CES 2025 showed me the future of AI in fitness, and it’s hilariously unimaginative
Anyone who’s been following the news from CES 2025 knows that one word (or two letters, if we’re being pedantic) dominated the conversation at the biggest tech conference of the year: AI. Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into everything from cars to coffee machines – often whether we like it or not.
Even if it’s an area of our lives where artificial intelligence doesn’t feel like a natural fit, tech companies are eager to use it to better personalize “our experiences” (or make good use of all the data that’s been collected lately). decade).
This goes double for a fitness kit. CES 2025 showcased a host of AI-powered fitness tools that will invade our homes and gyms in 2025 and beyond. The Amazfit Active 2, which we’ll be reviewing for our best cheap smartwatch buying guide, comes with voice-activated AI assistant functionality.
The beautiful booster fitness machine and the Gym Monster 2 are home gym setups that use AI to monitor your workout and recommend workouts through the kit. Similarly, Therabody, makers of some of the best massage guns, will use data from the top Garmin watches to recommend recovery programs.
This follows emerging trends in fitness and doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel. Oura Ring 4 has an Oura Advisor chatbot service in beta. It’s trained on Oura users’ data and can answer basic health and fitness questions or recommend action steps based on your individual data. PUSH, one of the best fitness apps for strength training, can program workouts for you, as well as a whole host of others. However, recent data shows that remote personal trainers won’t be replaced anytime soon.
Garmin, COROS and other manufacturers of the best running watches did this a long time ago. They didn’t call it AI, just used their algorithms to recommend workouts based on your training plan and recovery scores. So CES 2025’s AI offering doesn’t give us anything new, even if companies are now using LLMs or generative AI instead of algorithmic flowcharting decision making to achieve the same effect.
Therabody, amp, Amazfit and the rest have just extended these old features to new devices and services. As far as I can tell, no one is doing anything different or revolutionary in fitness this year. Is this the AI revolution we were waiting for?
Part of that, I think, is that unlike computing, content creation and communications, there is a limit to what AI can do in a predominantly physical space. Instead, you can consult an actual personal trainer, they can write a program for you in Microsoft Word, and you can print it out and take it with you to the gym.
What AI can do is recommend changes to that program and provide expert advice on new exercises – but as my colleague Stephen Warwick and I discovered, using AI to design your workouts isn’t a perfect process. It needs to be combined with a bit of common sense – if you feel sick, tired or sore, dial back the training a bit and perhaps ask a member of the gym staff for advice on new or unfamiliar exercises.
Of course, I’m not saying that there is absolutely no place for AI in consumer health and fitness devices; people are finding it very useful, not to mention its applications are already common in healthcare. However, I expected some more imaginative AI use cases from CES, and as the conference came to a close, I was left disappointed.