{"id":23565,"date":"2024-02-14T15:59:29","date_gmt":"2024-02-14T15:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/?post_type=article&p=23565"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:11:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:11:03","slug":"how-to-make-sure-ai-works-for-you-and-your-team","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/how-to-make-sure-ai-works-for-you-and-your-team\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Make Sure AI Works for you and your Team"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n 14 Feb 2024 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

How to Make Sure AI Works for you and your Team<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
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Gary McCoy of Peak AI shared his thoughts on what teams, coaches and practitioners should be doing to ensure their organisations capitalise quickly.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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By John Portch with additional reporting by Joe Lemire<\/h6>\n
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    Teams need the right KPIs if you\u2019re going to leverage AI to your benefit.<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n
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    Leaders need to set the terms on which AI is used inside their building.<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n
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    The analysts of the future will be generalists who know how the datasets derived from AI transact.<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    AI will only ever be as good as the questions asked<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Are you asking the right performance questions? Until you do, AI is only a secondary concern, according to Gary McCoy, the CEO of psycholinguistic specialists Peak AI, who are Main Partners of the Leaders performance Institute. \u201cIt\u2019s really how you action the data,\u201d McCoy told The People Behind the Tech<\/em> podcast. \u201cI always state in any technological sense whatsoever that we\u2019ve got to have the question ahead of the technology,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

    To illustrate his point, he cited the question of preventable injury: \u201cIt\u2019s called \u2018preventable injury\u2019 for a reason \u2013 it\u2019s preventable.\u201d In 2019, McCoy helped to deliver professional baseball\u2019s only soft tissue injury-free season for Taiwan\u2019s Chinatrust Brothers. There are, as he said, key performance indicators for baseball players in every position, yet injury rates across the sport are \u201coff the charts\u201d. McCoy attributes these rates in part to a lack of accountability in some quarters as teams push for \u201cbigger, faster, stronger\u201dplayers without considering the impact on the individual. \u201cIf an athlete\u2019s injured and it\u2019s a preventable injury, you haven\u2019t conditioned him correctly.\u201d Technology can help raise flags, but it has limited utility without meaningful KPIs. \u201cAre we improving the athlete\u2019s key performance indicators or reducing preventable injury?\u201d<\/p>\n

    Coaches need to step in and guide AI<\/strong><\/p>\n

    At November\u2019s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Oval in London, a coach was overheard saying: \u2018I have a team looking at AI but I have no idea what they do\u2019. We put that to McCoy on the podcast. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know what they do, go and lead them because they probably don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing either,\u201d he said. \u201cArtificial intelligence and data, as a general staple in sports, needs guidance. It needs transactional guidance to evolve the athlete.\u201d<\/p>\n

    He spoke of a Major League Baseball team whose analysts are \u201clooking at spreadsheets [and] have no idea of what\u2019s going on out on the field\u201d. That disconnect is down to the coaches: \u201cartificial intelligence and data, as a general staple, in sport needs guidance; and it needs transactional guidance to [help] evolve the athlete\u2026 we cannot get to a point of siloing data and letting it just run by itself.\u201d McCoy does not believe that AI will replace the coach, but it can certainly remove coaching or performance biases. \u201cIt can show correlations that we have never seen that may be critical to improving performance or reducing injury.\u201d In any case, it comes back to the coach and the environment they foster.<\/p>\n

    AI needs a guiding ethos in sport<\/strong><\/p>\n

    According to McCoy, if the world of sport is to better manage data and smooth the way for the widespread use of AI, \u201cwe need analysts, we need performance practitioners, we need data scientists and we need the general managers of organisations to come together and create almost an ethos around how organisations need to look at this moving forward.\u201d AI can also free up the coach to be “creative”. \u201cCoaches need to embrace it,\u201d McCoy added. \u201cIt\u2019s going to open up opportunities for you tactically on how to work with athletes. But for all coaches and even support staff, it\u2019s going to open up hours and you can get creative by learning how to ask that next level of questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Analysts need to understand how data derived from AI transacts<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The most effective analysts in the future will know how the data transacts in their organisations. \u201cAnybody coming into this space from a data science perspective has got to understand that they need to dive in and be generalists in areas like performance,\u201d said McCoy. His advice: \u201cwork with high performance directors specifically to understand the physical demands on that athlete, the technical skillset of that athlete and understand what may be gaps in their technical efficiency and start to leverage [data insights]\u201d. The analyst can \u201cbuild the AI models with the direction of your coaching staff and your organisation but [they] can get creative around this [search] for unbiased correlations.\u201d Do that and \u201cyou\u2019ll be employed for the rest of your career.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Listen to the full interview with Gary McCoy:<\/strong><\/p>\n