We are about to see pretty much the exact same thing that happened in the financial industry when platforms to deliver MPT optimized portfolios and all of the bells and whistles to consumers automatically came onto the market.
- Financial institutions said it wouldn’t work, so they could have more time to implement their own version.
- Bad advisors said it wouldn’t work, since they were scared of losing their 1% AUM yearly fee even though they weren’t providing any real value.
- Traders didn’t care because who has a portfolio instead buying and selling mortgage backed securities
- People without many assets signed up because the downside risk was low and the fees were very low
- Good advisors for high net worth clients shrugged, because no one with 20M in assets doesn’t want a human being to talk to when they have a question
Eventually, nearly all the good advisors that didn’t go out of business are now using the technology platforms to manage their clients. It didn’t “disrupt” the industry because finance is still very personal and it relies on human behavior rather than just a binary yes no case, but it undeniably changed it for the better.
Some predictions:
- I think Adaptive Training will be a huge step forward for TrainerRoad and the majority of the people that sign up to use it will find it more valuable than the previous offering
- I think a lot of bad $100-200 a month coaches who just pick workouts will lose some clients
- I think plenty of good coaches will learn how to use it for their benefit
- I think most people at the higher levels will still want a coach
I’m fortunate to work closely to a team that does ML at a very large scale, so I have a bit more inside baseball about how things work for real organization, who aren’t just sitting in their basement messing around with TensorFlow. Based on how Nate described their process of approaching this problem, I think TrainerRoad has set themselves up to be successful with ML to the best of its ability to deliver value in the area of training adaptation. There isn’t just this moment where you wake up and things are amazing. It’s a process of refinement over YEARS and they are saying “we are starting on that journey”.
Clearly it will take time for people to trust their system, same as its been for every other ML system every implemented.
Personally speaking?
I really like my coach and a lot of that comes down to needing to talk to someone sometimes. If some day he told me he is switching to an ML system he trusts because it saves time and lets him spend more time on the soft skills side of coaching, I wouldn’t care. I’d still happily pay him the money I do every month.