I would like to convey the opportunities that AI offers to study animal behavior. I will spend a few minutes giving an intuition of how AI works and then explain how we have used it in the lab to study collective animal behavior. One clear opportunity AI offers is to extract richer information from our experiments, that I will illustrate mainly with a tracking system. Less obvious is perhaps how to use AI to understand animal behavior. I will show how we used it to find a model of collective behavior that is both accurate and transparent. I believe the AI modelling is quite close to what a biologist expects from a model: a quantitative description that does not oversimplify too much the underlying Biology.