StarApple developing AI assistant coach to improve football teams

WITH JAMAICA not having the best football teams in the world, CEO of StarApple AI, Adrian Dunkley, said he wants to change this with an AI assistant coach system he is developing, but first teams must be willing to accept this system.

“We are around 30 per cent (done), so what I am doing is using data on other countries that are similar to Jamaica because the data on Jamaica is lacking. So when we get to around 40 per cent the idea is to start approaching these associations and to start getting support,” he said. “We actually need to start working with the athletes and the coaches to refine the model so that’s the other 60 per cent, which is curating it for Jamaica.”

However, Dunkley said achieving the latter percentage has proven a challenge because of myths associated with AI systems.

“AI coaching is not about replacing an actual coach, you can’t do that. It’s about making them more efficient in their decision-making,” he said.

Public awareness

The StarApple CEO said to get people to understand this, they will need advocates to help improve public awareness so that people can focus more on the benefits of using AI in sports and see the bigger picture in what they are trying to achieve.

“We are trying to create an international lab of athletes and it is going to require a lot of collaboration across different areas – public and private partnership. It is not just an AI assistant coach, but it is an entire framework that goes from finding the talent in primary and prep schools … up to the national teams, training them effectively so that they are the best in the world in a limited amount of time,” Dunkley said.

By using AI, he said Jamaica can achieve things they have never done before.

“I want us to bring a Gold Cup back to Jamaica for the male and the female teams, that’s my objective for what we are trying to do,” he said.

He said with the assistance of AI, Jamaican teams could be more innovative.

“With the AI assistant coach, the purpose of this is to effectively monitor each athlete and their performance, put in the early warning indicators for injuries (and) prepare them to go in the game with the best tactics to run against a competitor. It allows them to make the best decisions with the limited amount of time and resources they have available,” he said.

“The idea is you can use AI to go through thousands of strategies in a split second to find the best one for what you need to do; it’s just about being adaptive because you may have the best athletes but you are not utilising them properly,” he added.

He said his company developing AI systems for sports in Jamaica does not have to come at a cost for the teams.

“We are willing to do it for free, we have no problem with that,” he said.

Dunkley said he tried to relay this idea to the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF), but efforts to get in contact with the JFF were unsuccessful.

“We have reached out in the general emails for them, but we haven’t had any contact (from the JFF) as yet,” he said.

Track and field is another sport Dunkley said he is interested in developing an AI system to help further establish the island’s dominance in the sport.

“We are trying to expand into track and field, which is more of an individual sport, so it is a little easier to analyse, but it is a lot more data. But it’s something that we can do. It’s not going to be perfect, but we don’t need perfection, we just need incremental improvements over time,“ he related.