The same Microsoft technology currently used by healthcare organizations and yes, robots, is now being tested throughout the summer months by Cricket Australia, making it the first cricketing nation to integrate the company’s team and player performance platform into its decision-making processes across fitness, game strategy, player recovery and team selection.
As part of the new deal with Microsoft, Cricket Australia is now one of a few sports organizations worldwide experimenting with the new platform.
At the recent Microsoft Australia Developer Conference, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said he was “glad” with how Cricket Australia was planning to integrate “machine learning” into its overarching strategy.
“Cricket is one of the richest sports when it comes to using machine data. But how could you harness the power of data to even start having a more intelligent informed conversation about performance of teams, performance of players?” Nadella said, according to News Corp Australia.
Powered by Microsoft’s Cloud and Cortana Analytics Suite, the new platform allows organizations like Cricket Australia to leverage predictive analytics and machine-learning to best understand players’ performance on the pitch. Based on various bits of data, the platform will also make recommendations to coaches who can, in turn, make smarter decisions during practice and game action.
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“The new platform takes this vast amount of data, provides an environment for our sports science folks to explore that data and find insights in it, and then provides a very elegant dashboard that will surface the trends and the information that will be impactful to the coaches,” Michael Osborne, Cricket Australia’s Head of Technology, told Financial Review.
Through the new dashboard on Microsoft Surface devices, coaches and training staffs will receive real-time information in order to make data-driven decisions. They’ll be able to decipher players’ fitness levels and workloads to help determine when someone needs rest to avoid injury or when he is ready to return.
Still, even with the advanced computing tools and insightful data, Osborne still sees a human element as necessary to evaluating a player’s performance.
“I think we will always need human selectors, we’ll always need people to make those judgment calls,” he said.
“I don’t think the artificial intelligence will get to the point, or I don’t think we’d want it to get to the point, where it’s selecting our national team for us.
“To me, it’s about helping improve the conversation so that when people are making these decisions, they have all of the information and the key data points right there at their fingertips.”