Google's AI Health Coach is now live. The price is $9.99 a month. That is less than most practitioners charge for twenty minutes of their time, and it is now accessible to every Fitbit and Pixel Watch user on the planet, with Apple Watch integration expected next.
It is easy to read that as a threat. We think the more useful response is to understand exactly what it does, and where it stops.
What the Product Actually Does
Google's AI Health Coach integrates directly with wearable data and does several things well. It logs food intake from photos using image recognition, tracks sleep patterns and surfaces trends, provides guided workout recommendations calibrated to activity history, and answers health-related questions around the clock without scheduling, without a wait, and without judgment.
For someone who has never had access to any kind of health guidance, this is genuinely useful. It provides structure, accountability nudges, and data-informed feedback at a price point that removes most access barriers. In that sense, it is doing real work for a real population.
The question is not whether it is useful. It clearly is. The question is what it cannot do, and whether that gap is where you live.
The Gap the Product Cannot Fill
There are things that do not scale with software, regardless of how well-designed that software is. Google's AI Health Coach cannot notice that a client has been skipping Tuesday sessions since their divorce. It cannot build trust over two years of showing up, of knowing when to push and when to hold back. It does not know when to skip the plan entirely because something more important is happening in a person's life.
Clinical judgment built from knowing someone over time is not a feature that can be added to a wearable integration. The practitioner who remembers what a client said eight months ago, who catches the subtle shift in energy before it becomes a problem, who knows which cue will land today: that is not a workflow. It is a relationship.
What Clients Will Actually Use It For
The more realistic picture is that the clients most likely to use a $9.99 AI health tool are not the same clients who are booking sessions with experienced practitioners. They are people who were not going to book those sessions anyway, or people who use both: the AI for daily accountability and a practitioner for depth, strategy, and human connection.
Think of it less as competition and more as the first point of contact. The AI raises awareness that health is trackable and manageable. Some of those users will want more than tracking. Those are the people who will come looking for what you offer.
How to Position Yourself Alongside It
The practitioners who adapt well to this environment are not the ones who ignore these tools or position against them. They are the ones who are clear about what they provide that the tool does not.
If your value is a custom program and weekly check-ins, you are competing on territory where AI has an advantage: availability, price, and infinite patience. If your value is judgment, relationship, context, and the capacity to catch what the data misses, that is a different conversation entirely. That is the one worth having explicitly.
Update how you describe what you do. The clients walking in right now already have a fitness app. They are coming to you because the app cannot give them something. Know what that something is, and name it clearly.
The Human Skills That Do Not Scale
The $9.99 product is real. So is the gap it cannot fill. The practitioners who understand both of those things clearly, without anxiety or dismissiveness, are positioned to do exactly what clients need most right now: help them figure out what the technology is actually for, and what to do with the parts of their health that it cannot touch.
Follow Healthy Dynamics on LinkedIn and Instagram for more.