A coach decides whether to push an athlete through another training session or give them another day of recovery. A sports medicine physician determines whether an injured player is truly ready to return to competition. A strength coach adjusts a training plan based on fatigue. A parent wonders whether their child is developing appropriately. A recruiter is wondering what is really under the hood of this prospective athlete. An athlete asks what they need to improve to reach the next level.
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Now back to our discussion on Athletic Intelligence for Performance.
These are among the most important decisions made in sport, yet they are often made with incomplete information, not because data are unavailable, but because the information exists in disconnected systems that rarely communicate with one another.
Over the past two decades, sports science has experienced an explosion of innovation. Exercise physiology, biomechanics, sports medicine, performance analysis, wearable technologies, computer vision, and artificial intelligence now generate unprecedented amounts of information describing athletes, teams, and organizations. Yet despite these remarkable advances, these disciplines have largely evolved independently, producing fragmented models of performance that often limit our ability to integrate biological, technical, tactical, environmental, and organizational information into coherent, evidence-based decisions.
That realization is what ultimately led me to begin developing what is now becoming what I call the Athletic Intelligence Platform (AIP⁴).
But the journey toward AIP⁴ actually began long before I ever stepped onto a pickleball court.
I have been fascinated by the intersection of healthcare, human performance, and emerging technology for nearly thirty years. In 1997, I began exploring how technology could improve health and wellness. My doctoral research surveyed more than 5,000 early Internet users who regularly searched online for health information. At a time when most healthcare providers viewed the Internet with skepticism, my research explored something that seems obvious today: people wanted to communicate with their healthcare providers using digital technology.
Looking back, I realize I was never simply chasing new technology. I was searching for better ways to help people make better decisions.
Throughout my career I have continually experimented with emerging technologies before they became mainstream. I developed applications to better understand how people interacted with digital platforms and how user experience influenced behavior. Shortly after the introduction of the iPhone, I designed two live-streaming applications, one that would allow first responders to see emergency scenes before arriving, second that would allow any iPhone owner to stream short 60 second video with location data inviting their community to join them in the excitement.
Later, I explored social video platforms, blockchain technologies, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, not because the technologies themselves fascinated me, but because each represented another opportunity to improve how people communicate, learn, and make decisions. I was also fortunate enough to teach these subjects at the University of South Carolina to Information Sciences students.
At the same time, athletics remained a constant part of my life. From winning a state championship in high school to later earning two Beach Ultimate world championships, and completing dozens of Ironman Triathlons and other tri distances. Sport has always challenged me to improve, yet for many years I never seriously considered applying these emerging technologies to athletic performance.
That changed three years ago when I discovered pickleball.
Like many people, I quickly became captivated by the sport. I began competing in tournaments, earned my coaching certification, and one year after learning the game won a state championship in my singles division. As my passion for the sport grew, I found myself asking the same question I had been asking throughout my technology career:
How can emerging technology help people perform better?
One of my earliest experiments was creating an AI voice and chat digital twin of Pickleball Hall of Famer and multiple-time world champion Scott Moore. Rather than training the system on everything known about pickleball, it was trained specifically on Scott’s coaching philosophy and player development model.
The project taught me an important lesson.
The technology could answer questions, but it could not truly coach.
It responded only to what a player asked. It could not observe movement, recognize patterns, identify strengths and weaknesses, or provide feedback the way an experienced coach does after watching someone play.
That realization changed my thinking.
Instead of trying to recreate coaching, I began exploring how computer vision and artificial intelligence could observe athletic performance directly from video and transform those observations into meaningful coaching insights. My original vision was to build that technology myself.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to.
Companies such as PB Vision , SwingVision , Wingfield Sports, and others were already making remarkable progress. As these platforms matured and became integrated with ecosystems such as DUPR, many of the capabilities I had imagined only a few years earlier became reality. Today they are helping coaches and players (even fans) better understand shot selection, movement patterns, technical execution, and match statistics in ways that were unimaginable only a short time ago.
Watching this rapid evolution led me to an even bigger question.
If technology can now analyze movement, biomechanics, match statistics, physiology, video, and performance independently, why are we still treating these disciplines as separate conversations?
Perhaps the next breakthrough is not another application.
Perhaps it is a framework that brings them together.
That question became the foundation of what I call the Athletic Intelligence Platform (AIP⁴).
AIP⁴ is an interdisciplinary scientific initiative dedicated to advancing Performance, Physiology, Prediction, and Potential through Sport. Rather than replacing existing disciplines, it seeks to create a common scientific language and evidence-based framework capable of integrating contemporary sports science with emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, wearable sensing, digital twins, knowledge graphs, and advanced decision-support systems.
The framework recognizes that athletic performance is not produced by physiology alone, nor by biomechanics, coaching, psychology, analytics, or technology acting independently. Performance emerges from the dynamic interaction of individuals, teams, organizations, and their competitive environments. AIP⁴ seeks to better understand those interactions through scientifically validated measurement, continuous learning, transparent evidence, ethical AI governance, and human-centered decision-making.
It is important to emphasize that AIP⁴ is not presented as a finished solution.
It is a research initiative.
A living platform.
An invitation to collaborate.
Like every meaningful scientific endeavor, it will evolve through experimentation, peer review, constructive criticism, and contributions from experts representing many different disciplines. My expectation is not that every initial idea will prove correct. Rather, I hope the framework will become stronger as researchers, coaches, clinicians, engineers, technologists, and athletes challenge its assumptions, refine its models, and expand its capabilities.
Over the coming months I will begin publishing the AIP⁴ framework for public review and scientific discussion. My hope is that this platform will grow into an open body of knowledge that helps advance both the science and practice of athletic performance while remaining grounded in rigorous evidence and practical application.
If your work involves sports science, physiology, biomechanics, coaching, sports medicine, rehabilitation, computer vision, artificial intelligence, data science, wearable technology, organizational performance, or if you are simply an athlete who is passionate about improving human performance, I would genuinely welcome your perspective.
Whether your contribution is challenging an assumption, sharing research, participating in pilot studies, testing new ideas, building technology, or helping validate future models, there is a place for you in this journey.
When AIP⁴ ultimately succeeds, it will not belong to one researcher, one university, one sport, or one technology company. It will become a collaborative platform dedicated to helping the world better understand, measure, predict, and develop human performance.
I invite you to help build it.
Send me a message here on LI, or email me at: doc+aip4@gordonjones.org
