Matt Spettel co-founded CoPilot in 2019, an application that directly connects users with a personal trainer. The company raised millions of dollars and has been repeatedly named the best personal fitness app by Forbes. But as the term "copilot" has become synonymous with AI chatbots, in part due to Microsoft's homonymous Copilot service, the app has been renamed to Trainwell.
"After we had launched the initial CoPilot brand, Microsoft GitHub Copilot launched which was the very first glance into what would become this huge initiative by primarily Microsoft and many smaller startups to call large language model AI agents copilots colloquially," Spettel said. "What finally pushed us over the edge is Microsoft in particular started putting a huge amount of direct to consumer marketing behind the copilot name."
Trainwell is reportedly making eight figures in revenue. But even with that amount of money coming in, Spettel felt a legal battle with one of the largest companies in the world would only "waste time."
"That product is a fine product, it's a very functional chatbot," Spettel said. "But the idea of a completely automated chatbot that doesn't empathize with you or hold you accountable is so antithetical to what is at the core of our product. Not only was a big company coming in and starting to use the name, which on its own would be unfortunate, but they were coming in and creating strong associations between our name and sort of the opposite of what our product represents."
Spettel feared that an oversaturated market of low quality services similar to the company would ultimately undermine the brand and the human focused nature of the product.
"I remain steadfast that getting an identical message from a chatbot versus a human being will have an impact that is day and night," Spettel said. "Fundamentally, there are certain industries, especially service industries, where having a human in the loop cannot be replaced by nature of them being a human."
