Technology has evolved to a point where it can redefine how people coach, recruit, train and analyze athletes and improve their playing ability.

An example of how this has become reality can be found in the business model for Blast Motion Inc. Founded in 2007, the company intelligently combines the biomechanics of movement with sensor data, video capture technology and cloud-based software to enable athletes to become the best version of themselves.

Along the way, Blast Motion has partnered with Persistent Systems Ltd. and Amazon Web Services Inc. to apply generative artificial intelligence and move the “art of the swing”  into an entirely new dimension.

“We have over 300 million swings, and we’re on track to collect another 100 million swings this year,” said Bhaskar Bose (pictured, left), vice president of advanced engineering at Blast Motion. “One of the visions that we had very early on was that this data was going to be valuable and we would mine that data for insights. We have high-quality data scientists on staff, they’ve been analyzing the data manually and we’re taking that knowledge and transferring that into a generative AI system.”

Bose spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier as part of ongoing coverage of AWS and cloud ecosystems and in conjunction with the AWS Summit NYC. He was joined by Pandurang Kamat (right), chief technology officer of Persistent Systems, and they discussed how the two companies are seeking to transform sports through generative AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Information-centric partnership

Blast Motion works with athletes across a wide range of skills and abilities in the sports arena, including golf and baseball. This could involve players in the very early stages of youth sports all the way to certified stars in Major League Baseball. Yet, the central questions remain the same for all.

“The biggest questions are: ‘What do the metrics mean, what’s good and how do I get better?’” Bose said. “We want to get away from being a data-centric company to being more information centric and then guiding the user. That’s why this partnership with Persistent is really important, because generative AI is a key component to communicating our technology to our various personas that we’re working with.”

GenAI helps the users of Blast Motion distill massive amounts of data collected through the firm’s sensors and video capture technology.

“You need to do time series analysis of that player’s swings,” Kamat said. “The second thing is to then compare not only against the baselines, but compare against their own goals. All of these require multiple techniques, whether it’s clustering, whether it is time series analysis, whether it is data cleaning. And then you bring the generative AI angle to add the very humanesque touch to it.”

Using Amazon Bedrock

To put an expert biomechanics coach in the pocket of every player, Blast Motion and Persistent Systems relied on a series of GenAI tools to translate data into personalized recommendations. In April, AWS announced the availability of Amazon Bedrock, a new service for building and scaling GenAI applications, in addition to the Titan family of foundation models developed by AWS. Persistent Systems was one of the tool’s initial users.

“We were able to get early access and bring that to bear in the particular Blast Motion engagement,” Kamat said. “We were able to leverage their Bedrock framework for generative AI and the Titan foundation model to drive some of this at scale. Using the AWS services helped us accelerate that journey in building the front-end experience.”

In the highly competitive world of sports, athletes and teams continually seek an advantage. This requires firms such as Blast Motion to protect and safely anonymize the data it collects, a need facilitated by controls built into Amazon Bedrock.

“We make sure the data is anonymized so there’s no personal data that’s being used in any of these kinds of analyses,” Bose said. “We know a college player versus a high school player versus a travel ball team; we have those categories, but it’s all anonymized.”

The use of GenAI by Blast Motion, in partnership with Persistent Systems and AWS, provides an example of how technology is just beginning to reshape the business and cultural landscape.

“Generative AI, just like any other technology, is a means to an end,” Kamat said. “Companies that have a very distinctive advantage, which Blast Motion has, [are] the companies that create unique and frictionless experiences leveraging generative rather than treating it as a fancy tagline to put on a product. The technology itself is going to mature, the ability to bring this technology to multiple different user experiences is going to get even better as time passes.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS and cloud ecosystems and in conjunction with the AWS Summit NYC:

(* Disclosure: Persistent Systems Ltd. and Blast Motion Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Persistent Systems/Blast Motion nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE