Nash Consing was riding his bike in Brooklyn last week when wham!—he slammed into a door carelessly opened by a woman leaving her Uber. The crash left the 25-year-old video editor hurt badly enough to require an ambulance, but not so badly to stop using Strava, an app that lets people track their activities and share them with friends. Still dazed by the collision en route to the hospital, he ended his workout and tapped out an update for his followers.
“Just got hit by a car,” Consing wrote. “I’m heading to the hospital now lol. Rib might be f*cked.”
Little did Consing know that, on the very day of his accident, Strava had just released an AI feature called “Athlete Intelligence.” The app has long supplied detailed metrics like heart rate and speed, but the AI tool means it now also spits out a personalized summary of a user’s workout in the voice of a coach.
Still in shock, Consing could only laugh as Strava’s new AI tool provided feedback on his abruptly ended bike ride. “Ouch, hope you’re okay after that car accident!” it read. “Despite the setback, your activity data shows you’re a consistent, well-rounded athlete – keep up the great work!”
Athlete Intelligence
Founded in 2009, Strava has built an impassioned base of fitness nuts that religiously track their exercise regiments and give each other “Kudos,” the app’s equivalent of likes. But the first week of its latest feature has drawn skepticism from even its most avid users like Consing, who view Athlete Intelligence as the latest gimmick in the AI explosion. “I do think it is more amusing, but also kind of pointless,” Consing told Fortune. “It just feels more like a meme than anything right now.”
The new AI feature comes at a time when Strava has ridden (or run, hiked, or swum) to the peak of fitness apps, with more than 125 million users and $150 million in venture funding. In an interview with Fortune, chief product officer Matt Salazar said that the company has been developing its AI tool for newer customers who can often find it difficult to consume the onslaught of information presented by Strava. “That’s really where we thought AI as an application could really help solve a real consumer problem,” he said. “And really help make sense in a very digestible way.”
Strava first tested the feature at a private conference hosted by the company Los Angeles in May, then released it for beta testing with subscribers last week. Salazar said the response has been overwhelmingly positive, though he did acknowledge what he described as an “injection of humor.”
Because the tool digests activities, some users have had fun gaming the outputs and posting them on Reddit, like one who reported that they put “abducted by aliens and probed” in the description. “Your activity shows an unusual spike in heart rate, likely due to an unknown substance injected during an extraterrestrial encounter,” replied the chatbot.
Others criticized the often obvious (and sometimes incorrect) feedback provided by the feature, with one Reddit user commenting that the tool “doesn’t add value and probably costs them a ton of money.”
‘Solving real problems’
Salazar emphasizes Strava’s new AI tool is intended more for novice athletes, though he didn’t provide specifics on how Strava plans to build it out or integrate it with other features, saying that he couldn’t “get too much into [the] future roadmap.” He did add that AI could help with route suggestions. Strava has put more of a focus in recent years on its mapping technology, including an acquisition of the app Fatmap in 2023.
Despite its dominant position, Strava still faces wide competition, including more personalized options like Nike Run Club and Runna which provide customized training plans, as well as smartwatch companies like Garmin and Coros which offer similar features. Salazar noted that other apps like Runna are compatible with Strava.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, companies have rushed to capitalize on the AI hype wave, often with disastrous consequences. When Google rolled out an AI box at the top of its search function in May, users discovered a slew of incorrect answers, including recommending a pizza recipe with Elmer’s glue.
Salazar pushed back on the idea that Strava was trying to shoehorn AI into its platform. “Just putting in technology for technology’s sake, I agree, is not a worthwhile endeavor,” he said. “We’re in the business of solving real problems.”
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