AI agents help pageant contestants train—but not on stage yet

Samantha Smitte, 37, spent a decade working at IBM before turning her attention to pageant competition. For the Miss New York USA pageant scheduled for the following week, she invested about $150 in AI agents to support her preparation across multiple dimensions. The agents served as a comprehensive training toolkit: they conducted mock interview sessions to sharpen her responses, generated personalized workout routines to maintain her fitness, delivered daily briefings on current events to keep her informed for competition topics, and curated dress recommendations based on the styles worn by previous pageant winners.

However, Smitte discovered limits to what AI could deliver. Her AI "poise and style" coach, tasked with advising her on onstage posing practice, did not deliver the quality of guidance she needed. Rather than rely on the AI for that critical element of stage presence, she switched to a human coach for onstage training. This pragmatic split reflects her broader philosophy: AI as a capable behind-the-scenes collaborator and thought partner, but not yet a substitute for human expertise in live performance.

The pageant world itself remains divided on AI's role. In April, the Miss America organization posted a tongue-in-cheek joke announcing that it would deploy AI with contestants on stage, challenging them to solve real-world problems in real time. Separately, a pageant featuring AI-generated women, branded "Miss AI," stirred debate: some viewers celebrated it as a statement on diversity, while others saw it as evidence that humanity was losing connection with reality. Smitte's skepticism about visible AI on the pageant stage reflects this broader caution. While she has embraced AI as a training tool, she made clear that audiences—and presumably the pageant world—are not yet ready for AI competitors to step into the spotlight.

AI agents have historically found their footing in business and government contexts, but Smitte's pageant preparation signals a shift into personal-performance training. Her $150 investment represents a low-cost entry point for contestants to access round-the-clock coaching on multiple fronts—interview readiness, fitness, knowledge, and visual presentation. The split between her backstage AI use and onstage human expertise is telling: it reveals both the practical utility of AI tutoring and its current limitations in creative or nuanced tasks like live posing advice.

The broader pageant ecosystem reflects genuine ambivalence about AI's visible role. The Miss America organization's April Fools' joke about onstage AI problem-solving, and the "Miss AI" pageant's mixed reception (praised by some for celebrating diversity, criticized by others as a loss of human authenticity), underscore that audiences and organizers have not yet settled on AI's place in a competition built on human charisma and presence. Smitte's own framing—calling AI her "collaborator and thought partner" while insisting the public is "not ready to see the AI in front of the curtain yet"—captures this in-between moment: AI is useful behind the scenes, but its on-stage future remains contested.

No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!