One of the biggest mindset shifts our industry still needs to make is moving beyond thinking in terms of participants. The same person who registers for your race may also volunteer, donate, purchase merchandise, join a membership program, train year-round, refer friends, or support your mission in countless other ways. They're participants, but even more importantly they're customers and community members.

My name is Jackie Levi, and I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at haku. For years, I've been helping endurance events and nonprofits both operate more effectively and bring on the technology they need to be more efficient and develop better customer relationships. If you've been following our blog, you know that I've written before about why your organization should be acting as a year-round brand. If you haven't already, you should read that blog as well, but that isn't required reading for this article.

The endurance industry has spent decades optimizing events. The next decade belongs to organizations that optimize customer relationships.

Across our years of supporting endurance event organizations, my team at haku has been able to support operational excellence with the power of our all-in-one platform with an industry-native CRM at its core. Our technology helped race organizers accomplish more with limited resources, and the organizations that adopted those tools gained a meaningful edge.

Today new chatbot-like functionalities are being rolled out in software platforms anywhere you care to look. As endurance organizations adopt AI, they will naturally see some efficiency gains for things like drafting social posts or email outreach. Tasks that previously required manual work can increasingly be automated by these AI tools.

At haku, we’ve been at the forefront of AI innovation in the endurance space since the beginning, launching our generative AI capabilities months and even years before the competition. But we didn’t stop there. We found that we had a uniquely rich set of data that could inform AI decisions and provide operational intelligence, not just generative assistance.

The endurance events that get the most out of AI will do it by having a clearer customer understanding, insights surfaced by the platform (even if they don’t know what to ask), and a rich dataset beyond registration data alone. AI won't create customer understanding. It will amplify the customer understanding you already have.

Let me say that another way.

The organizations that benefit most from AI won't be the ones who happen to be using AI. They'll be the ones with the best customer understanding.

Most of the Endurance Industry is Having the Wrong AI Conversation

When I talk with race organizers, event operators, and nonprofit teams, most AI conversations start in roughly the same place.

People want to know how AI can save time. They ask things like:

Can it help write emails?

Can it reduce administrative work?

Can it speed up reporting?

Can it help small teams accomplish more without adding headcount?

Those are fair questions. After all, endurance organizations have spent years trying to do more with limited resources. What strikes me, though, is that these conversations often focus on AI as a productivity tool rather than a strategic one.

The most important thing AI is likely to change isn't how quickly we complete individual tasks. That’s kind of like asking if hiring more chefs will make a pie bake faster. Obviously, you could create more pies with more chefs, but the operational bottleneck of the oven and baking time still exists. Similarly, the benefits from AI won’t just be sending more emails or social posts. AI starts delivering the most value when it helps organizations understand what's happening across their customer lifecycle. Using a chat tool as a feature, and not as infrastructure, is basic.

Most endurance organizations already have an extraordinary amount of participant information at their fingertips. Registration history, fundraising activity, donations, merchandise purchases, volunteer participation, membership engagement, referral behavior, race-day activity, customer support interactions, and marketing engagement all tell part of the story.

The challenge is seeing those signals in one place. Certainly if your AI tool is only looking at registration information, you’re already missing out. Without the unified data you can get from a truly modern revenue platform, like haku, it’s nearly impossible to have that complete view.

Over the years, I've watched teams spend countless hours pulling reports from multiple systems, reconciling records, and rebuilding participant histories manually before making the switch to haku. The information they’re looking for usually exists, but it takes a ton of effort to surface it without the right tools.

As AI becomes more capable, there is a temptation to think that alone will improve the outcomes it can bring. But like any system or computer, AI can only work with the context it can access. If your customer relationship is fragmented across disconnected systems, AI inherits that fragmentation. It doesn't magically resolve it. If data is siloed across registrations, fundraising, commerce, volunteer records, memberships, and marketing engagement, AI understands fragments, not a complete customer. But if you have connected data that’s well formatted and accessible across your business, AI inherits that connectivity too.

The conversation many organizations should be having is not whether AI can generate outputs. Even relatively simple AI tools can do that. What no AI tool can do is give you insights without visibility.

Customer Understanding Is About to Matter More Than Data Collection

For years, endurance organizations have invested heavily in collecting customer relationship, but have struggled to act on it quickly.

Consider a participant who has completed the same event for three consecutive years. Along the way, she has purchased merchandise, donated to a charity team, referred a friend, joined a membership program, and recently began registration for a longer distance before abandoning the process. Most organizations can eventually uncover all of those actions, but cannot quickly connect them in order to influence what comes next.

As AI becomes more capable, timing and proactive understanding will be increasingly important. Organizations often assume AI will create understanding, but more often it reveals whether or not your operations already understand your participants.

If participant history, fundraising activity, commerce data, engagement signals, and operational records remain disconnected, AI inherits those limitations.

On the other hand, when those signals are connected like they are in haku, organizations are able to see relationships that are otherwise difficult to identify. A participant's registration history can be viewed alongside fundraising activity, purchasing behavior, engagement trends, and other forms of involvement. Once those relationships become visible, different decisions become possible.

Why Operational Intelligence Matters

One of the reasons I'm excited about where AI is heading is that it creates an opportunity to move beyond automation.

For years, technology has primarily helped endurance organizations execute. It helped process registrations, manage fundraising programs, automate communications, and streamline operational workflows. Those improvements created meaningful gains across the industry.

Increasingly however, endurance organizations are realizing they need to operate as year round brands, not just one off events. They need to invest in the participant journey.

When registrations slow unexpectedly, teams need to understand whether the issue is audience quality, messaging, pricing, timing, conversion friction, or something else entirely. Likewise, when participant engagement shifts, organizations need to determine whether they are seeing a temporary fluctuation or the beginning of a broader trend.

This is one of the reasons I believe operational intelligence has the potential to become the greatest differentiator important in endurance technology that we’ve seen to date.

Platform Architecture Is Becoming a Different Kind of Conversation

For a long time, platform architecture conversations were simply not happening in our space. Even today, there are event organizers who don’t use a CRM-based platform.

Organizations might evaluate systems based on integrations, workflows, reporting capabilities, and ease of use, but they weren’t always thinking about how they fit together.

Teams operating across disconnected systems can still generate reports, automate tasks, and access AI features. What becomes more difficult is developing a unified customer understanding across the entire lifecycle.

By contrast, organizations that can connect registration activity, fundraising engagement, marketing performance, commerce data, memberships, race-day participation, volunteer involvement, and CRM history create a richer foundation for analysis and decision-making. From my perspective, that is where architecture begins to move beyond a purely technical discussion and into the realm of lived experience.

I’ll Leave You With This

As I’ve shared, much of today's AI discussion centers on task automation and agentic workflows. In fact, for much of our industry's history, technology has been evaluated through the lens of distinct tasks. We measured success by how quickly registrations could be processed, how easily teams could manage operations, and how many manual tasks could be eliminated.

But there is a real opportunity for event organizers who want more insights that they can use both in-moment and strategically. As AI becomes more capable and more widely available, the advantages associated with automation and productivity will become easier to access across. The organizations that stand out may increasingly be the ones that can connect customer behavior across more of the lifecycle, identify meaningful patterns earlier, and act on those insights while there is still time to influence outcomes.

If you’re interested in learning more about how haku can help you with the fundamentals of your event, help you scale and grow profitably, or gain advanced insights directly within your workflows, my sales team would be happy to chat.

We believe AI will be one of the most important technologies enabling this shift, but only if it's built on a complete customer understanding of every customer and every interaction.

That's the future we've been building toward. We're excited to share more very soon.

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