In our opinion, interns are lovable beings who are prone to accidents – mostly benign embarrassing ones, like starting an email with “Dead boss” instead of “Dear boss” or sending a “cute boy” email to everyone in the company, or turn up for a 10 am meeting at 10 pm. Occasionally, an intern might trip on a wire and break a few monitors, accidentally send a “TEST – IS THIS WORKING?” message to a million users, or fall prey to a phishing scam. 

Let’s consider what would happen if the intern wrote the command git branch –delete AI and then follow it up with git merge. We know AI is not a git branch but stay with us.

Also, consider that a critical cricket match is about to be played. What would happen to that match?

1.Ticket-holders will leave early for the stadium, and they’ll carry umbrellas and caps.

Let’s start with the most obvious item: modern weather forecasting is AI based. Without that, people would just prepare for both sunshine and rain. 

The red-orange-blue lines and the traffic time estimate on Google Maps is AI based. Without that, best to leave a few hours early. Like they did in 1996.

2. Players won’t seem as match-ready as we’d like them to be.

Teams use all kinds of analysis in their preparation for big matches. Without all that data analysis, coaches would have to resort to generic advice like “do a good job out there,” “don’t lose focus,” and “remember to adjust your pads” instead of match, opponent, and weather-specific advice. Imagine if the Indian team was as prepared for their big games as they were against Sri Lanka on that fateful 1996 world cup semi-final at Eden Gardens? [Hope the people who got to the stadium on time are prepared for a similar outcome.]

3. Hawk-eye wouldn’t be there.

Fact: hawk-eye is what prevents cricketing wars. Whether a leg is physically before the wicket is easy to tell, but was the ball planning to hit the wicket? Only AI can tell, albeit within 5mm of accuracy. 

4. Decision Review System (DRS) would be different.

First there were two umpires, and then, there was a third umpire who could use TV replays to take better decisions. And every Indian knows that the first wicket to be declared out by the third umpire was that of Sachin Tendulkar playing at Durban in 1992 – run out. 

The off-field umpire is equipped better today – Slow motion replays at many more frames per second, Hawk-eye to predict ball path, Hot-spot which can show whether ball made contact by detecting friction heat and Snicko (or Ultra-Edge) which can pick up minute sounds. These technologies might survive without AI, but would be less accurate, and … different. 

Let’s hope for the best.

5. Video cuts would be slower to come by. 

Old-timers would remember that “highlights” for a game would be available only the next day, because they were manually made. But video editing in the modern era is AI-assisted. Thanks to video analytics tech, an editor can easily pick out all the 4s and 6s, and all the wickets, and so on.

Not just for highlights, such AI-assisted cuts are used real-time to improve the quality of the television viewing experience.

6. Without live statistics and predictions, pundits would be insufferable.

All those charts and graphs that we consume – before, during, and after a match – some of that needs AI. Win predictor, for example, needs some of that magic juice. Our guess is that cricket matches will manage without these graphics, but pundits won’t. Not everyone is Geoff Boycott or Harsha Bhogle, they need stats to make that commentary interesting.

7. Region specific ads wouldn’t exist. 

The ads painted on the field and pasted near the boundary rope can be magically switched by the broadcaster depending on the country (or region) of the viewer. That wouldn’t be possible without video analytics, and this would not be good news for sponsors in general.

Speaking of sponsorship, here’s a word from ours: Akaike is an AI-shop, and enterprises use our services to solve all kinds of problems. Like CCTV video-feed analytics of their chain of stores, predictive analytics of their field sales, semantic search using LLM of their multi-modal unstructured data, and more.

8. OTT may not support all viewers.

Managing a million viewers at a time is not easy for any app, especially a live broadcast app. Apps like Disney Hotstar and Jio Cinema use AI to take real time decisions on broadcast quality and video enhancement (for each user) so that every user can have a good viewing experience.

Without optimization and other algorithms working in the background, we would need infinite bandwidth for everyone to be able to view live matches glitch free.

9. TV and OTT video may not be as great.

There are AI algorithms running at every step of the process – in the camera, at the broadcast control center, and in our TVs. That intern just took us back 20 years. 

Summary

Cricket fans across the world care about the game, and the entertainment. AI algorithms have improved the quality of the experience, and everyone is thankful for it. It’s impossible for fans to imagine going back in time now. In fact, we look forward for AI to further contribute to our experience. A crowd emotion detector perhaps?