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New MIT Sloan research found that the use of tailored generative AI in an online weight loss program resulted in a reduction of weight and BMI for participants.
Cambridge, Mass., January 5, 2025 — If you’re considering setting a goal to lose weight in 2026, there is good news: Generative artificial intelligence can help. MIT Sloan School of Management professor recent research “Building an Ecosystem or Prioritizing Personalization with AI? Evidence from a Field Experiment,” a working paper published on SSRN, has found that the use of tailored generative AI in an online weight loss program improved weight loss outcomes for participants in her study, marked by reductions in body mass index (BMI).
Key Findings: The positive impacts of Gen AI on weight loss
- Participants in the study who engaged with personalized, generative AI content saw positive weight loss outcomes, and some were no longer classified as obese.
- Tailored generative AI in online weight loss programs can be a low-cost intervention to help address the obesity epidemic.
- These tools are scalable to enhance weight loss, a generalizable finding from the research, providing participants with more access to information and support faster.
Tucker and her co-author, Linyi Li from Singapore Management University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business, partnered with a Fortune 500 company in Asia to determine if generative AI could potentially help address the obesity epidemic through direct messaging and personalization, and to what extent the personalization achieved through AI could also create a foundation for community building among those with weight loss goals. The number of participants who were no longer classified as obese, based on BMI, went from 6 to 17 out of 416 participants in Tucker’s study.
“Weight loss is such a big challenge. If it was easy for us all to lose weight, we'd just lose weight,” Tucker said. “The fact that a digital tool such as AI can have any effect is wonderful because interventions such as surgery or injectables are expensive. This is evidence of the cost efficacy of a very small intervention in terms of changing behavior.”
Through the company’s online weight loss boot camp, which was conducted via a group chat on an instant messaging app, participants interacted, shared experiences, and supported one another throughout their weight loss journeys. The program offered a generative AI-powered food analysis tool that provided real-time, personalized dietary recommendations and analyzed photos of meals uploaded by users, delivering tailored suggestions to help them make healthier food choices.
“Our results indicate that generative AI can be an effective tool for addressing obesity, without the need for medication and resultant side-effects, reducing related healthcare costs and health inequities,” Tucker and her co-author wrote. “By providing real-time, personalized, and actionable feedback, generative AI helped bridge knowledge gaps, making weight loss education more accessible.”
Why a combination of both tailored AI and a supportive community are key to weight loss success
In their research, Tucker and her co-author found a notable limitation of AI in promoting successful weight loss: it didn’t help build community.
When AI was used to try and build community among the participants, the researchers found there was actually a decline in the number of active users, and dropout rates increased. The researchers believe that for now, focusing on personalized individual experiences with generative AI is more effective than pursuing large-scale ecosystem development.
“It's very tempting, when you have a technology which lowers the cost of generating content, which generative AI does, to think that, therefore, I can use it to very quickly build a community, or I can use it very quickly to build an ecosystem or a network,” Tucker said. “What our study shows is there are no real shortcuts there. The reason we build ecosystems is because people crave genuine connections. Just because it's cheaper to produce content [with generative AI], doesn't mean it's going to serve the purpose of community building.”
Personalized, low-cost, non-judgmental content and support is important for weight loss success; and a strong community to hold people accountable and to acknowledge both victories and challenges is as well — the two need to go hand-in-hand for individuals to have positive weight loss outcomes, Tucker noted.
“I think what we are showing is that in the generative AI age, technology can certainly assist with maybe the information retrieval, the reminders, the prompts, all those good things, but we can't really use it to replace that community,” she said. “In the end, generative AI can't replace the benefits of having a community of people supporting you for your weight loss journey.”
About the MIT Sloan School of Management
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