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 muc