Garmin is embracing AI with ‘a keen sense of authenticity’ according to its COO — but acquired TrainingPeaks for ‘consumers who want to engage with a human coach’

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‘.