AI & Sports Betting Picks: The Benefits and Drawbacks 

There is absolutely no doubt that we are embarking on the age of artificial intelligence at the moment, although the direction of travel still seems up for debate. Nonetheless, it’s evident that AI – and possibly AI agents – will play a greater role in both our work and social lives in the near future. 

The technology still has its doubters, including legendary software engineer Grady Booch, and many don’t believe that AGI (artificial general intelligence) or the new buzzword, superintelligence, are possible, but even skeptics agree that, as a tool, it is here to stay. 

The way that tool will be used should touch many industries, but we wanted to look at a specific area – sports predictions and sports betting – to highlight AI, as it is today, and its benefits and limitations. 

AI can help with sports predictions – but there are limits 

To begin, let’s start with the statement that AI can be useful for sports predictions. It does not matter if you are placing wagers on soccer on a top betting Malawi site or playing fantasy NFL in the United States; the basic concept that you can use AI to analyze data for your analysis is sound. 

The problem, however, is how much stock is put into that analysis. AI can look at vast amounts of data compared to a human, sure, and it can also trawl the internet looking for expert opinions to back up its analysis. Yet, we should stop short of believing that AI has some sort of clairvoyance; it doesn’t 

Indeed, if you look at what IBM has been doing with its AI supercomputer program, Watson, you will see that while it has done okay with its fantasy sports program (based on the NFL and NBA, but no better than good human players. 

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AI is only as useful as the data it receives 

Secondly, it is important to appreciate that AI systems are only as good as the data they hold. As such, you can’t simply ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini to predict all the Premier League results and expect the chatbot to give an answer based on all the detailed statistics around English football. Why? Because it simply does not have access to them. We mentioned that AI bots can search the internet, but there are limits. And expert data providers guard their data jealously. 

As such, the only way you are going to get a system going with true expert analysis is to start feeding the AI the expert data that is not widely available online. That will mean paying subscriptions to professional sports data services like Betradar. These companies have spent years building up these services, so they aren’t going to simply let web crawlers access their platforms and give them to AI companies for free, rendering their services obsolete. 

That brings us to another point – tipping services backed by AI. You will see adverts for such services on social media. You should be very skeptical about these, especially those that demand a fee for their services, as well as those that claim to have foolproof systems for winning sports bets with AI. Nobody has worked out how to do that yet, and if they did know how to make guaranteed profits betting, do you think they would be flogging subscription services on social media?

Finally, we should note that AI will improve over time, becoming more adept at understanding both the structured and unstructured data that bettors need to make logical bets. So, it will continue to be a useful tool, especially for those who put a lot of stock in stats-based betting. Yet, you should be aware that sports betting providers won’t rest on their laurels, and they, too, will be using the technology to better understand the markets in the age of AI in a bid to keep their profits intact.