Swimming Australia laps up GenAI for 'non-techie' coaches

Swimming Australia is tapping into generative AI to help its coaches understand data and insights from athletes’ training.

Jess Corones from Swimming Australia

Ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, the Australian swimming team is planning to use Amazon Web Services GenAI assistant Amazon Q alongside its host of AWS-powered predictive insight applications.

Speaking at AWS Summit Sydney, Swimming Australia’s general manager of performance support and Olympic campaign Jess Corones said more tools are in the works for the team’s coaches.

“Our coaches are not tech people and we don’t want them to be,” she said. “But Amazon Q is going to help them query the data using their natural language."

Corones said Swimming Australia intended to use GenAI primarily in the training pools alongside its forthcoming Training Insights system.

Revealed by Corones during AWS re:Invent last year, Training Insights is described as a “piece of software that then can use machine learning and image recognition to track the athletes in a training pool”.

“The training pools can be our most challenging environment; swimmers sharing multiple lanes, swimming different drills and the coaches yelling different stroke rates and times from their stopwatches,” Corones said.

“It’s about bringing the power of real-time analysis and generative AI into those training pools."

Swimming Australia’s forthcoming use of Amazon Q, which is touted as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, follows an extensive data and analytics implementation by Swimming Australia.

The solutions included a bespoke athletic improvement system, known as Sparta 2 and Lane Four, an online portal for coaches to access their swimmer’s data built using Amazon Quicksight.

Corones said that while Swimming Australia’s “single-minded focus” is on the Paris Olympic Games, it also has “one eye on the future”.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be finished,” she said. “As we complete different projects and products, there are always new ones to be done.

“Our aspiration is to be the best in the world at what we do, both in and out of the pool. [We want] to continually improve and lead through innovation.”