This one started with a conversation. Paardensport Vlaanderen vzw, the equestrian federation in Belgium, came to us with a problem they know well. On a big national show, a lot of riders send a PM with their entry: start near my trainer, late in the class, keep my two horses apart, a specific start number. Reading all of that by hand and turning it into a fair start order takes hours, and no one can hold it all in their head at once.

We looked at the numbers together. On one national weekend, almost one in three riders had written a free-text wish, hundreds of them in Dutch, French and English mixed. So we built Startlist AI with them, and this is the first version.

It is an extension inside Equipe. You open it from a meeting, and it does a few things:

• Reads the rider PM notes. The AI turns each free-text note into a clear, structured wish, whatever language it is written in.
• Proposes a start order. It keeps the start list you already drew and moves starts within those slots to honor as many wishes as it can. It does not redraw your day.
• Shows its work. For every wish you see the original note next to what the AI understood, and whether the wish was honored or not.
• Writes the order back to Equipe when you are happy with it, and never touches a class that already has results.

The AI only does one job, reading the notes into structured data. Everything after that is plain, predictable logic, so the proposed order is something you can check and trust.

You bring your own OpenAI API key. Startlist AI needs an OpenAI API key to read the notes, and you provide your own. It runs on your key, so the usage is billed to you and you decide what is sent and whether the notes may be processed.

It is not generally available yet. This is an early, first version. It works, but we still have a lot to refine, and we are testing it on real shows with a small number of organizers before we open it up more widely. If you run busy shows with a lot of rider wishes and want to try it with us, get in touch.

Thanks to the team in Belgium for bringing us a real problem and working through it with us. That is how the best things in Equipe get built.