The Brief

The Big Bang Fair is the UK’s biggest festival of STEM for young people and exists to encourage more 11 – 18 year olds to choose STEM subjects and careers. To make STEM seem more appealing to youngsters, we applied it in a truly original way to something millions of them love: football.

The Big Idea

We made world sporting history by creating the first ever artificial intelligence football coach, (dubbed Alexa Ferguson). We partnered with non-league Wingate and Finchley F.C. to use the coach to select the team’s formation and tactics for a competitive league fixture.

Alexa Ferguson was coded on the Amazon Alexa platform and provided bespoke pre-game and in-game tactics to the team’s human managers. It also has the capacity to learn from every match by using the data it gathers to become an even better coach.

We got AI experts to run a free pre-match masterclass for 20 young football fans aged 9 and over, introducing them to the world of STEM and all of its amazing career opportunities.