Your Climbing Gym’s Sales Results Might Be An AI Red Flag
- Pete Ward
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
At the start of 2026 I wrote about Rise Above’s 2025 insights and 2026 predictions. Next month we’ll be doing a mid-point check in to see how those predictions are holding up, and in the meanwhile, I want to address a topic that I didn’t tackle at all: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Back in January I didn’t make any predictions about what AI will mean for the climbing industry for the simple reason that we have built Rise Above to be the place where bullshit goes to die and we think that most AI predictions we have seen thus far for the climbing gym industry are bullshit.
Climbing Gym AI Predictions = Guesses at Best
No one has any real idea how AI will change things, particularly in the climbing industry and we have no interest pretending we can see the future of a technology that is changing so quickly it’s nearly impossible to keep up. Things will change (duh), and AI is a powerful tool that we all use regularly (duh), but there are too many unknowns to say with certainty what the best use-cases are in any climbing-related business that will drive real sustainable value.
Which brings me to the point of this blog: Because some of our clients are starting to use AI heavily in their day to day business, particularly in their sales functions, we now have first-hand, lived comparisons between our clients that are using AI and those that are not. You still won’t get any predictions on AI here, but we can share what some of our clients are doing with it and what the early results are right now.
So, is AI helping climbing gyms? NO. They way climbing gyms are using it right now, it's hurting them
Sales + AI = Early Warning Signs
We’re seeing the clearest early warning signs are in sales where some folks responsible for generating membership revenue are off-loading huge amounts of work onto AI with very poor results. This is a problem for businesses for the obvious reason that revenue is the life-blood of the organization, AND also because we think that sales might be the canary in the coal mine - an early indicator of AI-related problems that could emerge down the line in other business functions.
This is because sales performance is measurable in the present. Other functions might suck too, but you don’t really notice as quickly or clearly. No one knows their HR department is bad until it’s scandal-level bad. For IT, it could be a decade before things look off. But in sales, we can see the drop-off in performance in real time and that’s worth taking note of.
If we compare our more AI-forward clients and the clients that are still doing things the old fashioned way, there is a clear trend line emerging: As of today, our clients who use AI the most are performing the worst.
Given that tech companies are literally spending trillions of dollars betting on the opposite, it’s probably worth explaining what we’re seeing in more detail, starting with WHY climbing gyms are starting to use AI in the first place.
This blog isn’t about predictions, it’s about reality. What we’re seeing with AI at the moment is that it is extracting value from the climbing industry, but that it is not yet providing value in a way that is helping our clients.
Why are Gyms Using AI at all?
Back in our 2026 predictions blog, our ONE big prediction was this:
“While we believe that the industry is healthy and growing, we're already starting to see gyms and operators struggling to maintain performance and in some cases closing their doors. 2026 will be about performance, plain and simple.”
And that’s what our more AI-forward clients are using AI to address - The need for better performance and for greater professionalism in their business. They’re generating sales strategies, go to market plans, product strategies, marketing copy, investor decks, financial projections and basically any other business-related documentation you can imagine. And at first glance, it’s working. I’ve never seen more MBA-level work come out of the climbing industry. On paper the AI users look like a bunch of geniuses.
But business doesn’t take place on paper, and what we’re seeing first-hand is that the actual employees of the more AI-forward organizations have often stopped learning themselves and have instead become interfaces for the AI they’re using. This is not a problem if your goal is to sound smart in an email conversation. It's a huge problem if your goal is to run a productive meeting, execute on a revenue strategy or execute on any sales strategy that involves communication or creativity from the individual.
When and How AI Can Actually Help
What we will say about large language models is that if you are already a deeply experienced subject matter expert, using AI to produce things for you like a sales strategy draft can vastly speed up your workflow. But if you are not an SME, using AI to fake it is going to do real damage to the business, AND to your own professional abilities. Unfortunately these are the use cases we are seeing the most.
Using AI as a tool to enhance your existing deep expertise is a yes. Using AI to fake or replace deep expertise is a big no. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it shows and what we’re seeing in real time with actual businesses is that AI amplifies that ignorance rather than concealing it.
So What do You Do?
Consider how you want AI to play a role in your business, determine what level of AI use is acceptable. Think hard about the experience level and quality of actual lived experience and demonstrated success you want when hiring and building your team. And above all, be very VERY wary of any team member clearly using large language models to do their job for them.
No, We Did Not See This Coming
Personally, I’m surprised to be reporting these findings. If we rewind three years, all management consultancies were supposed to be dead by now having long-since been replaced by AI who knows better, is smarter and is far, far cheaper.
What we are finding instead is that Rise Above is having its best year ever by a wide margin. Discovery calls, conversion rates and average contract value are all up YoY and at record highs since we started the business.
Maybe that all changes tomorrow. Maybe AI comes around the corner that can run your business for you and puts us out of business. But what we’re seeing TODAY is that in a world where AI, social media and the myriad challenges of the world are dulling the senses and abilities of professionals globally, there is a higher premium than ever on ACTUAL expertise and professional ability.
Used well, AI can help you, but it can’t do it for you. Our best performing clients understand the difference.
(Postscript: AI has already changed our cognitive abilities to the degree that I chose to bold the point I wanted to make in every paragraph and you expected it of me without thinking twice about it. Degraded attention span, degraded reading comprehension and difficulty with complex tasks are all early warning signs of dementia and dementia rates are skyrocketing for folks younger than 40. The brain is a muscle and it only works if you work it. So maybe think twice before off-loading your intellectual heavy lifting to a robot.)
Just for fun, here is what Claude has to say about it. The prompt was "Is there any obvious issues with a team member using a large language model to do their jobs?"
