Another WorldTour team enters cycling’s growing AI race

The Australian team said in a press release that the collaboration will give its men’s and women’s teams access to ai.io’s expertise in artificial intelligence, motion analysis and athlete performance technology. The company works across a range of sports and develops tools designed to assess movement, analyse performance and support athlete scouting.

For GreenEDGE, the partnership is being presented as a way to improve several parts of the team rather than a single performance project. The team says ai.io’s technology could be used to support rider development, injury prevention, talent identification and fan engagement.

“We are always looking for new ways to better the team in all areas and as road cycling develops at a rapid rate, we are pleased to stay at the forefront of technology and utilise this new partnership with ai.io across the board in all departments,” said GreenEDGE Cycling general manager Brent Copeland.

“Not only will this partnership help provide us with a much deeper insight into our riders and enhance performance, but it will also provide us with a better understanding of many other areas thanks to their extensive data analytics, from assisting with talent identification to fan engagement.”

The move comes at a time when AI is becoming increasingly visible across the top level of the sport. Visma | Lease a Bike announced a partnership with Mistral AI earlier this year, adding the French company as both a premium and technology partner. 

The collaboration was presented as another step in the team’s long standing search for marginal gains, with AI expected to support selected performance driven projects around faster information processing, decision making and race preparation.

For Visma, that sits naturally within a wider innovation strategy. The team has previously developed its Foodcoach app to help riders manage nutrition more precisely and introduced its remote Control Room during the 2024 Tour de France, giving sports directors an extra layer of real time information from staff away from the race. 

Its move into AI therefore looked less like a sudden pivot than another addition to an already data heavy performance model.

Ineos have also placed technology at the centre of their latest rebuild. When Netcompany was confirmed last month as title sponsor for the next five years, the team highlighted the Danish company’s Pulse AI platform as a key part of the partnership. 

The deal was presented not only as a commercial agreement, but as part of the team’s attempt to create the conditions to win the Tour de France again after several years of losing ground to UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma | Lease a Bike

The trend is not limited to teams. Olympic road race champion Kristen Faulkner has been building her own AI based performance system, using years of biometric and training data to better understand how her body responds to the demands of elite cycling.

One thing already seems clear: ai.io is unlikely to be the last AI partner to arrive in professional cycling.