Why Stephen Hutchinson thinks AI will decide sport’s next winners
Based in London, Stephen Hutchinson built his name across British and European American football before becoming a respected voice on leadership, teamwork and change.
Hutchinson’s playing career included spells with the London Monarchs in the World League of American Football, the Hamburg Blue Devils in the German Football League and the Scottish Claymores in NFL Europe. He also helped the London Olympians to major honours, including the 1994 Eurobowl Championship, where he was named Game MVP, and the 1999 EuroCup Championship, alongside Team MVP honours.
That breadth of experience is exactly why Hutchinson stands out among sports presenters. Inducted into the BAFA Hall of Fame in 2021, he has since continued to shape the game through coaching, co-founding Rosterbase.com and co-hosting the Ballaz In Da Middle podcast, while speaking on leadership through transition, sport innovation, and high-performance mindset.
In this exclusive interview with the High Performance Speakers Agency, Stephen Hutchinson reflects on sport innovation, leading through change and why artificial intelligence could become the next major force shaping performance in both sport and business.
Question 1. Sport is often seen as tradition-bound, yet it is changing rapidly. How do you define sport innovation, and where is it having the biggest impact on how sport is played, managed, and consumed?
Stephen Hutchinson: “Sport innovation, I guess, refers to the introduction and application of new ideas. In the sporting world, you’ve got to look at sport today and what that has done for sport itself.
“For one, you’ve got to think about social media. What’s social media done for sport? Social media has brought fans so close now to teams, coaches and players, and they can now get an idea of how that player lives, how that player practises, and what their families are like, etc.
“Social media has definitely done that. With regards to technology, when you think of performance for athletes, how has technology helped that? Well, you have monitors that can monitor your heart rate, your temperature, and your blood pressure. And once you have these things on when you’re training, it can measure and probably mitigate against injury. So, there’s technology that can help players improve.
“There’s also technology on the sidelines. When you look at games today, you look at the coaches and assistant coaches, and they’ve got iPads. They’re sitting with players and they’re going through things in real time, on the field and on the sidelines, with players, potentially to make changes in the game there and then.
“So, sport’s changing. It is changing drastically in comparison to 10 years ago. It has changed drastically with regards to technology.”
Question 2. Leading teams through change often tests both standards and morale. How do you maintain high performance while asking people to adapt?
Stephen Hutchinson: “Leading through change can be a challenging thing because people generally don’t like change. People generally like to stick to their schedules.
“But to do that you need to lead with transparency. You need to lead with empathy. You also need to lead with retraining because when there is change you are changing from the norm to something new, which means there has to be training and support put in place for these things.
“You have to make sure that you’ve done a skill gap analysis for each member of staff so you can understand where the gaps are and what you need to fill, and then plug in training modules to get those individuals up to speed.
“Or it can be the inverse of that, looking at your individuals, looking at what they’re good at and plugging things in there to make them better at what they’re good at. So, there’s two different ways that you can approach that.”
Question 3. At the intersection of sport and business, what do you see as the next major high-performance trend, and why?
Stephen Hutchinson: “Okay, so that one to me is a no-brainer. It’s got to be artificial intelligence, without a shadow of a doubt. The first wave of AI was the likes of Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, with regard to voice assistants. You’d ask them something, it gives you an answer.
“We are now in the second phase of AI, which is called generative AI. Examples of that are Microsoft’s Copilot, you’ve got ChatGPT, you’ve got Google’s Gemini. The list just goes on, and AI impacts every industry. I don’t know what industry it doesn’t impact. It impacts every industry.
“Just homing in on myself and putting a spotlight on myself, I use AI in my day-to-day job. For example, I haven’t even mentioned this, but I am an IT service manager. I write reports, I do PowerPoint presentations and, prior to AI, I have to candidly say it would take me a day and a half to create the end-of-month report to present to my manager.
“I now do that in AI in less than five minutes and it’s literally like night and day. So, I’m talking about a day and maybe a quarter of pulling data from different areas, creating slides and PowerPoint, making it all glossy, making it read right, a day, day, and a half.
“Now with AI, so long as it knows where it needs to go, it will do it within less than two minutes. So, what AI brings to the table, it brings efficiency, it brings speed and economy. That’s what it does.
“In sport, it does exactly the same thing. I can use American football. There are thousands of examples that I can give you here. I’ll just give you one: AI agents.
“You can create an AI agent on any one of these platforms to do data analysis for you on the up-and-coming team that you’re going to play, injuries, stats on those players, what type of running plays they like to do, what type of defensive plays they like to do.
“You can create an agent to do this for every week for the 16 weeks of the NFL season if you want to. That is so much easier. And they will get that report. You can schedule it to get a report every Sunday evening.
“And it saves so much time. There are repercussions with AI, which I’m not going to go into today, but the positive side of AI is that it definitely helps you in your day-to-day workflows.
“Companies out there today are encouraging staff to lean into AI and use AI as a huge tool in their toolbox to help them with their day-to-days. And I think they’re doing that because they’re worried that their company might get left behind.”
This exclusive interview with Stephen Hutchinson was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.