We have declared 2025 the Year of AI for RunSignup. We are rapidly moving from personal types of productivity gains to systemic gains leveraging the use of AI. We are starting to implement systemic AI that will allow our company to produce more features and provide better support for our customers while helping to hold our costs down. We will share more about these in the future, but as an example, we are expecting a gain of about 20% in development productivity with some of the tools and approaches we are using – so maybe we will hit 3,000 releases in the next 12 months instead of the 2,300 releases over the past 12 months.
However, we expect that most competitors will use similar approaches. We might have a bit of an advantage because of our culture of being very adaptable and embracing change since we are employee owned and focused on a long term learning environment of trust. That advantage is somewhat strategic, but it will likely be small.
Openness is Our Real Strategic AI Advantage
We have always been open with our content and our Open API. These gave us an advantage over the years, but that advantage will be multiplied by AI.
The foundation of the AI revolution is Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which are trained on content. RunSignup has a long term advantage with all of our content – comprehensive website, 1,000+ blog posts, 1,600 videos, hundreds of Help articles and thousands of customer support cases all publicly available and scraped by all the LLMs. The result is that the LLMs know all about RunSignup and can answer a lot of questions about how to use RunSignup. We will in fact be introducing several specific AI Chatbots on our website in the coming weeks to make this easier to access.
This is a significant advantage over competitors who are not as open with their information or complete with their documentation. RunSignup will simply be easier to use as more customers shift to seeing AI as a knowledgeable Advisor and Tutor.
Customers can also use this robust base of knowledge to have their own event specific AI driven chatbots to helps answer customer questions, as some of our customers are already doing!
This also helps us win new customers as we think there will be a shift from traditional search tools to AI powered search and dialog. For example, a number of people at RunSignup are shifting to ChatGPT as their first search tool instead of Google.
Our OpenAPI will be an even bigger strategic advantage. We have the most mature and used API available that has been used by many customers. Even with the introduction of our Zapier integration, it required customers to be developers or hire an expert like Sidekick Solutions. AI is bringing a new set of tools that generate code by simply talking with the model. And some of those tools also provide a deployment environment. We recently wrote about v0.dev, the Vercel AI tool and how we created a Race List application in an hour simply pointing the tool at our API.
We expect an explosion of customers and partners beginning to build applications, reports, dashboards and integrations using this new wave of AI tools over the next couple of years. We have the best API today, and are actively working on projects to make our API even easier for these AI tools to use. We will also be providing more content on how to leverage these AI tools with examples and documentation (and of course AI tutors).
The AI Future is Here
Yes, AI is here. It is time to embrace how AI can help us grow and do more. We have always been open with our content and our Open API. These gave us an advantage over the years, but that advantage will be multiplied by AI.