Cricket Australia has overhauled its flagship Cricket Australia Live app with an AI Insights feature that delivers real-time, contextual analysis of player milestones, match records, and historic moments as play unfolds — drawing on an official scorecard archive stretching back to 1886. Built in partnership with Microsoft, Insight Enterprises, HCL Tech, and Skewer, the feature runs on OpenAI’s GPT-5 within Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, and is now available to over one million Australians who use the app each summer.
A platform built on 139 years of cricket data
The depth of Cricket Australia‘s historical archive gave the project its foundation — and its greatest engineering challenge. Official scorecards covering nearly 140 years of the sport had to be cleaned, aligned, and validated before a single insight could be generated.
Balamurugan P M, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Cricket Australia, told a Microsoft corporate feature: “Scores and highlights tell you what happened. But the context tells you why you should care about it.”
He added: “It comes down to the storytelling. From my perspective, I thought it was essential for fans to learn more about the story rather than just following the scores or watching highlights. So, we wanted to give a different experience.”
The data integration process ran for three months, with accuracy treated as non-negotiable for a fanbase that holds its records with precision.
“We had hundreds of years of data, and when it comes to fans, trust is non-negotiable,” Balamurugan said in the Microsoft corporate feature. “When you’re dealing with records and milestones, you can’t make mistakes. There are some hardcore fans who know these stats like the back of their hand. History is core to cricket’s identity. And instant context turns a scoreboard into a story. Getting that volume of data, integrating it and surfacing greater context for live games required huge data alignment and validation. With our systems and with the skilled team that we’ve got, that was made possible.”
AI Insights tested in real match conditions
The Ashes series between Australia and England provided an early live demonstration of what the feature could do. When left-handed batter Travis Head posted 172 runs across the fifth Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January — earning Player of the Match honours and helping Australia seal a 4-1 series victory — fans using the app received instant context placing that innings within his career record.
Todd Greenberg, Chief Executive Officer of Cricket Australia, noted the effect in a Microsoft corporate feature: “The recent series where England were here in Australia had a couple of key moments where I saw the insights come to life in real-time. And you can see the engagement through the analytics and the tracking that when something is delivered in the right time frame, in the right format, into the right hands, it has a huge effect.”
Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, shared a promotional video on X featuring the Cricket Australia Live app and its AI capabilities during a recent visit to Sydney, adding in his post: “Really fun to try this app while in Sydney this week, which uses our tools to help fans deep dive into cricket matches, players, and history.”
Really fun to try this app while in Sydney this week, which uses our tools to help fans deep dive into cricket matches, players, and history. pic.twitter.com/D1wgpu0ZIA
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) April 26, 2026
The technical architecture behind real-time delivery
Microsoft Azure serves as the cloud foundation underpinning the entire Cricket Australia digital ecosystem. Azure Cosmos DB powers both the Cricket Australia Live app and PlayCricket — the community platform that hosts scores for up to 7,000 club matches every weekend — providing a data layer capable of updating at the pace that live sport demands.
Greenberg made clear that the performance bar is unforgiving, saying in the Microsoft corporate feature: “All live sport has one thing in common. There are no pauses. It’s not like reality television. So, the experience has to be fast, reliable and consistent, especially when it’s under peak demand and when you have millions of people enjoying it at the same time.”
Balamurugan, speaking in a promotional video shared by Microsoft and Cricket Australia, said: “Ease of use and accuracy to check the players’ stats, to check the match stats was non-negotiable for us and Azure OpenAI just hit the mark. Millions of data points that sits in our Azure Cosmos DB are being served to our fans in subseconds.”
He added in the same video: “The frequency on which they use the app has increased by 30% from the past season to the current season.”
Partnership framed as a shared delivery model
Greenberg positioned the collaboration with Microsoft and its technical partners as a model for solving complex fan-facing problems, saying in the Microsoft corporate feature: “What we’re talking about is a really good example of solving a fan-facing problem with deep technical capability and a shared vision on delivery. Microsoft brought world-class cloud and AI foundations. Without them, we would not have been able to get as far as we have. And our partners have helped accelerate the build, the integration and, importantly, operational readiness.”
Kieran McMillan, Head of Customer Experience at Cricket Australia, said in an official press release: “The latest evolution of the Cricket Australia Live App reflects our commitment to delivering world-class experiences for our fans. By combining real-time AI insights with new interactivity for follow-up questions and access to official scorecards dating back to 1886, we are offering a unique level of engagement and personalisation in sports technology. This combination of history and technology sets a new benchmark for how fans connect with the game.”
Mike Morgan, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Insight APAC, said in an official press release:
“Technology is fundamentally changing the way we engage with the world around us, and sport is no exception. As an AI-first leading Solutions Integrator, Insight is proud to power the AI Insights feature within the Cricket Australia Live App, ushering in a new era of fan engagement. By uniting advanced artificial intelligence, cloud innovation, and a passion for sport, we are helping Cricket Australia deliver a richer, more personalised, and truly interactive experience for every fan.”
Sarah Carney, Technology Officer at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, said in an official press release: “Cricket Australia continues to show what’s possible when a sporting code leans all the way into AI. This next evolution of AI Insights doesn’t just enhance the fan experience, it reimagines it. By combining real-time, analyst-grade insights with more than a century of rich cricket history, they’re setting a new global benchmark for how technology can deepen our connection to the game, enhancing the experience for existing fans and creating a new generation of fans.”
Fan engagement across every level of the game
The app is designed to serve both lifelong supporters and complete newcomers to the sport — a challenge Greenberg acknowledged candidly in the Microsoft corporate feature: “I mean, we play a crazy sport that goes over five days and sometimes at the end of the five days, you still don’t get a result. We can’t expect people to be tuned in at every moment, but what we can do is we can hyper-personalize the way they would like to engage with the sport during the contest.”
At the grassroots level, supporters of the Seddon Cricket Club in Melbourne — a community club that has operated since the 1920s — offered a direct measure of the feature’s value. Cassie Gray, a club supporter and cricket fan, said in a promotional video shared by Microsoft and Cricket Australia: “I like that I can switch between profiles. So most of the time I’m a newbie. Sometimes I’ll switch to stats guru. I like to deep dive, especially on great players, what their stats are, what they’re known for.”
Gray also spoke in a Microsoft corporate feature about what the historical dimension of the feature means to her as a fan: “It’s definitely made it more interesting to follow along and learn more about the players. You could follow a player, you could see what they’re known for, as well as figure out what’s their next step or what do they need to get an amazing moment next.”
She added: “Cricket is a game of history. It’s been around for a really long time, and the players influence other players, and countries influence other countries. With the insights, it gives me an understanding of not just what’s happening today, but what’s led up to that in the game itself.”
Personalisation and the next phase of the product
The next development phase will allow users to select from distinct personas — newcomer, history buff, or stats guru — receiving insights calibrated specifically to their level of engagement with the sport.
Balamurugan outlined the longer-term vision in the Microsoft corporate feature: “We want to understand every fan and cater to how they want to be served by the app. We have moved from scores to storytelling, but we want to move from storytelling to fans setting up the narrative themselves. Fans should hear the story how they want to hear it. That is one of our lodestars.”
Greenberg, reflecting on what the platform could mean for the sport’s next generation of supporters, said in the Microsoft corporate feature: “The thing we’ll never know until much later on is the impact that we’re having on young kids falling in love and choosing cricket as their preferred sport. And if we help them love it, what we can create for a fan on their journey between the ages of 8 and 80 is astronomical for a sport like cricket. And so, we’re very mindful of ensuring kids get the opportunity to engage in cricket so we can form lifelong partnerships.”
Greenberg also noted in a promotional video shared by Microsoft and Cricket Australia: “AI Insights gives us the ability to supercharge someone’s knowledge of the game, make them feel part of a community and part of the sport.”
With interest already arriving from other sports organisations globally about how the feature was built and what it has delivered, Cricket Australia’s AI Insights platform is rapidly being positioned as a reference point for how professional sport can use artificial intelligence to deepen its relationship with fans at every level of the game.
