Of course, speed and accuracy are critical wherever insights must be shared, whether in business or on a soccer field. According to Armstrong-Barnes, HPE GreenLake makes essential cloud computing features—like scalable analytics and content distribution—accessible from anywhere data and apps are used, from on-premises storage centers to private clouds.
The New State of Play: How AI is Changing Sports
A multi-industry shift toward AI tools
From streaming video apps with embedded analytics to powerful Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, organizations are increasingly leveraging AI to meet complex performance and customer experience challenges. This trend is relatively recent.
A 2023 survey by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) of 900 IT decision-makers revealed a shift in how leaders in multiple industries view AI’s usefulness in meeting their performance goals.
According to the report, many IT decision-makers no longer view AI tools as an experimental add-on to business strategy as they had in the past. Instead, most survey respondents now see the use of AI as a practical way to accelerate slow business processes and extend the value of limited resources. That industry-wide evolution in thinking has impacted how many sports teams view and implement AI.
Globally, sports organizations now use AI-generated insights to guide everything from talent development to public safety analysis at performance venues.
AI innovation starts with human intelligence
Unlocking AI’s full potential to drive purposeful innovation begins by combining human ingenuity with machine intelligence techniques. That’s according to Matt Armstrong-Barnes, the UK&I, Middle East, and Africa chief technology officer for artificial intelligence at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
The power of artificial intelligence tools to ingest, analyze, and transform massive amounts of data into actionable truths has been instrumental in some of the decade’s most significant innovations. According to Armstrong-Barnes, generative AI is powering a new wave of global innovation by transforming industries and revolutionizing historical norms for invention. Armstrong-Barnes says that AI’s best use is to find hidden patterns and allow human insight to be more focused. Generative AI can spark new levels of “machine-based creativity,” he says.
His belief is based on long experience. For years, Armstrong-Barnes has created technology integration strategies for complex organizations—like sports teams—seeking to leverage the power of AI to address evolving performance requirements and enhance customer experiences.
“We’re seeing AI playing a role wherever there are large volumes of complex data, everything from accelerated drug discovery to improving manufacturing processes to the intricacy of sports analysis.”
MATT ARMSTRONG-BARNES, THE UK&I MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AT HPE
Leveraging AI in esports
One example is HPE GreenLake’s work within the esports industry, Armstrong-Barnes says. With an estimated 318 million esports enthusiasts worldwide expected to watch and play online by the end of this year, digital gaming is no longer considered a niche sport. Today, the use of advanced analytics by esports teams is just as common as it is in soccer and football.
In 2022, legendary esports organization Evil Geniuses and HPE GreenLake partnered to bring data and analytics to esports in an unprecedented way, Armstrong-Barnes says. “Together, we harnessed the power of their performance data to develop an organization-wide innovation strategy.” Like many HPE GreenLake partners, Evil Geniuses not only wanted to extract the most value from their data but also learn how to do it more efficiently by using AI tools that accelerate the innovation process, Armstrong-Barnes states.
“When it came to how to change the face of gaming, Evil Geniuses partnered with us because they had large amounts of intricate data, and they wanted to find some pretty complex patterns within it to derive value,” Armstrong-Barnes says.
According to Armstrong-Barnes, HPE provided Evil Geniuses with a layered AI-native architecture that combined software, infrastructure, and talent to transform the team’s bespoke app solution to scale “sustainably and repeatedly.”
HPE GreenLake’s AI and ML solutions provide organizations with access to advanced technical capabilities by combining HPE’s comprehensive AI portfolio with open-source software to build complete solutions. The result is an open platform that leverages the innovation happening in the open-source community while providing choice and flexibility and avoiding data ‘lock in.’ By allowing organizations to access AI and ML features on demand through an edge-to-cloud solution, HPE GreenLake helps them avoid the high levels of resources needed to design, train, and develop their own bespoke AI models, says Armstrong-Barnes.
Human-guided AI innovation
Yet, even with the option of using modern AI techniques, developing efficient processes, training teams, and analyzing information can be complex, especially at scale. That’s especially true when a mix of legacy technology, diverse data sets, and hybrid and on-prem cloud solutions makes organization-wide innovation difficult, Armstrong-Barnes says.
Wayfinding across technology implementation paths starts with a deep understanding of the overarching need to effect data-driven transformation. This allows organizations to craft new customer experiences to meet long-term goals more efficiently. Armstrong-Barnes says that developing a strategy that aligns with business objectives around digital transformation ensures that advanced technologies translate into tangible value for organizations.
Internal teams- working with technologists like Armstrong-Barnes—provide vital context on how AI-powered technologies can align with unique fan and business requirements—like cashless ticketing or automated play analysis.
Yet, to make the most of AI tools, organizations must sift through a barrage of insights from disparate data sets to decide how and when to integrate new options, like cash-free kiosks, into existing workflows, says Armstrong-Barnes.
Accessing, distributing, and applying insights to urgent questions – like how to scale a football stadium capacity safely—can be slow and highly dependent on the bandwidth of internal teams. Those insights, often essential for immediate and proactive problem-solving across organizations, lose value over time. Enter HPE GreenLake for LLMs, an edge-to-cloud solution that allows organizations to accelerate the process of developing custom, enterprise-scale, generative AI applications to automate these highly challenging tasks.
How Generative AI fuels performance
Enterprise generative AI tools, accessible through HPE GreenLake’s portfolio of AI solutions, can help organizations bridge the gap between data ingestion, analysis, and sharing.
With generative AI, a coaching team could develop a new formation strategy in minutes during a game based on an automated video analysis. Those insights could be shared with a click across the entire organization, from medical staff to communications teams.
A facilities team could also de-risk crowd control decision-making based on auto-generated real-time safety data and implement changes immediately through the cloud.
Private cloud-based AI solutions that use data at the point of creation, like those in HPE GreenLake’s portfolio, make AI use more accessible for sports teams and other businesses. Armstrong-Barnes says bringing insights together with generative AI means you can democratize your data in new and innovative ways.
Instead of organizations creating their own AI architectures to build and customize AI solutions to meet specific needs, they can use HPE’s resources to avoid a costly trial-and-error development path.
In addition, with HPE GreenLake for LLMs, sports teams and other businesses can personalize robust AI-powered solutions according to their unique requirements. Using the company’s on-demand, multi-tenant service, teams can accelerate development and launch times by training, tuning, and deploying new AI tools on a private cloud. AI-native architectures provided by HPE GreenLake allow companies to build AI solutions faster and more efficiently.
Making AI tools faster and smarter
Armstrong-Barnes says that speed can save businesses time and valuable resources, allowing teams to focus on the business problems AI technology is helping them address. New AI solutions built this way can be further customized for multiple needs at scale, ranging from e-commerce insights to improving team performance. This makes it easier for organizations to launch new business models or improve existing ones. A jumpstart on AI development is possible for teams even if they must manage an unwieldy mix of cloud, on-premises, or external data sources, Armstrong-Barnes says, using HPE GreenLake.
Of course, speed and accuracy are critical wherever insights must be shared, whether in business or on a soccer field.
According to Armstrong-Barnes, HPE GreenLake makes essential cloud computing features—like scalable analytics and content distribution—accessible from anywhere data and apps are used, from on-premises storage centers to private clouds.
How AI helps teams with torrents of data
When organizations deal with tens of thousands of requests of one type, like digital ticket sales, they are also likely managing a similar scale of processes in other areas of their organization simultaneously.
“We’re seeing the volume of data hitting organizations, and it’s a daily tsunami,” Armstrong-Barnes says. Even with access to advanced analytics tools, organizations are “running out of steam” because data flows are scaling exponentially and taxing human and technical resources. In addition, Armstrong-Barnes states that increasing data diversity and complexity is beginning to “hit the boundaries” of the level of insights legacy analysis methods can provide.
According to Armstrong-Barnes, the only solution to these problems is the use of AI techniques.
“So, we bring in these new, algorithmically driven approaches that are underpinned by artificial intelligence to find the value in the data and use it to inform key business decisions going forward,” says Armstrong-Barnes. AI speeds the analysis “that gives organizations the competitive advantage and drives the business in terms of what they’re trying to achieve,” Armstrong-Barnes states.
Yet, per Armstrong-Barnes, there’s still a catch. Translating great insights into stellar performances can be challenging even for organizations keen on data-driven decision-making and equipped with the right AI tools.
“We bring in these new, algorithmically driven approaches that are underpinned by artificial intelligence to find the value in the data and use it to inform key business decisions going forward.”
MATT ARMSTRONG-BARNES, THE UK&I MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AT HPE
Accelerating time-to-value in business
The best insights may become worthless to organizations unless they can be implemented quickly, monitored in real-time, and used to adjust strategy as external conditions shift. Just like players in a match, organizations need agility, speed, and precision to stay competitive.
According to Armstrong-Barnes, that’s why edge computing and hybrid cloud solutions can be essential for innovation efforts. When organizations leverage edge computing to manage their data, communications, and operations, they can accelerate time-to-value by accessing the technical capabilities they need—like real-time data analysis for a play-by-play fan experience—on demand.
Because HPE GreenLake’s edge-to-cloud solution brings supercomputing capabilities into the mainstream with scalable data storage closer to the devices generating data, stakeholders can access AI-powered insights faster and implement innovation strategies seamlessly and in record time.
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