‘The Loudest Voice in The Room’

Martin Cox from VO2max Coaching tries out Jason Koop coaching tool ‘KoopAI’:

Bizarrely, the KoopAI program generator doesn’t consider the athlete’s gender, age, training age, race experience, or initial performance status! Worse still, there’s no screening for current health issues – e.g. for increased risk for adverse exercise-related events, such as cardiovascular, pulmonary, and metabolic related diseases, as well as other conditions.

The list of omissions is endless! KoopAI doesn’t account for the majority of the variables that a competent and responsible coach should and, in many cases, MUST ask an athlete before starting to work with them.

It’s not surprising that the tool is rudimentary, faulty, and lacking any built in ability to respond to the athlete, almost all AI tools are promising, but in a sort of ‘beta stage’, to call this most charitable.

But Martin’s concluding thoughts explain what KoopAI really is all about:

The tragedy of KoopAI is not merely that it’s a bad product. The tragedy is that it represents a trend – of individuals mistaking influence for insight, ambition for wisdom, performance for meaning. We’re witnessing the rise of a new kind of coach: Not the mentor in the background, but the brand in the foreground. Not the quiet guide, but the loudest voice in the room.

We see a rising trend of coaches abandoning the shadows – where the best coaches belong – for the limelight of brand-building and content creation. KoopAI feels like a product of such striving: not for better coaching, but for industry dominance.

To the point.