While the human element can never be totally taken away, AI is augmenting it in a significant way, which is also being felt in the world of sports.Be it enhacing athlete performance, analysing data and tactics, fan engagement or customized taining programmes, AI is leaving an indelible mark on the sporting world.
Abhinav Bindra is someone who went down to the minutest of details during his career in shooting, which helped him crack the code to win India’s first individual Olympic Gold, clinching it in the 10m Air Rifle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
He is well aware of the “pain points” an athlete can come across when trying to straighten the creases in his or her performance or analyse it over a period of time to track improvement.
Talking to Timesofindia.com in an episode of ‘TOI Gamechangers‘, Bindra said there is no doubt that AI is going to not just help ease those pain points but also provide significantly better solutions in various aspects of sports.
Shooting bull’s eye with Abhinav Bindra
“I think AI is also going to have a massive impact in sports in the course of the next few years,” said Bindra, before giving a lowdown on the various fields where sports will benefit from AI.
“What we will see is AI’s role in coaching, it will actually help democratize sport to a great degree. Talk about grassroot-level coaching, sometimes you don’t have quality coaches. Imagine if AI could play a significant part there and guide young athletes in the right direction, making sure they have the right focus, right direction. It can play a very positive role there. Of course, the human touch can never be replaced as sport is all about human endeavour.
“AI will just be another element that will help you, but it can significantly help contribute to (ease) certain pain points in the world of sports, specifically coaching. There are so many different countries, different ecosystems that do not have the access to coaching, even within our country. It (India) is such a large country; all our athletes don’t have that access (to coaching). But with AI, there may be a solution in the next few years, where at least coaching at the base level can be very good,” the 41-year-old Bindra said.
Data is one of the key elements of modern-day, science-driven training and performance analysis. Crunching numbers is something that Artificial Intelligence can do in the blink of an eye, which will also impact jobs in the sector of data science.
Bindra said the impact of AI on data analysis is going to be “massive”.
“We talk a lot about sports science, analytics. The role that AI will play in all those sectors could be significant. Right now you have data scientists doing a lot of the number crunching. In a few years’ time, those jobs are going to be taken away. It’s going to be clearly reproduced by AI in seconds. So that also, from a sports science and analytics point of view, is going to have a massive impact,” said the former rifle shooter.
He went on explain how referring, broacasting and content generation in sports will be taken over by AI in a big way.
“Refereeing, for example is another element, where I am sure the role of AI is going to come in a much more stronger way in different sports. Broadcasting: It (AI) is already being used by broadcasters to a massive degree, and that will only increase.
“We are living in an era where it’s all about content. Now there are AI solutions where regular content creators can package and customize highlights of a sporting event in a few seconds based on what you want. If from a cricket game you want to package Shubman Gill’s innings, specificially the parts of his innings that you want to highlight in a package, it (AI) will do it for you in a matter of seconds. That will also help various sports grow because when high-quality content is being created, it only helps sports,” Bindra opined.
“Of course, as I said, it (AI) can’t take away human touch, human interaction that is needed for the success of any endeavour. But I am quite sure that AI will play a very important role in every sphere of society.
“It is already happening.”