Google announced Google Health Coach, its new AI-powered Fitbit coaching experience, a few weeks ago, and I was really excited to see the impact.
Now that early testers have shared their feedback, the picture is mixed, but very telling.
The good: people seem to like it when the coach connects the dots. When it remembers that you were sick, adjusts your workout plan, explains a bad readiness score without making you feel worse, or turns raw sleep and activity data into something actually usable.
The less good: it still makes mistakes. Some users reported hallucinated workouts, forgotten activities, inaccurate food logging, too much generic AI encouragement, and a general feeling that you still need to check what the “coach” is saying.
For years, wearables have been great at collecting data, but not always great at changing behaviour. AI coaching could change that, because it moves from “here is your data” to “here is what you might do next.”
Assuming the product continues to improve and these errors are fixed, it will be interesting to observe, from a behavior-change perspective, whether people will let an AI influence how they rest, eat, train, recover, or interpret their own bodies.