Tech companies continue to shoehorn AI into their product and services, whether it’s justified or not. Within fitness and health tech, we have more AI coaches and advisors than we can juggle — from Google’s Health Coach to Strava’s Athlete Intelligence — and AI interpretations of our stats, that often look suspiciously like the technology we had years ago, just with an LLM flair. But the shareholders love it and it works to upsell customers, so the game continues. Garmin, however, has been pretty careful about how it has employed the term, and how it has actually used the tech to ‘enhance’ its best Garmin watches and its Garmin Connect+ platform. From a dig into the Garmin website, you’ll mostly only see the term AI attached to one feature: Connect+’s Active Intelligence, which it describes as ‘AI-powered’. Active Intelligence is designed to offer LLM-style feedback and advice within the Connect app on your phone. The pitch is that as the app gets to know you, the insights will become ‘tailored to you and your goals’, according to Garmin. Garmin is a fairly careful, perhaps conservative, company among its peers. And I imagine there may have been a feeling it couldn’t not jump on this AI bandwagon, given wider industry trends. I asked Garmin COO Brad Trenkle how he sees AI’s role within the company. “I think because Garmin is a very engineering-focused company, we tend to be very pragmatic in all of our decision making,” says Trenkle. “That has led us to be very thoughtful and discerning about our use of AI. “One of the key tenets of how we’ve implemented AI across the company, not just in product but even internally in our own processes, is that any application of AI needs to keep a very keen sense of authenticity.” It’s an interesting take, when AI front-ends within health and fitness platforms often purport or appear to want to give apps a more relatable or human edge — and seem faker or sycophantic as a result. TrainingPeaks in the distance
(Image credit: TrainingPeaks) Garmin remains keen to emphasize it’s a human-first company, as proved by the company’s most recent major acquisition, TrainingPeaks , in July. TrainingPeaks does use some AI-based technologies in its platform but, fundamentally, it’s about matching an athlete (or schlub aspiring to be one) with the knowledge and expertise of a real, actual expert person…
