Artificial intelligence (AI) is conquering sports and the corona pandemic is accelerating this trend. Whether it's clever fitness apps, strategic statistical analyses, grouping of spectators or even the fight against Covid-19 - AI has become indispensable in sports. In 2013 three young men founded a fitness app start-up in Munich - with a YouTube video, a newsletter and three PDFs. Today Freeletics, as the leading company in the so-called fit-tech scene, has over 50 million users in 175 countries worldwide. This spectacular development shows how rapidly AI has found its way into sports.

Surprisingly, fitness just might be easier to achieve during a global pandemic. Almost half are using fitness apps for the first time, and 56% of people actually don't plan to buy back into their gym memberships after the current health crisis. And a staggering 80% of men are exercising more now without access to their gyms than before Covid-19, according to data from Freeletics, an AI-based fitness app with 47 million users in over 160 countries. If accurate, it indicates we're getting more fit without the gym than with it. AI is a big part of that, and so is human psychology, Freeletics CEO Daniel Sobhani told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast.