In yesterday’s opening keynote at the Innergize 2025 summit in Seattle, Zenoti CEO Sudheer Koneru offered a compelling vision for the future of the beauty, wellness, and fitness industries.
Sudheer opened with the current state of the industry, using aggregated data from thousands of businesses. While the industry showed strong recovery and growth post-2020, recent data from the last year reveals a slowdown, with a 10.5% drop in new customer acquisition and a 3.7% decrease in visits.
Despite the slowdown, the top 25% of businesses are still experiencing healthy growth of around 15%. Here’s a chart broken out by vertical.
While average businesses struggle to achieve material growth, top-performing brands prove it’s still achievable. It no longer happens on its own, however. Success now requires a focused strategy. To that end, Sudheer introduced a framework for building a thriving business: a magnet, a wheel, and a lever.
We’ll start with the wheel for reasons that will become clear as we go.
The wheel of revenue: Keep your customers coming back
Sudheer described the “wheel of revenue,” a cycle that builds momentum within your existing customer base. It’s a simple but powerful concept: More visits lead to more revenue. With more revenue, you can invest in your business and team, which creates greater customer delight.
Delighted customers return more often, which spins the wheel, generating continuous growth. This wheel is all about maximizing value from the clients you already have by ensuring they are happy, engaged, and loyal.
The magnet of scale: Attract a steady flow of new customers
While the wheel builds momentum, a business needs a magnet to achieve true scale. The magnet pulls a constant flow of new customers into your business, feeding the wheel. Sudheer pointed out that traditional magnets like a great location and marketing are still important, but the most crucial asset for attracting new customers today is your online reputation.
In an era where discovery happens online, a strong digital presence makes a business visible and draws people in. Excellent Google reviews, an up-to-date business profile, and positive social media engagement add up to a strong digital presence.
The magnet and wheel work together; a great reputation brings in new clients, and the exceptional service they receive turns them into delighted, loyal customers who then enhance your online reputation and visit more often.
The Zenoti platform supercharges the magnet and the wheel with features that reduce friction in the customer journey (online booking), enable virality (customer reviews and referral marketing), automate upsells (built into online booking and POS), and much more.
The lever: Lifting profits with unprecedented efficiency
The final component in the 3-part system is the lever. How can you do more with less, without sacrificing quality? The answer lies in automating the operational tasks that consume valuable time and resources. By applying this lever, you can improve your bottom line, creating more opportunities for investment, growth, and rewarding your team.
“Today, we have the ultimate lever that can minimize the effort you put into running your business and maximize the impact. That lever is AI. More specifically, AI agents.”
Sudheer Koneru, CEO, Zenoti software for beauty, wellness, and fitness
The force multiplier in the lever: AI agents that do the work
What powers the magnet, wheel, and lever? Artificial intelligence (AI).
Sudheer highlighted a key difference between AI assistants (like ChatGPT), which can generate information, and AI agents, which can take autonomous action. An assistant is a recipe book; an agent is the master chef who cooks the meal for you.
“AI agents are powered by the same technology as generative AI, but with the capability to perform, learn, and adapt without constant guidance,” Sudheer noted. “This makes them practical tools that save time and enhance your bottom line. So, what can they do for your business? They’ll handle routine tasks like scheduling, marketing, and inventory tracking, so you can focus your energy on what you love: making clients look and feel amazing.”
This is not a distant future. Zenoti has already brought the power of AI agents to the industry. Sudheer highlighted several examples:
• AI Receptionist: This front-desk agent answers calls, handling bookings, cancellations, and customer inquiries on services and pricing. It ensures you never miss an opportunity, even when your front desk is busy. Check out a post Sudheer wrote about Zenoti’s AI Receptionist.
• AI Scribe: Used in medspas, this agent listens during consultations and fills out forms, allowing providers to focus on the client.
• AI Concierge (evolving from HyperConnect): This agent will soon autonomously manage personalized client engagement by sending thank-you messages, post-service tips, and reminders, fostering a deep sense of belonging.
• AI Lead Manager: Launching soon, this agent will manage your sales funnel by contacting leads and following a customized workflow of calls, texts, and emails to convert them into booked appointments.
• AI Marketing: Also launching soon, this agent will scan your appointment book to send targeted offers that fill empty slots.
AI agents that work as one
The real power comes from Zenoti’s integrated approach, according to Sudheer. Unlike AI tools from different companies pieced together, Zenoti’s AI agents share the same “consciousness” of your business.
Zenoti’s AI agents work together, creating a seamless, intelligent system where, as an example, the AI Lead Manager uses the AI Receptionist to make calls, and the AI Concierge refines its strategy based on past interactions with the marketing AI agent.
The 3 components of a powerful system
Here’s a quick recap:
The magnet attracts more and more customers to help your business scale.
The wheel keeps them coming back and spins out revenue growth.
The lever increases productivity and decreases costs to lift your profits.
Beauty, wellness, and fitness: a human-centric industry with a brighter future
Addressing common fears about AI and job displacement, Sudheer offered a reassuring message. The beauty, wellness, and fitness industries thrive on actual connection. Humans cut hair, give massages, and lead fitness classes, for example. Such services are given in person, with human touch often necessary for delivery.
AI is not here to replace providers, therefore. Instead, it allows your team to focus on what they love and do best: deliver exceptional client experiences and build relationships. In other words, technology lifts the operational load so that human creativity can shine.
AI does the humdrum, elevating service delivery
Sudheer’s talk on the future of wellness with AI closed with a focus on the beating heart of beauty, wellness, and fitness businesses: service providers.
“The providers in our space can not only be very secure about their jobs but also look forward to increased focus and productivity, with AI taking over the mundane stuff,” he said. “AI agents will take us to higher-scale growth and prosperity. I look forward to entering this wonderful world with you, and Zenoti making a bigger impact in terms of helping the industry.”
