We are excited to announce RunSignup AI, a new way for our customers to interact with and leverage the power of the RunSignup platform. AI is rapidly advancing and changing our world. RunSignup is fully embracing AI to help our event customers adopt the wide range of advances available.
AI is a new type of interface to the RunSignup platform. There is still a need for everything RunSignup has today. AI is not good at transactional systems (you do not want a hallucination when collecting and transmitting money!), or having static content like a website. However it is amazing at interactive and dynamic tasks. Reports are static and defined, while AI allows an unstructured view of data.
With RunSignup AI, customers will be able to:
- Build powerful applications based on data and features in RunSignup. For example, customers will be able to build public facing applications like specialized leaderboards or loyalty lists. Additionally, using our Oauth 2 secure infrastructure build new dashboard reports, automate repetitive tasks and more.
- Chatbots will automatically know public information about events. This means that events using RunSignup and TicketSignup will be automatically listed on the fast emerging Chatbot marketplace alternative to Google and Facebook searches.
- Customers will be able to use Chatbots to interact with public information. For example, results published on RunSignup will be able to be analyzed easily with statements like “Compare the average pace of our half marathon over the course of the past 10 years”. Again, using our secure Oauth 2 infrastructure, directors will be able to query chatbots about their own race data. For example “How many people have done my race over 10 times, 5-9, less than 5 and only once?”.
We will be demonstrating and teaching customers how to leverage AI for their events at RunSignup University, June 24-25, 2025. Also follow this blog and see our RunSignup AI page on our website.
As usual, RunSignup AI will continuously improve. Here is a rough timeline to expect:
AI Based Applications – Available Now
The new generation of easy to use “Vibe Coding” like v0.dev (our current favorite) also simplify deployment – just push a button and your application is on the web.
We have done a series of example AI Applications, and customers have begun developing applications as well. The amazing thing behind all of these applications is that most of them only took and hour or two, and the super complex TicketSignup Timed Entry application only took 8 hours.
Our powerful, secure, and highly optimized API enables all of this development. Our API has always enabled a vibrant set of partners and custom built applications and integrations with systems like Salesforce, various race timing and scoring products, and various donor management systems. With this new generation of AI based development tools, this is drastically lowering the bar to create applications.
Improved AI Application Development – Available June-July, 2025
We have been working on a project for several months that will make the above application development even easier. We are implementing two primary features:
- OpenAPI specification – this makes it far simpler for AI based development tools as well as Chatbots to understand how to interact with our API. In the above application examples, we had to tell the v0.dev tool how our API worked, pointing it at the API and showing it a sample output. That will not be needed.
- OAuth 2 and Easy SignIn. We have a new OAuth 2 that will extend the PCI Compliant and Audited Secure Infrastructure to AI generated applications and Chatbots. What this will mean is that a normal RunSignup Login will be required for those applications and be the only way that data normally only seen in a RunSignup dashboard page will only be seen there.
Again, we will be demonstrating this at RunSignup University in late June.
Chatbots – The New Search
There is a shift in where people search for information from Google to AI tools like ChatGPT. In fact, Google announced that traffic is down (and their stock dived on the news). RunSignup has been monitoring the various chatbots as they crawl our site for lists of events. This is working pretty well today.
In the next few months, we will be implementing MCP (explained below). In particular, we will be implementing an MCP for Find Events. This means people using any chatbot will be able to ask questions like:
- “Find races close to me.”
- “Find a half marathon within an hour drive of where I live in October.”
- “Are there any triathlons in July in New Jersey?”
- “I’m looking for a small race this weekend.”
- “Do any races have prize money this month?”
MCP – Model Context Protocol – The New AI Way to Communicate Between Systems
MCP has been equated to the AI generation of the fundamental web protocol, http. Also to REST and API and Microservices architectures. It makes it easy for AI systems to understand what is done.
MCP (Market-Centric Product) can be thought of as an abstraction layer over traditional REST APIs. Where REST exposes endpoints like /events/{id}/participants, an MCP might expose a market-specific object like “Find Events” that includes the APIs, UI components, and logic patterns bundled together to serve that market’s full lifecycle.
In practice, REST is about verbs (GET/POST/etc) on resources. MCP is about business goals and user workflows. MCP could be the structure that organizes and documents how APIs, UI tools, and AI interfaces work together to serve a particular customer type.
RunSignup will implement secure MCP interfaces to our platform. Our implementation will be built on our new OpenAPI and OAuth 2 implementation, which means that public data like results or races happening this weekend will be generally and easily available. Private information and functionality done on a Dashboard will require login as it always has and be private data that will not leak into the general LLM.
What a RunSignup MCP Means
The big idea here is that RunSignup goes from being a large set of distinct functions (register, change events, run a report with certain data), to being a repository that AI can work with more unstructured data and analysis. Those search examples above can get really creative with secure login to get specific race data. For example:
- “What is the trend by age over the past 5 years of participants in my race?”
- “Break down how much donors give and the total donations for $0-$25, $25-100, and $100 plus. Show how many donors and the total amount raised in each category.”
- “I need to figure out how to staff my haunt each day. What days are we going to have over 750 people this week.”
As AI Agents become more prolific, MCP will become very important. For example, many of the training apps are moving toward AI, and will be wanting to integrate via MCP with race information. For example past performance of runners (generally public information) will be available to these apps to help guide a person to a 1, 2 or 3 hour half marathon time.
When Will RunSignup AI have MCP
We will implement our first MCP’s this summer (2025). We will start with the Find Events MCP so that our customers can get maximum benefit from the emerging AI search. We have a very long list of functionality in our API, and will eventually mirror all of that over the rest of 2025.
Summary
As we have said, 2025 is the Year of AI at RunSignup. The AI systems have gotten so good, so fast. And they are simply getting better and better. We are moving as fast as we can to adopt this new technology to help our event customers.