These days, there are numerous platforms that claim to provide insights into sports betting and prediction markets through the use of AI. You’ve probably seen the type of adverts, often on social media platforms. They tend to promise guaranteed success, which is in itself a red flag. But are they on to something generally?
The use of AI and modelling outcomes in sports is a natural fit. It makes full sense to, say, use AI to analyze team data to predict everything from injuries to why your quarterback is getting sacked more this season. Professional teams and those in the business of understanding sports outcomes use it.
AI is used to model various sports outcomes
But in a commercial sense, asking AI to predict a football or basketball game is very different from feeding the AI model a pile of data on player health records and asking the model about potential injuries. A sports game takes on a life of its own, with human actions that simply cannot be modelled. And if you take that across an entire season, it gets even more difficult. If you want proof, go back and see the models & predictions for the 2025 NFL season, comparing them to the Super Bowl LX betting odds, and see how badly they fared.
So does that mean AI is useless for predicting sports? Not at all. It’s more a case of thinking about it the wrong way. If you ask AI, will the New England Patriots win against the Seattle Seahawks tomorrow? Consider how it arrives at its answer. Mostly, it retrieves information from the web – form, injury news, human predictions, betting odds, and so on – basically the same stuff that we humans use to formulate predictions before placing a bet or making a change to our fantasy sports teams.
The issue, as such, is that AI usually doesn’t see anything that we don’t also get to see. Perhaps in some far-flung future when we ask, “will the Patriots win?”, AI will instantly scan 100s of hours of game footage, arriving at some unforeseen conclusion not immediately apparent to the human eye. But we are certainly not there yet.
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/qkvPdZv4W7E?si=8gTRteBAItXXknlT” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>
AI as a second opinion
Nevertheless, as mentioned, it can be useful for predictions if fed the right data. What you are looking for is not some omnipotent foretelling of the future, but rather some indication of a mismatch in value between betting odds and the chances of success. In short, when you ask the ‘Patriots question’, the answer you should be looking for is not that they will win, but rather that they have a better chance than what the betting odds suggest.
To do the latter, you need data – good data. It’s the reason that companies like Opta/OptaAI jealously guard their sports data. It is a commodity not readily available to the general public, and it’s certainly not available to the average Joe placing a sports bet on the Super Bowl. And the flipside of the coin is that the type of body with the most ready access to this kind of ‘super’ data will be sportsbooks. Odds are not plucked out of thin air, so there is a lot of modelling, whether through AI or algorithms, to arrive at those betting lines.
The best rule of thumb is to use AI and, at times, AI sports prediction services as a second-opinion hub. Be very wary of those platforms that claim guaranteed success – nobody has mastered this yet, and probably never will – and ask yourself why someone who had found the secret to guaranteed success in sports betting would be spending their time flogging subscriptions on social media. Be skeptical. But using AI as a sounding board, running your own models and theories, that could, indeed, get you ahead of the average bettor, even if the unpredictable world of sports means success is never guaranteed.