Beyond ChatGPT: How clubs can attract high-value members with AI

Amber, how is AI currently showing up in fitness?

AI is showing up in fitness in a lot of different ways. There’s a whole spectrum of possibilities, ranging from biometric analysis – to help with recommendations for what people should do in a home or in a class – to DNA and blood. AI is amplifying the workout experience with computer vision and augmented reality and making it more gamified and fun.

I think there's also a spectrum of what's accurate data and what's helpful and safe for members. Something we’re obsessing at Les Mills is finding the things that are most effective to get people started with fitness, on the journey to falling in love with it. We want to harness the power of gamification in a way that pulls them in but is also safe. Just because something has a cool mirror or a cool rack on a video overlay, it doesn't always mean that it's the right movement, so it’s another element of the spectrum to be aware of.

How do we ensure that people feel safe and are being delivered what they expect?

At Les Mills, we partner with PhDs and physios for all the content we build. Most recently, we built a series called Mindful Movement. It was less of a workout, more an opportunity to engage with augmented reality to offer users a downregulation experience - the process of consciously reducing or calming an intense emotional state. We partnered with researchers and used heart rate monitoring via the ear to prove its effectiveness. It’s crucial to partner with the right people - authoritative sources who can test, prove and validate things.

Depending on the type of workout, movement or recommendation, having different training data is incredibly important. For example, women need different things at different times of the month than men need. So even if you have HRV (heart rate variability), or sleep data, it's not always a one for one recommendation. Men and women shouldn't get the same recommendations. At Les Mills, we work closely with researchers to ensure that when we’re ready to offer something, it’s backed by science and expertise.

How is AI shifting consumer expectations and behaviors?

AI has been shifting consumer behavior and expectations beyond just the fitness industry for years. It’s existed since the 1960s, which is crazy, but it has become much more prevalent in the past two years with things like generative AI, deep fakes, and other applications.

Consumers expect personalized services. They expect companies to know them and their preferences – and to offer something relevant to that. So in the world of fitness, if somebody wants a strength building experience or something to help them chill out after work, they expect the right recommendation based on that explicit intent. I think the opportunity for operators to go above and beyond is to react to that with real time recommendations.

There’s also the chance to support the fundamentals of what members say they’re going to do. As an industry quite often we’ll hear from members that they plan to work out 5 or 6 days a week, but for whatever reason, they don't. That’s where AI can come to play because we can monitor what people actually do and what helps keep them in a habit with fitness, and give them recommendations to do that – support what they're actually going to do with their explicit overlay and their goals on top of it.

Where do you see the other opportunities for AI and fitness?

There are big opportunities in the club and in the business space. At Les Mills, we're using AI for targeting growth – targeting lifetime value positive customers – people who will spend more than we spend to bring them in. Every company that wants to stay alive will do that. So we use AI in our targeting and our churn mitigation, both with movers and with instructors. It helps us identify when somebody looks like they have a propensity to stop their habit. We’ll then target those users with minigames – like nudges or a reminder to come back and work out with us, take a class or to do a training.

Clubs can use AI to do the same thing and target high-value movers, by seeking out ‘lookalikes’ to their existing highly engaged members with media targeting. They can also do that with churn because retention is a key piece for clubs. It’s about more than just winning the membership dues. Once people start moving and get fitter, clubs can start monitoring the behavior - measuring the ‘lookalike’ activities of somebody who sticks versus somebody who doesn't. Then they can mine the commonalities of people who stick, and nudge those behaviors more with the people who don't.

In terms of increasing member satisfaction, we're seeing a lot of value in giving people instant answers. So when somebody reaches out having a question about where do I find X or how do I use Y feature? AI can really drive value in its ability to look up past answers, and mine previous customer feedback. We use AI to cluster our own customer feedback to give recommendations before sending that data to our product teams to make sure that we keep building things that people love. Clubs can do the same thing. They can do sentiment analysis based on what people are doing in the club and what people are doing outside, but in public social media, and scrape it and make sure that they have the right offerings based on what people are looking for.

How else can clubs use AI?

From an acquisition perspective they can use it to identify areas of the club where they have latent capacity and ensure they recruit members they can serve and retain. Identifying those ‘matching’ qualities. Asking what the right profile is for the type of member they want to recruit. And that’s based both on the profile of people who join and stick, but also the profile of where the club can serve them best. Because if the member is looking for something completely different, it's a lose-lose situation for both sides and nobody wants that.

For clubs looking to begin with AI, my top three tips for getting started would be:

One - look at your end-to-end business journey and identify where you can optimize it to have the biggest impact. I would recommend starting with how you approach new member acquisition and ask how they can layer in tech and AI to augment that with lookalike lifetime value-based targeting.

Two – pay attention to member churn mitigation. Identify what people are doing in a club and optimize the member experience against those things. Identify what the profile of a high value member looks like and clone the profile, mimic the touchpoints and nurture other members in it.

Three – we know the vast majority of members now expect personalization. Clubs should be asking how they bake that in from the moment members join . That’s the moment to start really understanding what it is they need.

What can fitness learn from how other industries are leveraging AI?

I think the biggest thing that everybody needs to learn is that AI is a solution – just one in the whole gamut of what technology can do!

The most important thing is to lead with the problem or opportunity, identify the right solution to solve that. We’ve found value with harnessing AI in the translation space, which was previously very costly for us as a global business.

I highly recommend clubs use AI to identify their biggest problems to solve, biggest customer needs, and then look at where AI can augment that. The other thing that clubs and B2B and the fitness industry can really learn is making sure that there's the right training data to give the right outcomes. Some companies have faced issues because they lacked diverse training data. For example, a well-known company (which I won’t name) built a credit card but trained its AI model primarily on men’s financial data. As a result, women were unfairly denied the card. That’s a huge problem.

We can learn from such mistakes by ensuring that AI models are trained on the right, diverse data to produce accurate and fair outcomes. AI isn’t magic—it’s an algorithm that works with data, and the quality of input data determines the quality of the output.