Public Investment Fund brings artificial intelligence to football through Humain and aiScout app
A Saudi company backed by the Public Investment Fund is reshaping how football talent is discovered, not with more money but with data measured by a smartphone. Humain, founded in May 2025 and majority-owned by the sovereign fund, acquired a controlling stake in ai.io in February. ai.io developed the aiScout app, which turns short videos recorded by players into performance scores that clubs use to decide which players to invite to the field.
Technology:The app asks the player to perform specific drills, such as sprint speed, jump height, bilateral symmetry and ball control with each foot. The phone’s built-in camera records the clips in real time, preventing any later editing. Algorithms extract biomechanical metrics that, until recently, required multi-camera labs and body markers, and deliver them to the club as a decision file rather than a marketing gimmick.
Current reach:Chelsea and Burnley in England, Major League Soccer in the United States, and more than a thousand players have secured trials, professional contracts or national team call-ups through programs that use this technology, according to ai.io. The long-term commercial agreement signed this month with the San Francisco 49ers of the NFL extends the use to monitoring movement changes that may signal injury risk, allowing the coaching staff to decide when to reduce training loads.
Saudi bet:Richard Fulton-Thomas, chief operating officer and head of sports science at ai.io, frames the issue more broadly: “That allows Saudi Arabia to be seen as a provider of technology and data for sport, not merely a source of money.” Humain, whose activities range from data centres and computing infrastructure to software and consumer products, aims through Humain Sport to turn interest in the Saudi Professional League into genuine participation by Saudi youth. The country will host the 2034 World Cup, and Fulton-Thomas notes that “the reality is you first need more people playing… and that comes from enthusiasm and from making access available.”
Human element:A former goalkeeper turned biomechanist describes the difference, according to Fulton-Thomas: “Twenty years ago the only tool was cameras on the field, we filmed people, went home and drew lines on the screen.” Labs later offered higher accuracy but did so slowly and at a cost that prevented scaling. Today artificial intelligence shortens the path from field to decision, yet it does not eliminate human judgment: “Excellence in sport is highly multi-faceted… there is always a way to keep the human in the loop.”
What this means for followers in the Gulf: technical sovereignty is no longer a slogan at conferences, but a tool for building player dossiers and signing deals with global clubs, while a local practitioner base that owns its data from the start expands. The lesson lies not in the size of the investment but in turning it into exportable infrastructure.