On Whose Watch? Human Coach Vs Artificial Intelligence

With smart gadgets threatening to render human coaching obsolete, sports psychologist Dr Josephine Perry pits a cutting-edge watch against her trusted coach

- Daniel Could

A 2017 report by the tech company Dell suggested that up to 85% of the jobs people would be doing in 2030 had yet to be invented. It was an interesting hypothesis, throwing up big questions… What would happen to our current jobs? Are we all soon to be replaced by automated systems? And how would this affect our training programmes – would artificial intelligence (AI) begin to mean less and less human input? Such was the starting point of this feature: I already had a coach, but could she conceivably be replaced by a gadget?

The past 18 months seemed to speed up the digital takeover: gym spin classes replaced by Peloton, and real-life racing replaced by Zwift. We may not have embraced racing avatars rather than real humans enthusiastically but it became second nature pretty quickly. While the human drama and stories of the peloton mean that pro cyclists are probably safe from wholesale digitisation any time soon, what about cycling support services? Specifically, what about coaching? Do we still need thousands of individuals providing plans and advice to cyclists, or could all that collective knowledge be amalgamated, filtered and shared in a far more effiient, democratic and cheaper way?

The big sports tech companies are on to this and many seem to be working away on secret-squirrel projects to amp up this part of their business. Martin Resch, senior product manager at Garmin told me: “The field of human performance is constantly growing, so our focus is to continue to improve the capacity of our products, from the precision of our sensors to drawing relevant conclusions from the data measured.” Garmin’s flagship product in this area is the Fenix 6, which, according to Resch, isn’t designed to replace real-life coaches but “is a great enhancement today – and it only gets better from here.”