PIF’s AI champion Humain acquired a controlling stake in UK-based sports technology firm Ai.io, a move that integrates a massive consumer of data processing into the Kingdom’s emerging AI infrastructure. The transaction value is still under wraps.

The acquisition formally launches Humain Sport, a new vertical led by Ai.io’s founder and CEO Darren Peries. The company plans to establish an office in the Kingdom in the upcoming months and has a team already operating out of Humain’s offices, Ai.io’s COO Richard Felton-Thomas tells EnterpriseAM.

Ai.io?

Ai.io is the company behind AI Scout, used by the likes of Chelsea FC and Burnley to address a fundamental inefficiency in professional sports: the physical limitations of human scouts. “We know each professional scout in the Premier League sees about 2k players per year. But mns play the game[…] It just doesn’t cut it,” Felton-Thomas said, adding that scouts go to the same places and miss vast swathes of talent.

AI Scout gives players a tool to record drills remotely, allowing clubs to review “5k% higher [volume] than what currently gets reviewed with the same staff members they have today.” To date, the platform has already resulted in “just over 750 players who have been trialed or signed by pro clubs.”

Beyond scouting, 3DAT (3D Athlete Tracking) technology captures motion data without wearable sensors for performance analysis and injury prevention. The company is in talks to deploy its solutions to the Mahd Academy, the Saudi Olympic Training Center, and a number of Saudi Pro League clubs, Felton-Thomas tells us.

The Saudi advantage

Successfully deploying Ai.io’s solutions is a test case for the Saudi advantage in AI. The acquisition is a wager that the Kingdom’s sovereign infrastructure and its promised low costs of inference can fix the unit economics of consumer AI.

Using computer vision to analyze athletes via smartphone video requires a lot of inference power. “Some people can scale and be validated, but then it costs too much so no one can use it. Having cheap inference [using Saudi’s infrastructure] is going to go a long way,” Felton-Thomas said.

The long-term play is to migrate this workload to Humain’s sovereign infrastructure to subsidize the cost of global expansion. Migration is “still in the works,” but engineering teams are building toward a future where the heavy lifting happens in the Kingdom. “We want to do that with Humain and in Saudi. Where we don’t have to [use other providers for sponsorship reasons], it will be with Humain.”

Felton-Thomas dismisses concerns regarding the availability of local technical talent to support AI infrastructure. The company participated in a recent hackathon with SCAI (the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence, now folded into Humain), and the output from local developers was “very impressive.” The cost of Saudi talent also remains “a lot lower than some of those talent hubs” in the US and elsewhere, which can be a competitive advantage when building platform backends, he argues.

What’s next?

The company is preparing “Phase 2” of announcements, with Felton-Thomas hinting at major agreements currently in the pipeline, both in Saudi Arabia and globally.

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