Next week I will be in Dallas for Beyond Activ Americas, on 12 and 13 November at the Hilton Anatole.
On Friday 13 November, from 12:15 to 1:00 PM on the Main Stage in the Trinity Event Complex, I will join the panel "Smart Clubs, Smarter Margins: Turning Tech & AI into Digital Muscle and Competitive Advantage" with Aroha Leigh, Director of Global Product at Lift Brands, and Rosanna Tucker, Founder and CEO of CoverMe. Jervin Justin, VP of Product and Engineering at Xplor Technologies, will moderate.
I won't preview the panel here, because it should stay a real conversation. But there is one position I want to put on the table before Friday, since I know it is not the most popular one in our industry.
The comfortable answer about AI
When people in fitness talk about AI, the answer is almost always the same: AI helps with admin, it saves staff some time, and the important decisions stay with people. It is a reassuring answer, and today it is mostly true, because many clubs see AI as a ChatGPT that fixes emails, does translations and writes workout plans that all look the same.
I don't think it will stay true for long.
I am convinced that AI, in every industry, will make more and more decisions on its own. The clubs that prepare for it now will build a cost structure that clubs still using it as a proofreader cannot match, and in our industry that gap does not close by itself.
And I don't mean saving an hour at the front desk. If a club can do the same work as another one at a fraction of the cost, the other club will eventually be unable to compete, because in the end what counts is the bottom line.
Why I believe it
I don't say this because I read it somewhere. I see it every day at my desk, where a growing part of my work as CEO now goes through one AI assistant.
It prepares the analysis before a decision, sets up marketing campaigns, sorts my email, gets me ready for meetings with prospects and analyzes the company's administrative flows in real time. More and more often it finishes the work instead of only suggesting it, so much that these days I use my computer the traditional way less and less.
At home I use a different AI, kept completely separate, so nothing there can ever touch company data. I decided what each one can see before I put it to work. Many managers will soon use AI this way, and they will expect to do the same at work. Once that happens, the question for an operator will be how to use AI well.
What it means inside a club
In a club, AI can already build personalized programs for each member and notice when a member starts training less often and with less effort than usual, before they cancel and before anyone spots it in a report.
In marketing, the useful part is knowing how much of each campaign turns into real revenue.
The next step, as I see it, is a central AI that coordinates one agent for each function. It should not hold all the data itself: just like with people, each agent gets its own key and sees only what its task needs. This only works with open platforms, and UPTIVO, for example, has an open API that an AI like this can connect to today.
It also means, and I know it is not nice to say, that AI will cut a lot of jobs, in our industry as in every other. The roles made of repetitive work will go first.
An owner who hides this loses the team's trust: the honest thing is to tell staff now which tasks are going away and to train them for the work that stays. The people who stay, coaches included, will have more time for the part no AI can do: empathy, energy in the room, knowing members by name.
Who answers for it
Our industry often presents AI as something easy to keep under control. It will not stay that way for long unless someone manages it with real skill.
If AI decides more, someone still has to answer for those decisions, and that someone will always be a person.
If you use AI without the right setup and a safety net, it's like having employees who make decisions in your name, without you knowing.
And every mistake is yours.
You won't be able to say: "Sorry, it was my AI." Your AI is an extension of you.
Someone has already tried. In 2024 Air Canada argued before a Canadian tribunal that its chatbot, which had given a customer wrong information, was a separate entity responsible for its own actions. The tribunal called it "a remarkable submission" and sided with the customer: a company is responsible for everything on its website, chatbot included.
Learning to manage AI
So I think the skill to build in the next years is managing AI well. Managing means setting the rules it works within, putting a safety net under it and always knowing which person answers for what it does.
My own assistant, for example, sees the company's numbers, but it cannot move a single cent: every payment requires a confirmation that goes through a channel it has no access to.
This is the part I care about most. If your safety net is only an instruction you gave the AI, you don't really have one. A real safety net is a limit that software alone cannot cross.
In a club it works the same way. The AI can see that a member is about to cancel and prepare an offer, but only a manager can approve the discount, in a system the AI cannot touch. The AI does the hours of work and the manager needs a few seconds to approve, and that is where the costs go down.
It is what a good owner already does with anyone who joins a process, whether a coach, a front desk associate or a manager. Nobody hands a new employee the keys and access to everything on day one and walks away, and an AI deserves at least the same care.
There are also two things AI cannot do at all: take responsibility and give the human touch. People stay in a club because of the community, which is why coaches who really know their members will be worth more than they are today.
Let's talk in Dallas
On Friday I will talk about what this means in practice for a club, and I expect some disagreement on stage. Come to the panel at 12:15 PM and bring your toughest question for the Q&A at the end.
At booth #125, on both days, Andrea and I will show how the training data members already collect with their own wearables turns into concrete signals for coaches. You can also book 20 minutes with me before the event. More about our work is on the UPTIVO website.