The Benefits of Early Adoption and the Compounding Effects of AI

The fitness operators who embrace AI today won’t just save time, they’ll build a compounding advantage that grows faster with every interaction

Would you rather receive $1 million dollars today or a penny that compounds daily for 30 days? If you answered the former, not only do you misunderstand compounding, but you’d be $4 million short of the $5+ million that you could have received in this challenge. Steffie Bryant, president of AI SaaS company Keepme, used this powerful anecdote at her presentation at the ATN Innovation Summit to illustrate how much AI can compound your workforce — if you give it a chance. 

AI creates compounding advantages in three ways. First, the technology itself improves rapidly, becoming faster and more capable every few months. Second, AI systems constantly learn from every interaction, making their performance compound over time. Third, organizations that adopt AI early build an increasing advantage over those that remain manual, causing the performance gap between competitors to widen rather than stay constant.

Getting started early, and understanding how to build the right AI-human team, is essential. 

“If compounding is the prize, the opportunity in front of you isn’t to go buy some AI, it’s to build an actual workforce of people and machines together and lead it in a way you’d lead any other team,” she said. 

You also don’t need to hire an entire team on day one. It’s better to start with the role that’s hurting you the most, then put one capable agent on it and manage it like a new hire. 

“Give it context, check its work, tell it what goods look like in your club,” she said. “Once it’s earning its place, then you add the next agent.” 

Give the AI a Job, Then Give the Humans a Bigger One

In another illustrative example, Bryant asked audience members to stand if they or their team members responded to member inquiries after 9 PM or within five minutes while the team was on the floor. Unsurprisingly, most people stood up. This highlighted the workload and demands put on staff during limited hours in the day.

It also showed how having an AI agent managing repetitive tasks and summarizing business updates overnight lets fitness operators get time back to start the day informed and ready to focus on higher-value activities. 

At the end of the day, it’s not about AI agents replacing jobs, it’s about them replacing mundane, repetitive tasks that free up people to do more interesting and consequential work. In essence, people now have bigger jobs. 

“Think of my morning, the agent does the looking, I do the deciding,” she said.

Back to the penny example, where a daily compounding penny doesn’t even surpass $1,000 until Day 18, compounding takes patience. Fitness operators need to understand that AI might not show immediate results, but they can’t give up before things really go vertical.  

“Don’t start with a strategy or a committee,” said Bryant. “Take the one job your best people would happily never do again, and hand it to a machine. Watch what actually happens to your numbers and your people. Then you’re going to add the next one.”

The operators who win in the next few years won’t be the ones who made the biggest bet on technology, she said. 

“They’ll be the ones who started compounding the earliest and who partner themselves to something that is moving as fast as the world is.”