How is AI going to change how sports highlights are made?

Yes. AI is very likely to change how sports highlights are made, and in some settings it already is.

The main change is that AI can help with the first pass: identifying likely key moments, clipping plays, tagging athletes or events, adding basic graphics or captions, and formatting clips for different platforms. When those tools work well, they can make highlight production faster and cheaper, especially for schools, clubs, smaller leagues, and social media teams that do not have large editing staffs.

AI also makes it easier to create different versions of the same game footage: short social clips, player-specific reels, coaching review clips, recruiting-style videos, or longer recap packages.

But AI will not automatically make a good highlight reel. Human judgment still matters for choosing the right story, avoiding misleading edits, checking context, and making sure the footage represents what actually happened. That is especially important for recruiting or scouting videos, where overly selective or heavily polished clips may be less useful than clear, honest game context.

So the likely future is hybrid: AI helps find and assemble the raw highlights quickly, while people decide what is meaningful, accurate, and worth publishing.