Ahead of Apple’s long-awaited WWDC keynote earlier this month, the company was widely reported to be working on a new AI-powered doctor that could potentially help you diagnose common conditions, recognize potential illnesses, and understand your overall health.
The rumored Apple AI doctor had me excited for WWDC, but as we saw, Apple held off on announcing this feature, presumably for a later date. However, WWDC 2025 did introduce a new feature to WatchOS 26 that isn’t a doctor, but rather a friend in the gym who keeps you motivated.
The Workout Buddy feature is not the rumored AI doctor, but rather a different feature that’s both interesting and incredibly unique. Here’s why I’m excited for the Workout Buddy, and crucially, what this could mean for the Apple Watch and Apple Health in general.
Meet your Apple Watch, aka your Workout Buddy
Apple’s push towards making the Apple Watch the center of your health journey comes to the fore with the innovative new Workout Buddy feature, which offers personalized, spoken information and motivational techniques during a workout. In short, Workout Buddy is designed to provide you with the encouragement, resources, and personalized coaching to help you achieve your goals.
Lacking the motivation for that final push before you wrap up the day’s session in the gym? Workout Buddy should help you push through for that final stint. Hitting new personal bests and wish someone could recognize them in that moment? Workout Buddy is there with your Apple Watch to give you recognition, provide you with information on your times, and encourage you to keep pushing yourself.
There are also many other features, such as the Smart Stack on the watch face, additional contextual information, and new customizable voices for motivational feedback, including two created by Apple Fitness+ trainers. If numbers are your jam, Workout Buddy will also read out key summary stats at the end of your workout, so you don’t need to find the information later.
Why I’m excited about the future of Workout Buddy
As it stands, I am probably not the target audience for the new Workout Buddy. Neck and cardiac issues mean I am not as active as I want to be, and I can’t run thanks to the impact on my spinal cord. This means that some of the more specific features designed for runners won’t be useful to me.
That said, this is the direction I’ve been waiting for Apple to go in. With enough data points — which Apple has billions of — AI could prove to be the next frontier in healthcare technology that we’ve been waiting for. Workout Buddy is a good step in this direction, but it scratches the surface and breaks the barrier, similarly to the earliest Gemini features for Android.
Where the potential for Workout Buddy is strongest is, ironically, outside of Workouts. Apple Health is the primary source of information in my health circle, and it pulls data from every device I use, as well as from my electronic medical records provider.
The feature I’m most missing? AI that can summarize all of this, find key outliers or new data points, and provide recommendations on how to improve the specific health markers I’ve highlighted. It turns out that I’m ultimately looking for AI to perform the calculations that I’ve done manually, but automate the entire process.
Imagine a world where AI is your doctor on demand
Have you seen the movie i-Robot? There’s a particularly prescient scene related to the AI powering all the NX5 robotos, as well as a demonstration of how it can be used for nefarious purposes. It turns out that, while this is just movie magic, it raises an interesting question.
The world of AI is rapidly progressing, yet it has not been widely applied in the healthcare space, at least not in a consumer-facing manner. I suspect that Workout Buddy could be the first step towards Apple launching an AI-powered health suite, one where AI can be used to help diagnose, reassure, and pacify patients.
Much of this is abject, but what could it look like? I would love to see an AI doctor — or an assistant, for that matter — that can review all my health data, understand my ailments and comorbidities, and provide personalized recommendations. I have diabetes and check my CGM multiple times per hour to understand the trends, but it would be much easier if I knew that it was also being monitored separately.
My CGM is capable of providing alerts and displaying trends, but it feels like a small step towards the AI-powered health future we’ve been waiting for. For my own selfish needs, I also hope that includes an AI that can match my activity levels with my heart data, CGM information, and medical records to predict when my sugar may run low, or whether I’ve worked out enough or pushed myself hard enough to achieve predefined goals.
Workout Buddy isn’t the AI Doctor I was waiting for, but it’s a crucial first step that has me excited to try the WatchOS 26 public beta when it is released next month.
