Will sport embrace AI?

This LinkedIn post from a good friend and colleague, Ollie Bell, tells the story of him booking a table at a local pub over the phone but talking to an AI agent. The booking process was polite, super efficient, and really effective with confirmation emails and texts. It pointed to a new future where technology takes mundane tasks like taking bookings over the phone away from humans, leaving humans free to do more creative and interactive tasks that only humans can do. This got me to thinking about how much advancement has happened in my lifetime. One of my earliest memories of technology was when we had a Grandstand games console as kids. I was probably six or seven at the time. People might remember the game called Pong - it had a series of games where you had a device with a wheel on top that you twisted to move a bar up and down on your TV screen. This would deflect a ball back and forth in a rudimentary tennis-type game, which you could play in doubles or singles mode.

I lived abroad as a child and we travelled across the globe, often stopping in Hong Kong. Each time we visited, there was something new to see in their bewildering world of electronics. They had everything, but what I always wanted was the latest gaming console. In the early days, there was the Game & Watch, which had LCD Donkey Kong and other built-in games in handheld consoles.

Before that, we had the ZX81 or ZX80 Spectrum, which was this tiny keyboard that used cassette tapes to load games. The loading process took forever and made this distinctive noise that everyone remembers. Often it wouldn't work, and I'll never forget the most disappointing two words you could hear as a child after waiting 15 minutes for a game to load: "Syntax Error."

Then came things like the Commodore 64, and I remember convincing my parents we needed a Commodore Amiga, which was probably the earliest decent PC at the time. I sold them on it by emphasising its word processor capabilities and home office potential, but really, I wanted it for the games. The games were on disks that only took about three minutes to load, which seemed amazing at the time.

This was before email became widespread and before mobile phones were common. I grew up with the first mass-produced mobile phones, like the Nokia 5110 with its ability to send texts. I never understood texting at first - why would you want to send written messages when you could talk to people? Turns out people often prefer to communicate that way rather than actually talk to each other.

As mobile phones became increasingly smart, I started with HTC before moving to iPhone. I remember getting an iPod Touch before the iPhone came out. I was already familiar with iPods - I had an iPod Mini - but the iPod Touch was different. I remember being in a pub, showing people how you could use gestures to zoom in and out. We all just seemed to go "whoa" - it felt like holding the future in my hand. About six months to a year later, the iPhone came out and revolutionised touch-sensitive devices.

Before that, everyone wanted a keyboard on their device - Blackberry was the device to have. Then Apple came along, put the keyboard on the screen with touch sensitivity, and completely transformed the technology landscape.

The internet became massive, e-commerce grew, and social media emerged. We've seen Web3 evolve, creating cryptocurrencies and all sorts of new innovations. Now we're seeing the evolution of AI, which is growing not just in terms of applications and tools, but also in the range of platforms and the speed at which they're improving.

Looking at the world of sport and leisure, I've been really enjoying working with Ollie. He is someone who really energises me as he is a genuine pioneer in the area of technology and innovation. We share a common goal of wanting to work at the edge of the possible and we constantly ideate about how we can make physical activity more accessible to people by embracing these technologies. We're working on projects to assist physical activity providers to make sense of the incredible pace of change and take advantage of the advancements in a safe, effective and ethical way.

Historically, the world of sport and physical activity has been slow to embrace new technologies and this means that the contribution sport and physical activity makes to areas like health and education is limited. For example, currently a personal trainer requires clients to sign a PAR-Q (Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire) to assess their fitness levels and health status for insurance purposes. This is a labour-intensive process, but the digital world could create a digital PAR-Q, almost like a passport that would be regularly updated and interface with digital health records. This would make it easier for both practitioners and participants while improving safety and service quality. Likewise, I still find it amazing that if a primary school headteacher wants to find a coach that has training in specific sports or activities and training in working with children with specific needs...there is no way of doing this. It is easier to book a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur than it is to find a coach that can deliver dance and dodgeball to children with ADHD.

These are just a couple of simple examples, but it shows how technology could remove barriers to things like social prescribing and help GPs feel more confident about prescribing physical activity for people who need it, whether for mental health, social-emotional wellbeing, physical health, or weight loss or the sector could mobilise to ensure that sport is provided in schools safely and with high quality.

The speed of technological progress is fascinating, and I don't think we've even seen the tip of the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities for sport and physical activity. It's a really exciting place to be. I would love to hear your ideas for how technology could enhance sports development...what are your challenges and pain points...what would help?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While we are on the subject of technology...here are a few tools that I use on a daily basis to help me with my work and to speed up the content production process. I hope that they might help you... I use the voicenotes app on my phone to record podcasts while I am walking with Flo. It has a built in transcription feature which I copy and then paste into Claude.AI. I ask Claude to take out the umms and ahhs and clean up the grammar and superfluous language but keep close to the original words. I then copy that into my website and I have a blog post... I take the blog post and paste it into an awesome platform called 'Blaze' that will take any piece of content and turn it into a months worth of content in minutes. I can also take these posts and turn them into slides decks at the touch of a button using 'Gamma'. Gamma is an absolute game changer in terms of the time it saves me. I can take an idea or an outline have it turned into a slide deck in minutes. I really hope that these help you too. (full disclosure...I do get a small affiliate commission from anyone who signs up to these tools so if you do like them and sign up then you would be helping me to produce more content...it's kind of a win win!)