#444: A Gym Owner's AI Playbook: How BFT Tysons Is Running on AI in 2026

All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Behind Gym Doors podcast. I'm here with my boy, Pav, who I've known now. Pav, how long have I known you? How long have we known each other now? I think

we joined GSD almost

exactly two years ago. Okay, two years ago. But I feel like the first few months, I kind of really didn't know Noya. And then I feel like over the last, since the AI conversations really gotten into our group, so probably like the last five or six months, that's when we really started to connect a lot more, maybe a little longer. That's

right. I'm not sure.

Okay, so for everybody watching, everybody listening, just so you know, what we're going to be going over today is AI stuff. And Pav is one of, we got probably about 15 other gym owners that are in our group that are in what we created, this like cohort of gym owners that are really loving AI right now and taking it seriously. And I would say you're like one of the more advanced guys in there. And so we're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about how People are using it now in their gyms, how Pav is using it in his gym, how I'm using it, how other use cases that we've seen as well, and where we think this is going in the future as well. Sound good? All right, perfect. So Pav, I know you're a gym owner now and you're with BFT. What was your background prior to this? Because you're not just like a gym guy that kept going from gym to gym to gym.

Yeah, I didn't start out in the fitness industry at all. So I spent 20 years in corporate America, actually. And over that time, I worked in four different Fortune 500 companies, always in financial planning and analysis. So I think that that gave me a good understanding from those large companies about building teams and culture, which I've been able to bring over to BFT, which has been good.

Well, and I think also the engineer background, being able to learn a lot of what we're doing with AI a lot faster than people that really haven't done stuff like this.

I've been lucky that I am a little tech savvy, and some of the roles that I had included helping technology teams, so I picked some stuff up along the way.

Yeah, yeah, very cool. Okay, so let's dive in. Let's be really efficient. How long have you been using AI for, and then how long since you started being really serious about it?

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, the arc that we've gone on, because we probably started to dabble with ChatGPT three years ago, even before the gym was open. And we would do basic things like using it to rewrite emails or write some copy. And slowly we started to find that there was more functionality as the AI improved. And so we would get it to kind of automate some of the things that we did. And we've now gone all the way to we recently created a machine learning algorithm using AI that's going to help us predict who's most likely to attrite. And so, you know, as AI has developed, we've also been able to take advantage of it and use it for more things.

So walk me through that. So this machine now, it's going to help you learn who's most likely to cancel?

Yeah. So gyms collect a lot of information about their members. They know when they