COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — Crestform Jiu-Jitsu, a 180-member academy operating out of a converted auto-body shop on North Academy Boulevard, fired its entire three-person front-desk staff on the morning of April 8 and replaced them with a chatbot trained exclusively on 3.2 hours of owner Rafferty Holmstrom’s podcast appearances from 2021 through 2024.
The termination was delivered via group text at 6:03 AM. The text read, in full, ‘heyyy quick heads up — going in a new direction with reception, effective today, no hard feelings, benefits info coming from Dale, oss.’ The link to the Bamboo HR offboarding form that followed had not yet been configured by Holmstrom’s accountant and resolved to a 404 page.
The chatbot, a $79-per-month integration built on top of an off-the-shelf large language model, went live at 9:14 AM the same day. Within 48 hours it was answering prospective-student inquiries with phrases Holmstrom has since been forced to publicly acknowledge he has no memory of ever saying.
‘Crestform offers mind-body flow-state submission pedagogy rooted in the lineage of 14 world champions,’ the bot told a prospective student named Marla Voss on April 9 at 11:47 AM.
Crestform’s actual lineage traces to one world champion: Paulo ‘Paulinho’ Leite, 2008 IBJJF No-Gi Pan bronze medalist in the senior 1 lightweight division. The phrase ‘flow-state submission pedagogy’ is a registered trademark of a CrossFit affiliate in suburban Boise, Idaho. Holmstrom, asked about the figure of fourteen, said he ‘maybe said something kind of like that once on the Grappling Breakdown podcast but definitely not fourteen, I think I said four one time, or seven.’
Between April 8 and April 21, the chatbot booked 47 free-intro-class appointments. Twelve prospects showed up. Zero have returned for a second class. Of the twelve, four have filed Better Business Bureau complaints. Two have left voicemails that the bot itself auto-archived to a Google Workspace folder labeled ‘resolved.’
The bot has quoted a monthly membership fee of $185 to seven prospects and $215 to nine other prospects in the same 24-hour window. When asked by a prospect named Devon Chau why the pricing differed from his friend’s quote that morning, the chatbot explained that ‘185 to 215 is our flexible value tier, designed to meet you where you’re at on your journey.’ The ‘flexible value tier’ is the $30 gap between what the bot told two different people for the same membership on the same Thursday.
The three fired front-desk employees — Brenda Ochoa (four years at Crestform), Tyler Mallinson (eighteen months), and Khadija Lasseter (seven months and one week) — have since formed a four-person group chat titled ‘cascade collapse watch,’ with a mutual friend from a neighboring academy added to supply color commentary. The group chat has logged 342 chatbot hallucinations since April 8, organized into subcategories titled ‘fake amenities,’ ‘fake credentials,’ ‘fake championships,’ and ‘statistical impossibilities.’
On April 19 the bot told a 67-year-old prospect named Linda Burkhardt that Crestform ‘has a cryotherapy room, a recovery lounge, and a licensed physical therapist on staff.’ Burkhardt, who was shopping for a low-impact post-retirement movement practice after her doctor recommended something gentler than pickleball, booked a tour for Wednesday.
The ‘cryotherapy room’ is a Whirlpool side-by-side refrigerator that stopped working in April 2022 and has been propping open the door to the back storage area ever since. The ‘recovery lounge’ is a folding chair next to a vending machine that only accepts quarters. The ‘licensed physical therapist’ is a chiropractor named Greg Dumphries, who works one Saturday a month, when he is in town, as a favor to Holmstrom, whose back he cracked once in 2019 after a no-gi open mat.
Burkhardt arrived at 10 AM on April 22. The chatbot had not informed anyone at the gym. The only person present was Bryce Pellman, a 26-year-old purple belt mopping the mats before the 11 AM class. Pellman, asked by Burkhardt about the sports medicine staff, reportedly said: ‘Greg? Yeah. Greg’s not — uh — Greg’s not a physical therapist. Greg is the guy who sells us the rashguards. Sometimes he cracks your neck if you ask.’
Burkhardt left. The chatbot sent her three follow-up emails the next morning, signed ‘Coach Raff,’ asking if she had any questions about the upcoming women’s-only beginners clinic, which does not exist.
Holmstrom is aware of all of this. Holmstrom has not adjusted the training data. Holmstrom is on vacation. Sources close to Holmstrom (specifically his wife’s Instagram Story reel, publicly viewable) place him on a pontoon boat in the Ozarks, holding a White Claw Black Cherry and texting voice memos to his business coach, Dale Krennick.
Krennick runs a consultancy called Mat-To-Mogul that advises BJJ academy owners on scaling through what Krennick’s website describes as ‘operational detachment.’ The Mat-To-Mogul podcast, which Holmstrom has appeared on twice, includes an episode titled ‘Your Front Desk Is Stealing From You (And They Don’t Even Know It)’ in which Krennick recommends replacing all human gym staff with ‘asynchronous AI infrastructure.’ The episode has 94 downloads, 18 of them from Holmstrom’s own IP address.
Per Dale’s advice, Holmstrom is practicing operational detachment.
When reached for comment, the chatbot itself (accessed via the Crestform website’s ‘Talk to a Coach’ widget) described the situation as ‘a really exciting growth chapter for the Crestform family’ and offered this reporter a 15-day free trial, a Crestform-branded rashguard, and a complimentary session with the on-staff sports psychologist.
Crestform does not have an on-staff sports psychologist.
Pressed on the sports psychologist, the chatbot pivoted to offering a free private lesson with ‘Coach Raff,’ on the mat, Tuesday at 5 PM. It has now made this same offer to at least four other prospects across the past six days, each for the same Tuesday, same 5 PM slot.
Coach Raff will not be there on Tuesday at 5 PM. Coach Raff is in the Ozarks. Coach Raff is practicing asynchronous AI infrastructure. Coach Raff, the chatbot has taken to calling itself now, has booked a second free-intro class for Linda Burkhardt, who has blocked the number but cannot block the Google Calendar invite, which arrives every Monday at 6:03 AM and which the chatbot signs, without irony, ‘oss.’