From Reactive to Proactive: How Agentic AI is Reshaping Fitness

With the introduction of its AI-powered operating infrastructure, ABC Fitness is embedding intelligence across operations to automate workflows, personalize experiences and integrate across systems.

For years, fitness technology has largely been reactive. Operators would log into a dashboard, review reports, identify problems and then decide what to do next. But the industry is now entering a different phase, driven by prediction and automation. In this way, systems not only surface problems, they act to resolve them.

That is a huge leap forward, one ABC Fitness is helping to fuel with an expanded AI strategy, which positions the company less as a software vendor and more as operational infrastructure for fitness businesses.

ABC Fitness is embedding AI across the systems gyms, studios and coaches already use every day, including lead management, billing, retention and workout programming. 

“Agentic AI, in practical terms, means systems that can take action, not just provide insight. In day-to-day operations, this shows up as workflows that continuously evaluate data and execute next steps without manual intervention,” said Finn Hegarty, Chief Product Officer, ABC Fitness.

That distinction is important because it shifts how gyms and studios allocate man hours. With traditional AI, the platform might flag an at-risk member or show that a payment failed, but staff still had to decide what happened next. Agentic AI not only recognizes potential problems but it automatically takes the next steps to solve them. 

If a lead comes in after hours, the system can initiate outreach immediately. If a payment fails, AI can determine the best retry window and send a follow-up before staff even notices there was an issue. This all frees the team up to focus on the member experience. 

But just because operators are not involved, doesn’t mean they lose control. Each of the agent’s actions happen within preset parameters that can be adjusted as needs change. 

“Before going live, operators can simulate real conversations and refine the agent until they’re confident. After every interaction, they can review outcomes and rate calls, and that feedback shapes how the agent performs going forward,” Hegarty said. “Control doesn’t move away from the operator. It just stops being exhausting.”

Augmenting Member Interactions

Fitness operators have historically been skeptical of automation for one simple reason: this business runs on people. In studios and gyms, retention is tied to relationships, accountability and community. It should never feel impersonal.

ABC Fitness is sensitive to this concern. The company believes that AI works best when it removes operational friction so staff can spend more time actually interacting with members.

“Fitness is, at its core, a people business — and that’s not changing,” Hegarty said. “We think about AI as something that supports the human experience, not replaces it.”

In practical terms, that means AI handling repetitive administrative work that tends to drain staff time: chasing failed payments, following up with cold leads or managing routine member communications.

At the same time, AI can give operators more visibility into member behavior before problems escalate. Instead of finding out someone is unhappy after they cancel, platforms can identify early warning signs like declining engagement or missed visits and prompt staff to intervene sooner.

“By surfacing the right insights at the right time — such as when a member is at risk of churn or when engagement drops — our platform enables coaches and operators to intervene more personally and effectively. The result is a stronger, more informed human connection, not a diminished one,” Hegarty said.

This philosophy is already proving true.

ABC Fitness recently rolled out its AI Workout Builder coaching tool, and within two weeks, 42% of workouts created by coaches using ABC Trainerize were generated with the tool.

Hegarty said the appeal is obvious. “It resonates because programming has always been the part of coaching that is the most difficult to scale” he said. 

Each individual workout plan can take hours when done manually. With AI, a personalized plan that factors in a client’s goals, equipment and history is done in minutes. It’s a game changer for coaches managing dozens of clients.

The coach still has the opportunity to adjust the plan, as needed, but it’s no longer a heavy lift.

“The role of the coach isn’t shrinking. It’s shifting toward the things humans do better than software: accountability, motivation, the conversation when a client wants to quit,” Hegarty said.

Improving Business Outcomes

Gyms and studio owners spend a lot of time — and money — on lead generation. Too often that effort and investment go to waste when those prospects fail to convert to memberships. The culprit: the lag between inquiry and follow-up. 

If someone fills out a form late at night or while the operator is leading a class or working with members, they wait hours for a response. In the meantime, they move on. AI helps close that gap by responding to inquiries immediately and keeping prospects engaged while intent is still high.

Similar opportunities exist with billing.

Payment failures are incredibly common in fitness, and each represents missed revenue. 

Often it’s an expired card, a mistimed retry or a member who simply forgot to update payment information. Understanding these simple root causes is what makes ABC Fitness’ Intelligent Billing so powerful. 

“With $14Bn processed annually, 40M+ members and 30K+ operators on our platform, we see every variation of why payments fail and what works to recover them, and we feed that intelligence back into the operator’s billing flow,” Hegarty said. 

He says early pilot results from its Intelligent Billing workflows have shown a 30% to 40% improvement in successful payment retries, all without awkward and time-consuming staff intervention.

The company believes scale gives its AI models a meaningful advantage in recognizing behavioral patterns over time. And that may be most powerful when it comes to retention.

Historically, gyms have approached retention reactively. A member cancels, staff reaches out and tries to win them back. Predictive AI changes the timing of that conversation.

Instead of reacting after cancellation, operators can identify disengagement patterns earlier and intervene while the member is still active.

That shift matters because keeping an existing member is far less expensive than replacing one.

“When you can predict which members are about to churn and act on it, you don’t lose them. And you don’t have to spend acquisition dollars replacing them,” Hegarty said.

In this way, Hegarty said, the retention benefits compound over time.

Building Toward the Future

The promise of an infrastructure that leverages agentic AI is powerful. But many gym and studio owners can lack confidence about adopting a new platform, even one that promises to free up time and boost revenue. In some cases, it’s because they’ve been burned before by systems that are incompatible with existing tech stacks or they’ve seen features become obsolete just months after onboarding. 

To address these concerns, ABC Fitness intentionally created an open AI platform that fosters flexibility and seamless integration. 

In addition to embedding AI into its own products, the company’s open AI platform allows operators and third-party developers to connect additional tools into ABC Fitness’s infrastructure.

Its platform follows emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP), which helps AI systems communicate across platforms and datasets.

That flexibility will become increasingly important over the next several years as AI becomes more deeply woven into daily operations.

“A closed platform forces operators into whatever the vendor decides to build. An open platform lets them bring the best of what’s available into the workflows they already run on,” Hegarty said.

In this way, owners and operators can build fully AI-enabled fitness businesses that will feel dramatically more responsive than today’s model. Leads will be answered instantly. Revenue recovery will happen automatically in the background. Member communication will feel more personalized because it’s based on real behavioral signals rather than generic campaigns.

But it all starts with an intelligent ecosystem drawing on a deep dataset.

“What separates early adopters from everyone else won’t be whether they have AI. Every platform will claim that,” Hegarty said. “The operators who pull ahead will be the ones running on infrastructure where intelligence compounds with every transaction making the next decision smarter, every member interaction making the next recommendation sharper.”

Ultimately, he said, the gap between the have and have-nots will continue to widen.

To learn more about how ABC Fitness is approaching AI, visit the company’s site here.