England Rugby and IBM

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With England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales all set to play this weekend, rugby is on many of our minds.

You may have seen that The Rugby Football Union (RFU) recently announced IBM as an official partner of England Rugby, which is something I’m very excited about. Under the partnership, we are working together using IBM Cloud and AI technologies, combined with deep sports industry expertise, to help deliver the RFU’s strategic plan.

Over the course of our partnership, England Rugby will look to leverage IBM’s Artificial-Intelligence (AI)-infused Cloud platform for competitive advantage in key areas including:

• Personalised interactions with community players and teams: to help the RFU in their development of the community game, and with the aim of increasing the number of active players and number of games played each weekend, IBM’s Cloud-based AI platform Watson is being used to find new player analytic solutions, and to deliver rapid access to player performance insights for coaches from video and match data. This will help the RFU in its goal to be world leading across men’s and women’s rugby.
• Personalised experiences for rugby fans in the stadium and beyond: IBM iX will work in collaboration with the RFU’s digital team to redesign England Rugby’s match day hub and other web platforms, to provide the best possible personalised experiences for rugby fans, wherever they want to follow England’s teams.

And we’re adding an element of fun to our collaboration. Using Watson, England Rugby and IBM are continually gathering information on which personality traits are key for England’s success on the pitch. Based on analysis across both the men’s and women’s squads you too can discover your optimum place on the team. Why not take the quiz before you sit down to watch the games this weekend?

You can read more about the analysis behind the quiz here and find out more about other smart technologies IBM and England Rugby are working on at ibm.com/rugby.

We’ll have more rugby-themed content soon!