It's a long way from the basic SQL databases and floppy disks he was using 20 years ago, when the New Zealander helped monitor training for professional rugby, cricket and soccer teams in the U.K. But those grassroots hacks recorded valuable information and led to productive outcomes. They helped him evolve into a modern data scientist. Flash forward a few decades, and Riddle is working with Microsoft's Sports Performance Platform, a data-driven predictive analytics platform that harnesses the power of Microsoft's cloud with state of the art machine-learning technologies, artificial intelligence capabilities and data visualization. "Having that creative space and relaxed nature within a high-pressured environment enables forward thinking," Riddle says.