AI Powers the Premier league.

Why waste millions on Lionel Messi, when you can fund a whole Robot team for a fraction of the price. You can see where this is going can't you ?

Developers will try and recreate the excitement of the big game without leaving their terminals.

Ladbrokes will take bets on who going to score the 1st goal, hacking will be the new sports doping, Tensor flow may be at the top of the league, and Duracell might even sponsor the champions league.

So the game of two halves may be transformed by AI, and robots with the best 3d swivel joints may win the game.

AI has some serious applications, but before you go rushing out and investing in Peppa @ (only £17k) or one of these boys, just park a small piece of your innovation budget and cut your teeth with a simple use case.

I often get asked how we can jump on the AI bandwagon, if I received a dime for every time I was asked that question, id simply hang up my footy boots and buy one of these babies.

So where do you start ? if you don't have a fully blown business case and your CIO simply won't sponsor the your 5 aside robot team, don't worry.

You can start small, invest is a Proof of concept, a quick 6 week exercise, will help you formulate a plan and help demonstrate the art of the possible.

For marketing automation, a simple conversational Bot, can reduce traffic to the call centre. Its not out of the box going to power your whole call centre, but designed well, it could drive some of the mundane tasks out and speed up a number of back office processes.

In the banking sector we have seen a number of excellent use cases for the validation of loan applications, something banks typically take days and weeks to turn around, which Bots can can turn around in minutes. Look at the key customer journeys and see how you can 'Pepper' in a little machine intelligence.

Simple use cases, using out of the box tools can give you this capability, there no need to invest £100,000's in the rather scarce data scientist resource.

If data is the new oil, then data scientist are like the new geologist. They'll sift through a lot of soil samples and tell you where the oil is likely to be, but your still going to have to get it out the ground and its still a big gamble.