Hawthorn Builds a Shared Analytics Platform With Google Cloud, With AI Agents Next

Hawthorn Football Club has brought its performance data and coaching notes into one analytics platform built with Google Cloud and partner Intelia. Google says questions that previously took weeks can now be explored the same day. That is the delivered change: applications and AI agents that let staff talk directly to the data remain future plans.

Connecting the numbers to the coaching notes

The club’s starting problem was scattered information, not a shortage of it. Google says a single AFL match can generate more than one million data points. Hawthorn’s GPS tracking, Champion Data match statistics, medical logs and handwritten scouting notes sat in separate systems that could not communicate with one another.

Preparing that material for coaches and analysts required manual work. The collaboration with Intelia brought those sources together through Google Cloud BigQuery, the platform’s data foundation. It combines numerical performance records with qualitative coaching notes, rather than treating the numbers and staff observations as separate bodies of information.

Google describes the resulting collection as a single, verified source of information for the club.

A different way for coaches to ask questions

• Google Antigravity is intended to help the club rapidly build front-end applications—the screens and interfaces its team would use to view information.
• Gemini Enterprise would power conversational data agents, allowing staff to ask specific questions rather than search through spreadsheets or interpret complex dashboards.

Google’s stated ambition for the agents is to remove the technical barrier for line coaches and provide verified answers on the spot.

Dean Westaway, Hawthorn’s general manager of technology, data and analytics, expressed excitement about being able to converse with the club’s data and analyse its sources in new ways.

The initiative also includes plans to improve staff AI literacy through Google Cloud certifications. Fan engagement and the matchday experience are listed as subsequent areas of interest, extending the club’s ambitions beyond the analytics team without describing those uses as completed deployments.