Where AI Belongs in a Martial Arts School — and Exactly Where It Costs You Students

Near the end of our Leadership Mastery meeting on August 18, I had William Wong’s ad on the screen next to a version I’d rebuilt myself. We went through the headline, the offer, the testimonials. Then I said the thing that always gets a reaction:

“I keep seeing ads with email addresses on it. I don’t want them to email me. I wouldn’t predominantly drive them to a website anymore. I would predominantly drive them to an inbound number.”

That’s not nostalgia. It’s a read on where every automated channel is headed — and where AI belongs in your school versus where it quietly costs you students.

I am not anti-AI. I use it every day, and we have it running background research on every lead that comes in. What I am is precise about it, because automation’s value is inverse to how much the interaction depends on a human feeling recognized. Get that backwards and you’ll build a very efficient school that leaks students.

The Decay Law: Every Channel Automation Touches Eventually Dies

I was listening to a podcast with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, on what jobs AI would put out of business. One he said was completely safe was sales — anybody effective and good at sales. Then the interviewer asked about voice AI doing outbound sales. Short term, he said, it’s fine. Long term:

“…is going to spiral out of control and then people just aren’t going to answer the phone.”

“And of course his answer is exactly right. Same exact thing that happened to email.”

Watch the email arc — the whole lesson in miniature:

“Email was very effective 20 years ago, and then it just spirals out of control to the point that people don’t want to check their email. Companies are trying to figure out how to use any kind of internal software to get rid of email. And people are pissed off when they have to check their email. And so the effectiveness for marketing has gone from a nine on a scale of one to 10 to a two or three. It’s not zero, but it’s trending the wrong direction.”

The channel got strip-mined. My own tell on the next one:

“I do a lot on LinkedIn, but my email box is so spammed with automated request. I haven’t read a message on LinkedIn for a year.”

That’s the decay law: the moment a channel can be automated at scale, its response rate starts dying. Not because the technology is bad, but because it works well enough that everybody piles in and the recipient’s only defense is to stop answering.

So the operators who win aren’t the ones with the best automation. They’re the ones already migrating to whatever automation hasn’t ruined yet — right now, a live voice on the phone, a handwritten note, a face at the door. When a vendor sells you “AI voice will make your absentee calls,” know what you’re buying: a short window of effectiveness, then a poisoned channel.

The Absentee Call: The Whole Point Is That a Human Noticed

The fastest way to lose a student is to let them fall through the cracks. Years ago I was training at Roger Green’s school in Tulsa, hadn’t been in for months, and the first thing we heard was a call because my parents hadn’t made the last payment. That tells you what’s important to them is the finances, not your participation.

So build the opposite. Joey comes Tuesday and Thursday. He misses Tuesday. Tuesday night, or Wednesday at the latest, the phone rings:

“Hi, Ms. Jones. I noticed that Joey wasn’t in class yesterday. I wanted to follow up, make sure he wasn’t sick or anything.” — “Oh no, no, we just had a play we went to.” — “Oh, no problem. I wanted to schedule a makeup class.”

If I had my way every one of those calls would come from the head instructor. In reality we tiered them:

“Those midweek calls were being done by the receptionist or maybe the program director. Those calls that were into the one-week file were being done by the instructor, two week and three-week files were being done by the head instructor.”

But the early “Hey, Ms. Jones, we missed you in class” came from whoever they were familiar with — program director or receptionist, but always “somebody they knew.” That’s the operative phrase.

Where owners break it

Here’s the failure mode I watch schools walk into, usually with a new software subscription:

“What I don’t want to do is all of a sudden get really slick and complicated so that their card didn’t get scanned. They automatically get an email, they get a text, and they get an AI voice calling in.”

Three touches instead of one, at zero labor cost. Looks like a win on a dashboard. But:

“The more this thing becomes pervasive, the less people are warm and fuzzy about they got a computer reaching out.”

We were excited about this early on: they miss, the software texts them, you drop in a link so they book their own makeup. And then:

“Once people know that it’s not a human being sending it and it didn’t take very long, then all of a sudden it doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t have much value to them.”

That’s the equation. The value of the absentee call isn’t the information — the mom knows Joey missed. It’s the evidence of attention. Automate it and you’ve removed the only ingredient doing any work. As Greg Moody put it, those tools are supplemental; they don’t replace the human touch.

Progressive, and What Your Parents Are Actually Experiencing

Want to know how that feels from your parents’ side? Be a customer for an afternoon.

“I’m busy dealing with a bunch of insurance claims, and yesterday we called Progressive and they now have their AI voice handling incoming calls. And nothing was more annoying than getting caught in this endless loop of having to deal with their crappy incoming voice AI that couldn’t and wouldn’t understand what we were trying to accomplish.”

Inside Progressive there’s a slide deck showing cost per contact, and every number improved. Meanwhile the customer grinds his teeth at a machine. Your school has the same deck, just smaller: “we now touch every absentee student within four hours automatically.” Great — ask the mom.

Automation is useful. Human-to-human touch is going to become more and more and more valuable, precisely because everyone else is fleeing it.

The Barcode in the Belt

Many, many years ago, Dave Kovar’s brother Tim and I were working on a software project together. One of his ideas was that every kid would have a barcode in the back of their belt and scan in for attendance on the way through the door. I’m not sure whether it was me who talked him out of it or whether he just:

“…recognized how dehumanizing that might feel, but they decided not to do that.”

Perfectly efficient: attendance capture at zero staff labor. And a nine-year-old walks in, gets scanned like a case of paper towels, and reaches the changing room without one person saying his name.

Compare that to the rule of threes we drilled into staff instead: greeted by name within three feet of the front door, appropriate touch three times a visit, their name used three times. My standard hasn’t changed:

“I’d much rather have inefficient with high touch than very efficient with low touch.”

Hold that against every automation decision. Not “does this save time,” but “does this remove a moment where somebody would have been recognized?”

Where AI Is Genuinely Good: Knowing Who Just Walked In

Now the constructive half. The same technology that ruins your absentee call is spectacular at something else.

“We’re definitely in the days of privacy as dead.”

When a new person comes through the introductory process, you can enter their home address in Zillow and it’ll tell you how big the house is and what it’s worth. A short Google search finds about anything you could want. You can go to LinkedIn and search for the dad and search for the mom, and oftentimes you’ll get their resume and their family history. You should be doing those things — and not by hand:

“When we have a new lead comes in, a Cowork worker will go pull all the data online and give me a briefing of everything from what their background is, what awards, what associations they’re involved with, what their address is, everything else, and you can just have it done automatically.”

That’s the highest-value AI application in a school today, and almost nobody runs it.

The volume math

Owners tell me they don’t have time. Run the numbers:

“If you enroll 20 new students a month, that’s less than one a day. Doesn’t take very long to do a little Google search and do a little LinkedIn background.”

Less than one a day. That’s a habit problem, and the fix is a setup you do once:

“You can set it up to just automatically run a little background on everything that you bring in, everybody you bring into the school.”

It won’t give you a lot — a paragraph on where they work and where they live. But that paragraph is the difference between “welcome to the school” and a real conversation.

Two cautions. First, everything here is publicly available information about adults, the parents, not the child. Second, this is background you use to serve and connect people better, never a substitute for asking them directly. I’d go further:

“I don’t rely on any piece of paper. They don’t fill them out. It’s not accurate. It’s not personal. What I’m relying on is I’m relying on instructor and program director being personal.”

The briefing is a head start. The relationship still gets built by a person asking questions. What do you do? If they’re holding a book, ask about the book. As Jason Purcell said, ask a dad what he does and he lights up — that’s when you write it down.

What it turns up

Greg Moody’s blunter follow-on was that you might find out something you really wanted to know. Occasionally that gives you pause about a family. Far more likely, mom is a third grade teacher at the elementary school you’ve been trying to get into for years.

“We found the guy who was in charge of the Rocky Mountain Flag Football League, whose two sons were students of ours, and we found three of the C-suite executives of a $780 million electronics chain and the person who was the HR director for the biggest employer in the state.”

One was listed as an accountant and turned out to be CFO of the Broncos. If I hadn’t dug a little bit, I wouldn’t have known.

Then close the loop with people. In a staff meeting I’m peppering them: who did we enroll today? What’s dad do? Half the time they didn’t know — but they sure as hell went back and found out. Use the machine for the digging, your people for the knowing.

Where AI Writes Badly: Anything the Public Reads

Christian Arias ran a booth at a movie theater for the Paw Patrol premiere and came out with 35 leads and 33 appointments. One anonymous person whined online afterward that they thought you had to enroll to collect the prize. One. Christian’s first instinct was to run a reply through ChatGPT.

“What I didn’t like about feeding it into ChatGPT is it almost sounds like an attorney’s letter. I mean, I don’t want that. I just want half a sentence, a couple half sentences, a joking response.”

What the moment called for was Jason Purcell’s version — “imagine what would happen if we gave out a hundred pair of nunchucks in the movie theater” — and the parents laugh and go, oh yeah. Conversational. Not the corporate PR department responding.

The deeper objection applies well beyond complaint replies:

“That’s the type of thing that’s not a particularly good use of AI because it’s not really going to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. And by the way, you’re trying to get a machine to act human rather than just have a human reaction to it.”

Christian took Jason’s approach and mine, posted a short human reply, ignored the other comments, and:

“The comments just stopped after that.”

One paragraph, written by a person, killed it. A polished AI response would have kept it alive: legalese reads defensive, and defensive invites the next round.

Where AI Designs Badly: Your Ads

I can spot AI-generated ad design across a room now.

“What I immediately identify anymore with something done by ChatGPT is if it has all kinds of extraneous little logos… it throws in all kinds of extraneous shit.”

The little globe next to the website. The little telephone symbol next to the phone number. None of that sells anything. To be fair to William Wong, the ad we reviewed was not AI-generated; he said so on the spot. I was describing the signature, not accusing his ad. But the signature is real, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

Greg Moody’s version is the one I want every member to internalize:

“You really need to get a concept of ad design and content design rather than you throw it into AI… you end up getting something that may look like other people’s ads instead of looking like something that would be as effective as it could be.”

That’s the trap. AI output regresses to the average of what already exists, and the average martial arts ad puts the logo on top and the offer in the middle. The headline is the ad for the ad, and it should be the benefit: “Martial arts has been the best thing for our child. I bet it would be for yours too.” Your logo is not your headline. AI is a fine drafting assistant once you know those rules and a terrible substitute for knowing them — the framework is in Martial Arts School Marketing.

The Sorting Rule

Put every recurring task into one of two buckets.

Automate freely — nobody needs to feel seen while this happens: background research on leads and new students; assembling data like attendance reports, year-to-date stats, retention numbers and cost per enrollment; first drafts of internal documents; scheduling logistics; summarizing your own calls and meetings.

Never automate — this is the moment of recognition: the absentee call, the birthday, the response to a public complaint or review, the first phone call to a new lead, the enrollment conference.

One question sorts them: does the value here come from the information, or from the fact that a person bothered? Information, automate it. Bothering, do it yourself.

That brings us back to speed to lead, where owners are most tempted to hand the moment to a machine. Bob Dunne had two people schedule on an online scheduler; neither showed up.

“What I know is if somebody fills out an opt-in form, I need to call them within 30 seconds. If somebody makes their own appointment online, I can’t set up an autoresponder text and voicemail and voice AI and then expect that they’re just going to show up for the intro. I’m going to get a human being on the phone with a human being and make sure I built rapport.”

If a human being doesn’t talk to a human being and build relationship, they’re not showing up. And if I have to call within 30 seconds anyway, I might as well drive them to the phone in the first place. A self-service scheduler doesn’t save you the call — it makes the call later and colder.

That’s the thesis. Automation is genuinely useful, and I run plenty of it. But every channel it touches at scale eventually decays, and the last thing standing will be the one thing it can’t fake: a person who noticed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should a martial arts school use AI to make missed-class calls?

No. The entire value of the absentee call is that a human noticed. Tier them the way Mile High Karate did: midweek calls by the receptionist or program director, one-week files by the instructor, two- and three-week files by the head instructor — always somebody the family knew. Once a parent knows a computer sent it, it stops meaning anything.

Where does AI actually help a martial arts school owner?

Pre-briefing. Before a new lead or student walks in, have AI pull publicly available background — a short Google search, LinkedIn for both parents, Zillow for the home address — and hand you a paragraph. At 20 enrollments a month that is less than one a day, and it routinely surfaces a connection you would never have found.

Why is AI-written copy bad for responding to complaints online?

Because it reads like an attorney’s letter. A member ran one anonymous complaint through ChatGPT and the draft was corporate legalese; the situation called for half a sentence, lighthearted, human. He posted a short human reply instead and the comments stopped. You are trying to get a machine to act human rather than just having a human reaction.

How fast should a martial arts school call a new lead?

Within 30 seconds of the opt-in. Two people scheduled themselves on an online scheduler with Bob Dunne and neither showed up. If a human being does not talk to a human being and build relationship, they do not show up for the intro — no autoresponder, text, or voice AI changes that.

Will AI voice outbound calling work for enrolling martial arts students?

Short term, somewhat. Long term it follows email exactly: effectiveness collapses as everyone adopts it and people simply stop answering. Email marketing went from a nine out of ten twenty years ago to a two or three today. Assume any channel you can automate at scale is already decaying, and migrate before it does.

Come Work On This With Us

If you want the full build — which tasks to hand the machine, which scripts stay human, and the tiered absentee system that holds students — that’s the work we do inside The Martial Arts Wealth Mastery Program. Supporting material: AI Implementation for Martial Arts Schools, How to Reduce Martial Arts Student Dropout, Operational Systems for Martial Arts Schools, and How to Sell Martial Arts Memberships.

If you’d rather talk it through first, book a call with Grand Master Oliver and we’ll look at your numbers.

Our live meetings run three days back to back in Colorado — Quick Start for you and your staff, Leadership Mastery, and Million Dollar Schools. Dates for the next round are on the site; fly into Denver International (DEN), and RSVP through Bob Dunne so we have a chair for you and an accurate food headcount. We always have a hard time getting a good headcount and therefore a hard time being organized. If you know a school owner who’d be a real contribution in the room, invite them and let Bob know.