold as an add-on inside Trainerize.
ABC's scale is what makes the two deals significant. By the company's own figures, its software runs more than 30,000 gyms and studios with about 40 million members between them, and any feature it adds reaches all of those clubs with a single update.
What ABC has put together
The two acquisitions sit on top of tools ABC had already launched. Its AI Churn Predictor, introduced in 2025 in ABC Glofox, flags members at risk of leaving, and by March 2026 ABC said 40 percent of the workouts its coaches create already used its AI Workout Builder.
FitMetrics adds the coaching layer: it centralizes client information, analyzes progress, automates check-ins and drafts program, nutrition and message recommendations that the trainer reviews and adapts before anything reaches the client.
According to the company, some customers doubled their coaching capacity and a few quadrupled it. Its founder put the principle in one line: "AI shouldn't make coaching less personal. It should give coaches more capacity to make it personal."
Why we think it is the right bet
We agree with that line, and it is worth saying so plainly. It is the same principle our own product is built on.
The members who leave a club are, in our experience, overwhelmingly the ones nobody follows. A trainer can keep a few dozen people in mind, so the rest of the membership drifts without anyone noticing the slope from three visits a week to one, and then to none.
AI can change that arithmetic without taking the coach out of the picture. Software ranks who needs attention and drafts the first message from each member's history, the coach reads it, edits it and sends it under their own name, and one person can follow a hundred members or more instead of a few dozen.
ABC has drawn the line in a sensible place. Its AI agents take on sales and service conversations, where automation is a natural fit, while on the coaching side FitMetrics is designed so that the trainer approves everything before it reaches a client. Its CEO, Bill Davis, said in March that "AI will never replace the human connection at the heart of fitness."
Why it is good news for the whole industry
When one of the largest management platforms in the industry ships this as a standard feature, the idea stops being a pitch from smaller vendors and becomes something club owners expect. The question in a sales meeting moves from whether coaches should use AI to how well a given tool does it.
That is a better conversation for everyone, us included. It pushes every vendor to show results rather than demos, and it gives owners a benchmark to compare against.
Questions worth asking, whatever software a club runs
A risk score is only as useful as what happens next, so it is worth asking any vendor where a flagged name goes: ideally onto a coach's list the following morning, with a message ready to edit and send.
It is also worth asking who the system reaches. By our estimate personal trainers work with fewer than 5 percent of a club's members, which means the members most likely to cancel usually sit outside any trainer's client list, and the tools need to reach them as well.
Then there is the question of who writes. Automation is the right tool for bookings, reminders and new leads, while a member who has stopped coming should hear from a coach they have trained with, and the software should make that the easy path.
AI coaching tends to be sold on efficiency: more clients per coach, less admin, lower cost than a new hire. For an owner the number that justifies it is a different one, how many drifting members are still training three months after a coach first reached out.
Where we fit
For transparency, this is what we build, starting on the gym floor. Members train with the wearables they already own, from Garmin and Apple Watch to Whoop, Polar or any Bluetooth strap, and their heart rate appears live on the class screens next to the workout, which coaches build from a library of more than 1,300 exercises with video or from clips of their own movements. Points, levels and challenges earned by effort make the session more motivating and more social.
That training data feeds a churn-risk score for every member and an AI assistant that drafts programs and messages for the trainer to approve, and it gives the coach something concrete to say, a level reached or sessions getting lighter, rather than a generic reminder.
All of it runs on an open API, with REST endpoints and webhooks for members, bookings, workouts and live heart rate, because we built it to work alongside the management software a club already uses, ABC's included, rather than to replace it.
So we are glad to be heading in the same direction as one of the largest platforms in the market. Coaching capacity multiplied by AI is now part of what a club should expect from its software, and the clubs that benefit most will be the ones that decide who receives it, whatever combination of systems they run it on.
Sources
Athletech News, ABC Fitness Acquires FitMetrics, Expanding AI Push Into Coaching