PUNE: American market research firm InForGrowth has come out with its latest study ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Sports Market’ which claims that AI will be eyed as a major investment by sports firms around the world owing to increasing asset value of major teams and substantial opportunity for operational improvements including efficiency and effectiveness enhancements.
Sports at the Olympic, professional, and collegiate levels has become very data driven as decisions ranging from recruitment and training to strategy and in-game tactics rely upon statistics and a dynamic set of variables including personnel, game conditions, and scenarios.
Aspiring Olympians depend on sponsors, trainers, and coaches for major funding and support. Wise implementation of AI in the sports market represents a means of sponsoring countries, companies, and wealthy benefactors to maximize their investment in the best world athletes.
At the collegiate level, a great deal is at stake in terms of recruiting athletes to become professionals. Much is at stake from an alumni good will perspective, which translates into donations for sporting programs, which funds university and college development. AI in sports at the college and university levels provides this type of indirect benefit as college sports programs must be careful to not step over the line in terms of rules regarding financial benefits to players.
InForGrowth evaluated many top global companies in its study such as Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, GE, Google, HP, Huawei, Haier, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Panasonic, Samsung, SAP, Tesla and Xiaomi.
It found that AI improves the value of cross-training by team role/position from 9-32%. It is likely to improve individual and team performance on an average of 17% to 28% respectively.
The study further claims that upto 65% of long-term cognitive dysfunction due to concussions is preventable through the use of AI. Its top benefits include performance improvement, injury prevention, and recruitment.
AI is also set to improve revenue, reduce operational costs, and improve valuations of professional sports teams.
