Does data work if you use AI?

Hey,

I had a call last week with someone about joining the Recruitment Room.

He's getting paid, inside a first division club, working on scouting and recruitment for the first team. He's building his own scouting application.

At the end of it, he asked me a question.

He writes his code with AI. And he wanted to know whether that counts against him.

And this is a question I hear a lot.

If coding has become easy, does it still count for anything?

So let me answer it properly.

Of course it counts.

The work is the work. Nobody inside a club is going to ask you who typed it.

I couldn't code at all when I started. I'd never heard of Tableau. The first things I built took me months, and I thought the months were the qualification.

Plenty of models that took six months to build still weren't any good.

Mine included.

But I want to be specific about what does matter, because most people have the order backwards.

Being able to read code helps.

Opening what you've built, finding the section that does the thing, following what it's doing. That's worth having.

Understanding it properly is better again.

And honestly, even that is further down the list than people think.

Because none of it is what you get hired for.

You get hired for insight.

For taking an output and knowing what it actually means. Which player it points at, and why that matters to this club, in this window, with this budget.

You get hired for communication.

For taking something complicated and making it usable by someone who has ninety seconds and a decision to make. A sporting director doesn't want your method. He wants your recommendation, and a reason to believe it.

And you get hired for trust.

Trust is the slow one. It's built when your recommendations turn out to be right often enough, and when the ones that don't were honest about their own risk in the first place.

Insight, communication, trust.

That's the job.

AI will write the code. It will not tell you which of the forty players on your list is the one to sign, and it will not sit in front of a head of recruitment and be believed.

So no, it isn't a weakness.

Nobody is going to ask you who wrote the code.

They are going to ask you what you think, and whether they can act on it.

Answer that well enough and the other question never comes up.

Liam