In a few years’ time, football coaches may be using an AI assistant

A s an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast, I have witnessed several overhyped technologies and businesses. These stretch from the first wave of the internet in the 1990s with Webvan and Pets.com, which both had multibillion-dollar valuations, to the recent Theranos scandal, where a $10bn blood testing business turned out to be a sham.

Irrational exuberance has been the precursor to the downfall of many ventures. I have been far from immune; you only have to see the photo of me, proudly wearing my Google Glasses, sitting next to the ponytailed inventor Astro Teller in 2013 as evidence. However, I believe that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool, could be a gamechanger. Bill Gates recently declared it the most significant technological advance since the graphical user interface.

Since ChatGPT’s public release last year I have been exploring its usefulness at home and in businesses. I encourage my 11- and 14-year-old children to use ChatGPT as a personalised learning assistant. In the business world I suggest using the tool in meetings, with a smart employee framing questions to help the collective meeting arrive at better conclusions. Using these tools may provide a competitive advantage through early adoption, at least in the short term.

In 2015 I attended a talk at IBM about the capabilities of Watson, its flagship AI. One of the developers I spoke to said something that stuck with me: that a better way to think about AI would be for us to think of it as IA or “intelligence augmented” – a set of tools and capabilities that will not replace us but enhance our own human capabilities. It has yet to have a visible impact on sport.

In football ChatGPT can easily be used to create marketing and communication