The NZ Rugby chief information and technology officer, speaking at an Amazon Web Services summit in Sydney, says he assembled both types of data on AWS’ platform.
Southee arrived at NZ Rugby two years ago from a role as chief information officer for Parliament. He’s also had similar roles at NZTE and Coca Cola’s Australian operation.
He was surprised at how high tech his new employer was but also struck by Balkanisation.
“We have 150 high-performance teams that operate inside of our rugby system across men’s and women’s, sevens and fifteens, provincial, age-grade academy, Super Rugby, and of course, our teams in black,” Southee says.
“We found we didn’t have a performance challenge but a data one,” he says.
“Players would move around our system, but the data didn’t.
“Every team had their own data. The All Blacks had theirs. The Chiefs had theirs. Each provincial union had their own version of the truth.”
Using Amazon Bedrock – designed to simplify the process of creating apps and agents using generative AIs from the Amazon-backed Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Cohere and Amazon’s own tools, Southee created and deployed AI agents to capture both fast and slow data.
The decision was also made to share all the tools with coaches down the rugby pyramid.
Game of two halves
“Technically, it worked brilliantly. However, usage was demoralisingly low,” Southee says.
“We’ve done a brilliant job of optimising the back end and really neglected the user experience.
“We gave coaches a blank screen with a chat box.
“Either they hadn’t thought that deeply about how they work, or they didn’t know the questions to ask. We went back to the drawing board.”
It went both ways. Southee and his team hadn’t thought enough about how analysts and coaches worked.
“We sat with our analysts to really understand their world,” he says.
They distilled it into three key components: player analysis, opposition analysis and a post-game review.
“Rather than an open-ended chat, we created three ‘launchpads’,” Southee says. It now started with a ‘guided’ data experience on each of the three elements above, with the chance to ask follow-up questions so an analyst or coach could go “as deep as they liked”.
There was an immediate uptick in uptake, he says.
Things are now also moving a lot faster.
“Previously, after the final whistle on a Saturday night, our analysts worked through the night to deliver an analysis package to [the coach and team] for Sunday morning review,” Southee said.
“We were able to shrink that time dramatically.
“We’re able to go quite a bit deeper. And that means that review and the transition week ahead was ultimately a lot more effective. It’s about: How do we use that week in between matches to be better than everybody else? We believe that will be a true source of competitive advantage.”
With South Africa heavy favourites for the 2027 World Cup, followed by England, the All Blacks will need every advantage they can get.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
