Recreation, meet AI

_{by Birju Kadakia, co-founder of Rec Technologies}

People often ask, why Recreation?

In 2025 screens dominate our attention, but “recreation” is how our communities stay healthy and connected. Whether it’s a kid learning teamwork on the soccer field, a family gathering for movie night in the park, or a group of seniors taking a water color class, we feel that the need, and the demand, for accessible recreation is greater than ever. 

As we looked into it, my co-founder Rachel and I couldn’t believe that the technology powering this industry had been ignored for decades. In San Francisco, 3 different billion dollar tech companies will deliver a burrito to my door in 15 minutes. But if a parent is scrambling to register their kid into a swim lesson?…godspeed.

We then discovered something inspiring: the backbone of local recreation is a network of incredibly dedicated recreation professionals, independent coaches, small businesses, community organizers, and volunteers. These people spend their day jobs, nights, and weekends serving the community…yet are starved for any tools that can make their work easier and more impactful.

There was an opportunity to have a huge impact on our communities - and so we started building Rec.

We’re talking AI?! These sites don’t even work on my phone.

Rec's design and engineering team has spent the last 3 years sitting side-by-side with recreation professionals, learning their jobs inside-and-out (yes, we understand the chaos of a last minute rainout!). 

We started by fixing the basics. Rec already powers access to recreation for millions of residents across the country, all via a totally transformed online experience.

So yes, the solution doesn't start with AI. We first needed a modern foundation - one that gives new tools to rec professionals, and one that simply makes recreation feel a lot like the other apps on your phone.

And now we're going to supercharge it with AI.

AI is ready for Recreation

The first and obvious question – is AI good enough, or are we just talking about another annoying chat bot that keeps getting stuck?
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As a team based in silicon valley, we spend a ton of time monitoring the progress in AI models, and we’ve started seeing some quite sophisticated tools built on top of them.

Because we’re a recreation company, we've been tracking the success of these models in performing the day-to-day tasks that exist in recreation operations. Quite honestly, we are impressed.

We’re seeing the models progress to a point where they’re competent at many of the tasks we spend so much time on. Now at Rec, it’s our job to make these advancements available to recreation operators of any size.

Introducing your AI Teammates

Yes, “AI Agents” sounds like robots are taking over – we promise that’s not the case. At Rec, we think the easiest way to think of AI is to think about a series of really great teammates. These teammates are pros at one workflow (often one that’s incredibly cumbersome), and can clone themselves to run through an entire queue of tasks in seconds!

At Rec, our principle is that agents (what the tech world calls these features) will work best as part of your team, not as a replacement for it. Thus, our agents are built with human supervision in mind. You can audit all actions, and when they’re not 100% sure, they escalate to a human for help! 

We know your team is being asked to do more, with less. We believe these AI Agents will be your team’s new superpower, taking on the busy work so staff can focus on best serving their community.

Not just a chatbot

First and foremost, we believe that AI tools can’t just be a random chatbot you throw on your website — they’ll get stuck on the first question someone asks about their payment, because how the heck does it know? 

We believe AI agents (again "agent" = "AI tool") should be connected deep into the core rec management system, thus allowing each agent to actually complete a task end-to-end (i.e. finding a receipt and refunding it).

To get nerdy for a second, we architected Rec’s reservation system with AI agents in mind from day 1. This allows us to train the models on recreation, provide unique context (for example, a city-specific cancellation policy) on each task, and monitor the quality of each AI Agent.

We're proud to have built a great foundation for Rec, where we can now rapidly introduce virtual teammates that will be game-changing to departments.

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The Future of Recreation Operations

We’re still in the early days of AI evolution. We pride ourselves in staying on top of the changes and bringing them to recreation operations. We see two phases of AI feature development.

We’re in Phase 1: Task-Specific Teammates

Right now, the best AI experiences are fairly narrow, trained to do one thing incredibly well.

Our design team has mapped almost every workflow in recreation and identified tons of manual workflows that can be made easier with the help of an AI teammate.

As we start introducing AI agents, we’ll focus on agents that can reliably and accurately take on some of the burden, making your team more efficient, and giving your residents more access.

Phase 2: Empowered Teammates

The cool thing about AI Agents is that they’re open to coaching. At Rec, our Agents are supplemented with training on the nuances of recreation. For example, our analytics agents understand what "cost recovery" means. Our operational agents will have access to weather APIs.

Our recreation-specific training, combined with accelerating improvements at the model layer, make us excited about the path ahead. In the coming years, we believe our agents will evolve to be stronger decision-makers, and be able to understand your team’s objectives.

Let’s say you want to avoid last minute program cancellations due to low fill rates. Above we have an early concept of an agent-in-training that will monitor the fill rates of your programs, and proactively run marketing campaigns to maximize participation. We know some of you run 1000s of programs a season -- imagine a marketing analyst assigned to each program!

This wave of AI agents will unlock creative, once impossible, new ways to serve your constituents.

A future full of recreation opportunity.

At Rec, we’re incredibly optimistic at what the future holds for our communities. While we’re very excited about AI in recreation operations, we also are building technology that enables the entire recreation network in your community to thrive.

Are you a parent overwhelmed by a summer full of camp registrations? Imagine a “travel” agent of sorts for parents, that scans every activity in your town, and suggests the perfect options for all of the siblings at once.

Rec already helps cities provide affordable access to coaching via the Rec instructor network. Now imagine if every pickleball court in your community held its own weekly tournament. Our Rec Tournament Agent will soon automate the overhead of running programs, making it easy to bring communities together for some friendly competition.

We hear consistently that people want access to more recreation in their community, and we've got tons of ideas to help.

Are you as excited as we are?

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Of course, we’re looking for the forward thinking rec operators - from Parks Departments to small businesses, that are inspired to bring these experiences to life. If you’re interested in trying something out, or simply sharing an idea, reach out directly at ai@rec.us.

And if you're an incredibly smart engineer or designer, come build for your community!

Cheers,

Birju
Co-Founder - Rec Technologies

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