Amazon.com’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, announced a multi-year partnership with the National Basketball Association to launch new AI-powered features and data insights from games, the organizations said on Wednesday.
The deal, which did not have a financial value attached, will introduce “NBA Inside the Game”, a basketball platform that will turn data points into insights and interactive experiences.
Sports firms have increasingly adopted artificial intelligence, striking partnerships with cloud providers to use machine learning to provide in-depth statistics for fans.
The “NBA Inside the Game” platform will offer a suite of features for live broadcasts and across the NBA App, website and other social channels, they said.
The new AI features and data will also be available to teams for review.
“Whenever we build a statistic, there is always input from our teams, because we want to make sure that these services we build not only are great for our fans, but also help our teams improve their strategy on court,” NBA’s head of media operations and technology, Ken DeGennaro told Reuters.
The platform will track data from players to generate AI statistics such as defensive positions of teams, data on shot success percentage and strategy, he added.
Earlier this year, Microsoft signed a five-year partnership with the English Premier League under which the cloud giant will infuse its AI copilot into the league’s digital platforms.
