Cricket Australia automates experiences for fans and players

Cricket Australia uses automation tools to help improve interactions between its website and its fans and bring enhanced insights to its professional-grade players. 

Don Elliot, General Manager, Australian Cricket Technology spoke to Digital Nation about how automation helps them elevate the fan experience.

He said at Cricket Australia they have a mantra that if they have to do something twice, they should be automating it.

“We should be looking at automating that task to take the work out. Keep the focus on delivering new capability and automating all of the things that keep us running efficiently,” Elliot said.

Using HCLTech for the past four years, Elliot said they were able to automate everything.

“We've got a very strong 100 percent cloud practice, very strong DevOps practice and rather than doing things manually, we've got a lot of automated testing a lot of automated deployments. We find that our workloads for our customer-facing assets are very picky,” he explained.

He used an example of pageviews on the Cricket Australia website.

“We might run a million pageviews during the week, and then as soon as there's an international match, there are hundreds of millions of page views on the website,” he said.

“We've got a lot of automation to automatically scale up that infrastructure and scale back down to keep it economical.”

He said it is similar to the community cricket space too.

“We support up to 7000 matches every weekend, but Mondays and Tuesdays, it's very quiet. As soon as you hit Friday, all the junior games are on and we're automatically scaling our services up to deliver great performance,” he said.

Elliot said they use chatbots on their community site as a FAQ tool.

“Instead of going to a call centre for manual help, we can use our chatbots to offload a lot of that traffic, that's process efficiency. Making sure that we minimise the amount of manual effort we have to expend,” he said.

Cricket Australia implements AI technology within its community cricket video feature to create highlights for each team.

“We've got great technology we launched with HCLTech last year into the MyCricket app, which is the ability for any community club that's got a FrogBox camera to live stream their games,” he said.

“We use a whole lot of video analytics AI to recognise when it's the end of the over and then flash up the scorecard over the top of the video, recognising when there are wickets or someone's hit a four and automatically clipping out highlights for those clubs.”

He added, “Without a whole lot of knowledge of video editing clubs can just stick a camera there and do their scoring as they would normally do and they get a fantastic almost broadcast-quality video feed.”

Cricket Australia also uses AI for athlete management around reducing injury risk for their professional teams.

“How do we analyse the performance of the opposition using AI to look at strategies for where do we bowl, how do we set our fields, weaknesses in batsman or sorts of stock balls or balls are likely to ball so our players an as prepared as they can be for upcoming series,” he said.

“The sky's the limit with AI, generative AI offers a whole range of new opportunities for us that we're only really just starting to scratch the surface of.”