Is AMS Cooked? AI Has Entered the Chat

*Note* This article was written by humans, not AI. It was proofread and consulted on by multiple coaches and colleagues over the course of several days.

A few weeks ago, Nick DiMarco published a piece on his Substack titled "Leveraging AI" that should make every athlete management system (AMS) company pay attention. His thesis was blunt: you don't need a $40,000 AMS subscription anymore. You need a Claude membership, a few hours, and a clear idea of what you actually want to track. He's built full athlete monitoring systems, performance dashboards, and off-season championship trackers — all as single HTML files, all running in a browser, all owned outright by his staff at Elon. No subscription. No vendor lock-in. No waiting on a roadmap.

He's not wrong. And he's not alone.

A D3 head strength coach told me this week:

 That's not a hypothetical. That's a working coach, today, using AI to do the analytical work that AMS vendors have charged premium prices for over the last decade.

So is AMS cooked? It's a fair question worth answering honestly.

The threat is real and it's pointed in a specific direction.

The part of the AMS market that's genuinely in trouble is the part that was always overpriced relative to what it delivered: generic dashboards, basic leaderboards, athlete profile cards, CSV imports, position-group comparisons. DiMarco built a 1,182-line performance dashboard in a single Claude session. He built a 2,723-line off-season championship tracker the same way. Anyone with a clear vision and a few hours can now build what used to require multiple sales calls, a whole procurement cycle, and a five-figure annual contract.

If the AMS product is essentially a fancy spreadsheet wrapper with a logo on it, then yes — they are cooked. In my opinion, the moat was always thinner than the pricing implied, and AI just drained the rest of it.

I also think there is another storyline in the "AMS is dead" narrative.

Strength and conditioning is not a dashboard problem.

This morning a longtime customer texted one of our employees about how they dropped an AMS and kept TeamBuildr:

They just saved a few grand and added AI skills to their resume.

That's the piece the AI-built-AMS conversation ignores at the moment. TeamBuildr has AMS capabilities, but that's not the core of what our company does. We are, overwhelmingly, a strength and conditioning program builder, distribution system, and data collection platform. The operational backbone that gets training from a coach's brain, to an athlete's phone, to the floor of the weight room, and back to the coach, with the data intact. TeamBuildr is built to work alongside AI to further propel a coach’s efficiency, understanding, and planning.

Building a dashboard that visualizes test data is a solvable problem. But what happens when a coach tries to build a system that distributes a strength program to 800 athletes across 25 sports with autoregulation, video demos, real-time data capture on the floor, athlete-side mobile UX, percentage-based progressions, conditional logic, calendar integration, and historical training records that travel with the athlete for years?

This is a whole other animal. It’s no longer a one-HTML-file problem. It's a workflow, mobile, and infrastructure problem that took years of iteration with actual coaches in actual weight rooms. Now you’re no longer a coach, you’re a coder, you’re the IT department, and you’re your athlete’s support team if something goes awry.

Claude is extraordinary at generating code. It is not, by itself, a turnkey replacement for a delivery system that thousands of coaches and millions of athletes touch every day to actually train.

Where this is actually heading.

The honest reality is that AI is going to split this market, fast.

On one side: the bloated, generic, dashboard-first AMS platforms that charge enterprise prices for commodity features. Those are going to feel real pressure, and they should. Coaches who know what they want and have a few hours of curiosity now have a credible alternative. DiMarco's playbook works.

On the other side: the platforms whose value lives in workflow, distribution, and the specific operational reality of running a strength program. Those platforms aren't threatened by AI — they're amplified by it. Platforms like TeamBuildr have the opportunity to work alongside AI to give the coach exactly what they need to increase their shareholder value. The same D3 coach using Claude for GPS analysis is still using a purpose-built system to actually program, distribute, and collect training data. Analysis and delivery are not the same job.

The smart move for any S&C or AMS company right now isn't to pretend AI doesn't exist. It's to lean into what coaches can't easily build themselves in an afternoon: deep programming workflow, mobile experience for athletes, integrations, and the boring infrastructure that makes a system reliable on a Monday morning when 200 athletes walk through the door for their lift.

So, is AMS cooked?

Generic AMS? Yeah, probably. The pricing is never going to survive contact with a $20-a-month code-generation engine like Claude Code. As the CEO of TeamBuildr, I’ve put the brakes on any work we’re doing on our AMS system. From here, we’re building alongside coaches with AI tools. It’s better for the coach, better for budgets, better for us.

Our mandate will now double down on TeamBuildr’s original mission:

The chat is open. The coaches are typing. And the industry may see a necessary “culling of the (software) herd.”