our next panel is being moderated by Scott Rosner Professor Scott Rosner he's a professor of professional practice in the sports management program uh at Columbia of SP SPS uh I don't think there are too many people at Colombia outside of the business school or maybe even inside the business school who know more about the business of sport more than Scott so Scott Scot I appreciate that um and so I'll welcome the uh the the panelists up to the stage um and we'll kind of go one by one we we were going to prepare and I was thinking about walk up music uh for everybody uh but decided ultimately not to uh and so as we I'll just bring everyone up so uh am Sharma Brett of aradel Christina Chase um and FL Ortiz uh if you could please uh come on up and we we'll get started all rightone all right so we are in effect the anchor leg uh today and so want to do a very quick introduction uh of everybody see their bios really quickly out there uh am Sharma is the CTO of dream Sports um and that and his bio was just drop the mic moment you go a little bit deeper uh and uh also previous experience at Netflix Yahoo um NBA uh from UMass Dartmouth or Ambassador I'm s computer science from um dmouth sorry uh additional degree from from Santa claraa uh undergraduate from University of Mumbai uh and so welcome uh brettel um is uh executive director Dr BR bar it's executive director of UNLV International gaming Institute associate professor uh in unlv's uh incredibly well regarded H College of hospitality uh and an affiliate position at the University of Sydney science brain and mind Center in the school of site um does a lot of work around academically around video games um Esports and gambling sports betting uh operations technology responsible gambling uh and community relations by the way I have friends who can use your help in probably all of those areas uh um so uh and and sits on numerous boards um and has done some really phenomenal work uh undergraduate from Brown University and Ms and PhD from unlb uh Christina Chase is managing director and co-founder of the MIT Sports lab uh where she works with professional teams Global Brands uh Elite Sports organizations to tackle key questions at the intersection of data Sport and Engineering uh has appointments uh in the the School of Engineering at MIT where she teaches Sports technology and Innovation and Entrepreneurship uh and was the first e entrepreneur and residence uh at MIT where she's helped hundreds of Founders go from concept to company uh Tech Stars ventor uh South by Southwest uh accelerator judge um and an Advisory Board uh former cyclist um has trained at the US Olympic Training Center in the springs uh color springs uh taught dville skiing generally a badass U it's probably the best way to to explain what what Christine actually does uh Christine actually does for for a living um and then Ortiz uh is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rucker University um but I think you know what what I think the general population would think that what your uh side hustle is in a way uh is much for uh is the AI team lead for baseball operations for uh the New York Yankees expertise so right like oh okay and so expertise in lies in sensing systems interaction and M multimodal learning uh within heterogeneous densely sensed environments which are a lot of really big words for someone who teaches sports management right um so um but uh and has a phenomenal background um I look forward to the conversation of all but Dr or earned his Ms and PhD uh in computer science from Berkeley uh and uh his BS in computer science and engineering from MIT um so uh welcome to everyone and uh uh like I said my name and like I was introduced so Nic my name is Scott Rouser I lead the sports management program uh which is over in the School of Professional studies uh Ms degree granting program um and uh I've been here for six years prior to this I was at the warten school for 15 plus years uh help leave the research and create and leave the research center there um as well so uh excited for this conversation I'm admittedly uh a AI neoy um you know and so in a lot of ways um you know it it represents what the sports industry as a whole and people on the practitioner side of the industry um are involved in so it's actually really helpful to have these conversations um as we kind of try to bridge the gaps and and and as AI becomes more infused in the day-to-day so with all of that said that Preamble uh I mean I'll start with you so let's talk about dream sports right and how is dream Sports leveraging AI to enhance user experience and engagement in the fantasy sports sure I'll take some time actually before I talk about anything else I wanted to thank everyone for being here and like being kind of the host dream Sports we this name throughout the day uh I'll take the next few minutes just to explain who we are what we trying to actually do here and um but very proud to be associated with colia Columbia's um you know search abilities access to pity year for us our industry experience and the kind of investment that actually want to make in the sports Ty ecosystem I think we can really solve a lot of fan problems there today right in sports ecosystem and I think earlier in one of the panels today I heard someone say that the amount of research in acemia in the sports is not enough right maybe some of the larger teams of the world got lots of money are like doing a much better job but that's where we without our te Sports foundation and among other things and these collaborations we want to do a lot more um so who who are we right so dream Sports our vision our vision is like make Sports better simple so we identify um in the sports domain what are the problems that we can solve for fans and we actually go ahead and our Flagship product is J which is a fantasy sports platform it's alone on its own it has 220 million users today and around 20 to 30 million of them actually play in the largest like IPL which is the largest CET tournament um in India we also have fan Cod which is a content and merchandise platform where users can watch tier two tier three content which is probably not as popular for the masses and then you have merchandise where we can it's not in India it's um some of the things that I talk about today have been Nuance because we serve the Indian market primity so sports merchandise is a lot more mature here for example in the States but back in India that's not the case you look get an authentic Sports Jersey of a player that you want is not that easy so fan Cod provides a sports um you know merchandise platform that you can go and buy the jerseys customize it to yours Etc then we also have an In-House Gaming studio called Dre game studio so that's what we're saying is so even today cricket being one of the very popular games there's no one AAA quality um game mobile game for Cricket anywhere there are some of them are the quality if you compare it to the of of the it's not there right so we want to create something like that um what about sports travel a lot of people want to go around the globe people follow Sports globally these days how do we actually provide them the opportunity to actually identify the games that they want to go give them behind the scenes experience so dream set go is a travel arm that actually does that these are the various examples and then the foundation that I spoke about so that's who we are um when it comes to AI I think our journey actually has been like started a few years ago when we historically if I look at it in two buckets historically we've invested a lot in machine learning um so for example some use cases would be demand forecasting so an interesting thing about fantasy sports platform is a lot of users come to your system in a very short uh interval of time so you know for example our Peak concurrency is 15 million users are on the plat at the same time and they're not there just to consume content they're there to actually make you know technical transactions so they're there to create their teams or edit their teams they're there to add money to their wallet they're there to join different contests that exist on a platform a contest joint right on a platform can go as high as 30,000 contest joints per say so you know so we need to be prepared to handle such volumes so we need to prale our system so what is going to we have to predict the user Behavior and the expected users on the platform and have all our system because in real time I don't have enough time because of the spiky nature of the platform I don't have time to scale up my cloudform so I have to pre pre scale my platforms so that's what our demand forecasting actually comes in um it's a again app so then we have to make sure that there's no the Integrity of the platform is maintained so there's a lot of work that we do to make sure that there are machine learning algorithms that identify any kind of collusion between Pairs any violation or terms of service so heav invest in that um personalization obviously is key I all good apps of the world I think end to end I talk more about maybe lat than end user journe personalization matches the contest that they join the rewards for them the payments instruments that they use so we personalize those and uh so that's historically and all these and what makes it a lot more complex is the scale at which we operate as 15 million confident users all of these use Cas will become a lot more complex um we've also been investing heavily in caal infuencing over the last one year uh you coming from like the companies in the industry I can tell you that making decisions is very is very difficult I mean you may think that today we have so much data analytics capabilities so much data about our users but even today we sit in the Board Room or sit in conference room and still struggle to make decisions um so that's where like things like a comes into the play so it's like directionally we relying on a lot the understanding the relationship between various metrics and variables to try to figure out what to prioritize because just like everyone else we also believe we have very limited people I think mostos will tell you they don't have enough engineers and also like them so I have to prioritize what to do so that's where these decision making capabilities come into picture forward looking we very excited about J gen so we've done some prototypes two tracks there one is the some prototypes to solve user problems they help them create their teams using uh you know by looking at all the information that's available in the in the public sphere and then bring it all together for a particular user and the pro side also we trying to do a lot of things hack inside not just focus on technology but all functions okay marketing HR to bring so I'm try to bring everyone up to speed with what's the capability what's the possibilities and you know how make them independent so they're actually not relying on the teams and Engineers but they're on their own using these platforms so yeah a lot of work happen yeah that's AES and if you had followed if you play fantasy football for the NFL uh you'll notice as you use the ESPN platform that they've started to incorporate something similar uh with Watson AI stuff and uh particularly uh Watson X stuff and uh really interesting right I mean if you comments on you know everything from is this the correct trade to make uh and feedback that you'll receive on any trades they make or proposed trades um how good or bad your draft was uh in a particular uh in any particular year uh it'll make game predictions obviously for uh for each of the athletes individual performance so it's basically um the the dream 11 appone yeah it's fascinating by the way they think very highly of Scott's top so far in the 2024 uh fantasy football season just so you know um so uh BR um so you do have done some some fascinating work and really cool research how do you see AI in data analytics shaping the future of sports betting and gaming uh particularly in terms of responsible gambling practices just like we' heard just like we've heard all day long uh no okay it has changed every single f asset of sports betting Eng gaming And to clarify because I'm use a whole bunch of different terms and I think the different people on this panel will use a whole bunch of different terms um the very generic definition of gambling is risking something of value on an outcome that's uncertain we talk about legal gambling the legal definition of gambling that things that you're risking in the prize you might win at the end that's something of uh money or money's worth so when we talk about gaming that might something that theoretically looks like gambling but when we think about it under the law it might be a better fit underneath the definition of gaming so I want to make sure when I talk about betting and gaming we're clear all of this is in essence Gaines of Uncertain outcomes it's just a matter of what the use of that game what goes into that game what are you risking and what might you get out of it those are some of those other elements as well I'll also talk about skill I think a little bit later because that I think is a very interesting future use case of some of this I but collectively within this the area of betting and gaming again just about every single facet of this has some sort of impact from data science and and in particular AI so I'm only going to talk about a few briefly here we can delve into others as the subjects come up but I'm going to start with of course the subject that's on the screen behind me which is fan engagement one of the most important things to recognize about betting and gaming is just how much it has an impact as a whole on fan engagement one of the best examples of this is to go all the way back now I used to say the other year now it's nine years ago to 2015 when we first started seeing the true explosion of daily fantasy sports we had had especially in North America fantasy sports for a very long time and we saw just how much it really got people engaged with new teams with new leagues and how that impact really helped Foster new interest in these games in these teams in these Leagues with daily fantasy sport we saw at an even more granular level level because as you start forming your teams and you pull players from various different parts of the league onto your particular team for that particular game people stay longer you're engaged through more of the game I brought this up with some ESPN folks the other day and one of them interrupted me and raised their hand and they said we were so happy in the fall of 2015 again lar part because of how this game this game of uncertainty allowed players to stay involved because it no longer matters if the game is a blowout what it matters is individual performances even within a team setting so one of the ways that we're seeing AI show up now in this fan engagement setting in betting and gaming is particularly in the area of personalization I know you wanted to get into that a little bit later so I'll be broad on this now which is this concept of taking the ability to place Wagers whether that's again betting or da buying tickets versus buying a betting ticket and providing the ability to cater that to each individual Choice some of the lightning talks that we saw earlier looked at this what contest do you want to promote to individuals because it might be a better fit to what that individual's interests are we see this in areas of things like marketing tactics we see it in terms of providing parlay bets that br in multiple different areas of interest for individuals you see it in bonusing are there areas that might be more of an incentive to place a wer versus others usually people like free money this is not a phrase that you'll see permitted by too many regulatory agencies but it's used all the time nonetheless uh which makes this a particularly key area for use of analytics and the capacity to again CER to individual interests another major of this is in the Integrity of the game we look for anomalies not just in game play but also in suspicious betting patterns sometimes they're very obvious so if you are for example a gambling operator and you see a ton of money com in on an amateur football game in Romania real example um it's probably not going to be a particularly clean game there's probably fraudulent activity there and that's something that can very easily trigger uh activity something that gets a little bit more nuanced might be something like example Christine I were talking about earlier which is tennis tennis went through a major Scandal about eight years ago nine years ago and they had to completely revamp what these uh organizations looked like what did their competitive scene look like because there was such a big betting related Scandal so something that might be a little bit easier to tweak would be something like double false double FSE is a major area of fraudulent activity in tennis and these can much more accurately be detected by Ani now than by individual activity some of these other areas in terms of kind of you know moving more into this consumer protection and game protection space include areas like compliance uh beding and gaming are two areas that are extremely Reliant for their framework on the regulations that create the framework in which they exist and we're going to pause for a moment and say offshore and illegal activity different different story but anything that fits within legalized Frameworks has to fit within that legalized framework um if I were to say for example I'll turn to all of you what is your most valuable asset as users the most valuable asset to a betting operator is their license because without the license they have no users right so so it's extremely important that you maintain that in place so Ai and it's it's still a bit rudimentary but it's with anything we do it's getting refine every single day uh is used in compliance settings as well are you doing something that might be pushing you out of compliance in certain parts of the world betting is regulated very very highly and in North America it's done at the state and Canada provincial level which means that if you operate in the United States and more than one state you have more than one legal and Regulatory framework that you have to manage so AI is used not just in terms of tracking compliance but also ensuring that you fit within all of these different compliance Frameworks and then I'll move into the last element of this here the number one priority for most of these compliance Frameworks is consumer protection so that includes most of what I already said but it also includes the very very important area of what you somewhat generically call responsible gambling responsible gambling is the concept of preventing harm we talk about problem gambling that comes up quite a bit that is the that's the moment where you're in har already where you're doing you need to seek help you need to be able to access treatment where it's available um so more generically one of the not more generically but but on the prevention side then one of the major areas that AI has been a major contributor and was one of the most or really is one of the first areas that we saw AI applied in the betting and game space is in uh behavioral tracking behavioral activity for anomalies that might be driving toward harmful activity for individuals and that is uh it's incredibly difficult to achieve it's still sort of considered the whole Grail we have come a long way since the beginning but even within that to speak to something that Natalie said earlier right it's the humans and the loop concept the hardest part of tracking human behavior for potentially you know activity that might be driving you toward problematic play that's actually the somewhat easy part the hard part is then communicating that how do you actually tell somebody you have a problem because if you do that there's usually you know a few different outcomes that can happen the first one is screw you that's the most common response to you think that you might be going for the problematic play but you also want to make sure that you time this correctly because if you intercept somebody at the wrong moment if they're not actually edging toward harmful or problematic play you may be driving away a customer and if they are but they're not ready to seek help you might actually push their help seeking further down the line and so that's one of the major areas where uh data analytics has become incredibly important is because it really helps with that timing element and it also helps test out messaging around the communications element of that yeah I mean it's almost like without going too deep into it this point will see to send a note like to your mom right um kind of thing that that you know you're headed down a bad path and to get the kind of you know response that you're hoping to get but it's not there yet right um Christina you all are doing really really cool work um at MIT Sports lab what emerging Technologies coming out of the work that you're doing at the lab do you think will have the biggest impact on fan engagement in the next five to 10 years yeah that's a great question so I'm sure we all heard about um the immersive external um experience that the future fans G to have and we've got a bun a number of sports teams concerned that it's going to be so good that folks aren't going to want to go to Live Events um I disagree I think it's really hard to emulate the experience of all of those humans being excited at the same time um the roller coaster of emotions um that said I think one of the things to think about with say engagement really comes back to what we've been all been talking about is that personalization and it's actually we talk about it as Big Data it is awkwardly medium siiz data so what does that mean it means you've got a few areas that you got nice high resolution and you got a 70 to 60 to 70% of it that has to be thrown in because of questionable Integrity um uh unsure um unclear uh how it was measured also a lot of inconsistencies of that and this is where on the fan site you would think that pro basketball teams Pro um Pro uh baseball teams all the resorts know who their fan base is you'd be shocked they don't know who's in the sa right it's it's the number is like 40% and that's good like that's a bigger Improvement that's exactly and so well in marketing efforts we capture all that right well does an open rate actually help you better understand what the best personalized message is for someone who's 15 25 45 maybe my 6 demographic where so I think better understanding what we're continuing to here um how do we better understand our our future fan and how do we understand our up and cominging fan who will then convert to season tiic the only reason I'm stepping back from the technology pieces if we put the human in the loop if I can't afford to go to a Warriors game can I afford to buy a VR headset and pay for the content I probably because the content is expensive to produce for that experience to be better in my living room and then do I have enough people who are also going to be in that with me so I think if I was to say I almost think we've got an opportunity to sports has an opportunity to step back and just say can we just better understand what the lowy fruit is and if I was to look actually in gaming they've done a really good job capturing being sticky on a platform now how do we better understand what the sequence of events are that are leading to a higher engagement reason I mentioned that is this goes back to what can we do in stadium what does that look like and can we better understand who those folks are during the time so I think we're going to actually see more technology going to the smart Stadium smart venu so that they can better understand who's in there when and I understand if my Saturday afternoon or evening games are we driving families are we driving Bachelor parties what those are and then can we customize it in inating experience and so um you know baseball has very uh Rich season so also those tradeoffs do I trade revenue for butts and seats essentially because I want that energy there and so I think we're going to continue see that and I think finally if I was to say where where did we see these future Technologies you have to have an infrastructure a a fairly technical groups who can also just maintain it right so the easy part is the buy the hard part is everything all the infrastructure own that goes with calibration um prop betting I think is going to be a big one in stadium how many of you had a reliable Wi-Fi experience in stadium right and these profs have to right so I think we're going to see that but we're also gonna it's gonna have to be balanced with can my user base financially it does it make the broadcasters half like those deals that's where Technologies are are being used first um and can I better understand is it infrastructure bottleneck or C bottleneck or am I just completely missing how my 14-year-olds who are going to be my future fand Bas are consuming sport today so I you give you a lot yeah sure it's VR AR is g to come first which is and I have a in a jersey and have unique insights that are coming up in stadium but I also think we have to keep a a mind toward just because I have a drone is me flying it through the stadium going to actually help or hurt what the experiences reason I mentioned this I was it uh so dfb who uh is the German Bali they did one of those uh asual uh I was going to say a real time experimentation that they're like okay we're going to show you how incredible drone be in stadium they had us all blocked off for safety so we couldn't move around this the stadium at all now imagine doing that in any type of Stadium environment where we're already running into flow challenges so I think that we're going to see it more on theit from those owners who are trying to understand who they are and then if we can better understand who they are then we can actually use the Technologies to optimize the engagement yeah and and to give everyone some perspective here because most folks in this room are making the Assumption have some pretty significant Tech chops right um and that is not necessarily what goes on with professional sports teams right and so to give you an example um about six years ago I did a Consulting project with a major league baseball team that owns owns its own stadium that had an IT department of three That's Not Unusual let that sink in for a second of three and one was directly responsible for the president of the team's it he was his own personal help desk right so it's really the other two for everybody else so then think about how much you're really going to be able to do from a tech perspective with an IT department of R right so speaking of baseball teams um we'll turn to Jorge um Jorge we're asking to divulge State Secrets here um can you share insights on how the New York Yankees are using AI to improve um onfield performance and to the extent that you're engaged in it and so with respect of play performance to the extent that you're engaged with at Fan Experience um so I I sort of wear a dual hat as a faculty and being involved with the Yankees at a at a high level I think with with the Yan and just like any other sport when you're trying to assess player performance you want to make you want to make use of the you know the big part of the data P which is really video and and there's a ton of video that's being collected by the Yankees and every other uh you know MLB sports team and so the the the key the the main sort of job that that I've had since I've been there has been trying to mine that data to provide more insights about player performance um and of course you know within the quantitative team that's that's really the the perspective um there is this interesting thing as an academic to see that you know historically it's had this strongly Quant background to it and and and we're moving into this future of way more data than any of the Beijing models can handle and frankly for which the infrastructure is not ready for it um and so slowly our our team has been growing on that front we've been we've been really focusing on that and I think you know I think another another challenge being part of the the sort of AI and computer vision team there and leading that team is is you know you don't always see the impact right away you know where it's you certainly extract more um you know new data sources from which new statistics dve than everything else and it's somewhere down the line getting getting baked into someone's decision which at the end of the day could either get folded into a decision or dropped on the floor CR right and I think that's true in any situation where you have this much data and you're trying to synthesize it and figure out who that's um in terms of fan engagement it's a completely orthogonal process to what we do um you don't think I mean at least I haven't I haven't seen us really you know prioritize that in any way it hasn't really come up in conversation it's mostly about understanding the you know frankly the player an asset and what are they capable of I think there are a lot of really interesting technical questions because these are like you know athletes represent the tale of the distribution in terms of human capabilities and so really trying to pin that down having a high level of accuracy and precision we often have questions I I bring this up all the time like what's our ground truth right it's it's not very clear um but but we but we do you know like like like I said a lot of other sports teams use the standard Technologies use the data feeds that we get from MLB um you know I I think there is a lot of opportunities you know if we were to somehow uh provide maybe aggregate statistics of some kind to to fans I think they would really appreciate that I think there I think in terms of you know we we've been i' I've hinted at causality being something we should look into um and maybe someone in the department is working on it but it hasn't been an explicit point of discuss well you so you bring up an interesting qu really kind of chungles around May CA is something we should look at but you're taking and and it is kind of the modern take on the the old school vers new school um conversation that is largely pass us in a lot of the kind of more traditional ways but it's it's still there right right um but we think about then the storytelling for you so what we're really focused on here so you have so you generated some Pro of really interesting insights right um on particular players and performance and and things of that nature but then Translating that for the coach for the manager for the athlete is an entirely different story right um and if you talk a little bit about the storytelling process talk about humans in Loop right so how do you translate that I mean there's like the first level of translation is literally going from I'm a computer scientists I'm I'm talking to statisticians and and so they think of the world as priors and hierarchical modeling where like everything is known or at least you have like a very explicit assumption and I say no no we're we're like orders of magnitude past that in terms of the amounts of data that we now have and so yes we absolutely need those because those those give you insight to decision making but if you want to get it right if you will or or maybe extract insights that there's no beijan model for which you're going to express a priority and learn something from you really have to rely on these data sources that you have in build data driven models and that's been an ongoing conversation the entire time I've been there yeah I mean I remember going back when some of my former colleagues have really been instrumental in in UCR and range Factor kind of these new defensive metrics that were that are now you know far more common um and the conversation was brought the research had shown that D Jeter at that stage of his career was no longer a really good defensive shortstop and they presented the material to Jeter um and Jeter's response publicly was computer must be broke man right um so get getting the the athlete to understand that and then and then getting the athlete to again having the actionable insights right is really different so concern about information overload about impact of the athletes confidence uh Factor things of that nature uh particularly challenging yeah and you know it's I think and there's new like llms are huge right they're every um even just having an llm to serve as a way of potentially translating this information into like the tidbits of like the main takeaways of the results of the analysis I think is something that's not utilize that we could to be to be fair to the Yankees though I am a huge Yankee fan and I've been with them for a long time so while I'm very critical because I'm very critical um yeah so um you know they they have been moving in that direction and there has been more interest it feels like there's a momentum growing and slowly through these conversations both within the department and from the Department to the coaching staff and the players and frankly the rest of the organization it's slowly trickling in but it's really a culture change oh for sure can you give an example of and it could be generic I you don't need to tell us who the athlete is right uh but can you give us an example of something where you generated some insights through your use of AI that ultimately has been been implemented um bottom clote that's a hard one yeah I I I have hard time actually pointing to an example of something that we've discovered because it's so silent yeah and and it's interesting that that's not uncommon for that to be refra it's like oh the but they're not really doing it right um it's really not I mean it's it's funny early on early on so think about six seven years ago we'll time it uh when the Miami Heat had both Shane Bader uh who's very data driven statistically oriented player um and Lebron James playing for them and one of the data points that came out was hey LeBron every time this you're guard this player who you're guarding in the upcoming game um 81% of the time I think was the number that this player gets the ball in a one-on-one U on the left Baseline he go he drives left right and so he tells LeBron he tells LeBron this um and the first time the guy drove by him right okay um it was the 19% unraveled all trust absolutely have one shot that's it right but and so he said something to him because he got dumped on right and and everything so uh the next time like trust me the next time he get it he's going to go left and he did it again and the guy went left right and then he did it again went left again LeBron came with a block and a seal and they came to the bench at the next time out is like hey what else you got man right um and so having the success rate right starts to to impact things as well so the hum can I just pick you back um how many of you are working with pro sports or in sport awesome um how many times have you found a really unique insight and shared it with someone you didn't ask for it and it went somewhere that's amazing so because I think one of the big things that we find is scort is exceptionally exceptionally conservative you can explain away a loss if you've changed nothing but you change one thing you go for the three points and you don't do it I it does not matter what the statistics say you called it Incorrect and now you are in the media for the next week so and or you get fired right I mean it's these are exceptionally public conservative of Industries it might say industry but they're they're owned by usually family and so one has to also understand that you in fan engagement youve got more experimentation on the team side you have a lot less wiggle room for what that has to get to and usually it's when a team is not doing well it forces so we have an Al who assistant manager GM um the head of r& for that diamond they were not doing very well for we went in baseball news it and he said look it had to get to that point for it to feel comfortable for the organization to actually make some big changes and I think they're thinking about that as their fan base as well because they don't want to lose anything yeah I mean it's easier to fail Dum than fail smart right in in some ways right in in the traditional way of thinking about thinking about sports I wanted to add that when something is picked up it's I think it gets really sticky and and and speaking from a from a fan perspective you know obviously you're trying to optimize for the performance of your team and so you come up with strategies and it takes years for the coaching staff and everyone else to gain trust in those strategies and then they Implement them but they Implement them sometimes for instance in baseball to the extent where the game got more boring I mean I know that I I'm I'm gonna wear my professor hat and my fan hat from that but baseball was boring before they change started getting really boring when they didn't have the clock and they were shifting all the time it just wasn't fun I would watch my favorite 80s and 90s clips on YouTube because those games were much more dynamic they weren't shifting it wasn't really clear that uncertainty led to the excitement small shifts in the rules of the game completely changed the dynamic of the game qualitatively and it made the experience much more fun my son who's 10 years old didn't want he was not interested at all in baseball and now because of its Pace can sit and watch a few Innings of he's not quite watching a full game but he's getting there and I think it's in large part because of the pitch clock and the lack of the ship that got rid of the ship I want to ask that's I don't know soccer is not very popular but sometimes it can the opposite as right so in soccer what happen is now the V you know they do action in real time to get the offside decisions and soccer uh it's a game which 90 minutes of action you know fans are used to it and now with every decision with every goal all the players everyone is like every single goal is like checked every single penalty call is checked and they like look at the way the you know the one1 of the shoe may be in an offside position that AI is it looks on television with AI is confused end just making a judgment call oh you know what I don't know this one but this is outside but that KS skills it right sometimes you can use AI technology to actually in hands and make it better but it has a reverse impact on the the and the engagement absolutely what's it's really interesting to hear this first I love you said the uncertainty that's a bit more exciting of course it has but this is such a great point with soccer and a great point with uh with baseball in terms of the pace and said shock but what there's really interesting applications of this in terms of the data flow and what that means for what we can do for live sport I know you asked the question about live sport twice so I'm G address it now so we we see this a ton in betting and gaming spaces for things like prop betting Inplay betting is often used term for this props can Beil at any point um things like Inplay betting micro prop betting uh these are not unique they're not unique terms there's overlap between all of these These are low latency high frequency Nets these are things that can be done they can theoretically they're not yet but theoretically these can be automated these systems can be automated which eliminates for those of you who are unfamiliar with sports betting operations actually the terminology is quite similar to finance which Dean Chen mentioned earlier as an application for AI uh Trading desks is the common term for sports betting operators if you're unfamiliar uh which makes it a lot easier in many ways and harder for trading desks to maintain the ability to provide this on in the moment live betting opportunity or live engagement opportunity as we think about this through gaming and what's interesting about some of these data flow situations is for such a long long time soccer I I give a lot of talks in Europe so say we'll go with that but but with bookall this was for such a long time considered to be a continuous flow sport so when V was introduced it threw a massive wrench into trading desks because we had finally gotten to a point where you're starting to see a lot of really inding Automation and things had to change um we started to see it we kind of we think about sport transitions I don't know how you feel about hockey here these days we're still pretty keen on it in Las Vegas um but hockey again another one of those more flowing Sports whereas when you talk about things like basketball which was a great example from earlier when we talk about things like baseball we're talking about a lot of discreet instances that keep happening the flow of data is very different than it is or was in a game like football or football and and when we think about those capacity we have to change some of the ways that we engage we have to change some of the ways in which we offer some of these immediate engagement tools throughout the game itself so when baseball started getting to the more of a flow that also changed the way that we engage in real time and we're still somewhat figuring that out again I think such a great point about there being so much data and it's sort of funny that comes from the gaming side of things and hear people compliment for sticking this because in our field like oh God nobody ISS going to do it what what's happening we here why why aren't you putting more people right three people comment on on this sort of area um because this really is an area where fan engagement can us to amplify Big Time whether that's a beding product whether that's a gaming product even whether that's just an information piece of information that you can share with a fan this all becomes incredibly important in terms of how we're learning from the data we have how that data itself is changing yeah and it's interesting too I mean again you think about the fan experiencea which you talked about before um and The Fan Experience in baseball from an accelerated game so you think about the user experience in stadium so my first job in sports when I was a high school kid I was a vendor at veteran stadium in Philadelphia so I walk around and sell soda and ice cream right uh during the games great best high school job you could ever imagine right um know fan Behavior oh believe me um so but you would think about it so you think about faster games for a vendor uh oh right I mean that's problematic there's less time for you to sell you're going to take a cut uh in your it's it's commission based uh business so you're going to you're going to take a cut what they've found is fascinating right so so far the FMB actually has increased right fans are more engaged they're consuming more in a shorter period of time now in some areas alcohol that might be problematic of course right but when you think about the the overall engagement it's much higher even though you would think given that the time is shorter right that you be spending less money when you're at the ballmark so so fascinating kind of insights um that come from it and some surprising ones right for sure I wanted to SP one point I think because AI is so great in technology evolv so much and we probably talk about revolutionizing everything but there are not g steps that we can take to make things a lot better as so I had gone to the Super Bowl game last year and I I think they gave us something to wear right and which migrated and had lights and it's a very small application that's Run in real time with the music and that in the half time show it was a great experience right like the ability to go in and out of Stadium smoothly the crowd control that happens as to which Gates you get based on you know or a simple example of a p sentiment analysis after game which sections of the fans in the stadium had a good time which which are the ones where like the view was not good for example so behind the scenes there's a lot going on using AI in small small different ways in identifying that how can we make fans experience better which probably doesn't come up front in front of everyone because it's not like glamous any because we we completely think of that there how do we get like VR set for everyone $3,000 and give them that experience right but that's not only you can do a lot more with technology which is more affordable as well right not just the things yeah so like the Portland Travers right now um are a team that's really taking a lead on AI uh in the NBA on the business application side of it right so one of the things they're doing specifically is with respect to customer surveys um where they can now they use AI to flag problematic responses right from fans who had a bad experience at the game and can you know really then forward identify when it needs to be raised to a level of concern where it needs to be forwarded to someone in their customer service department to respond to that particular complaint now there's a lot of teams that do a lot of survey work and historically they haven't had the resources to even read the surveys to turn them into actionable insights right so I mean that's that's a pretty remarkable development now of course fan surveys are a little that's heavily impacted by whether or not the team won or loss uh when they're doing well so the beer is always colder and the hot dogs always are a little better um the game presentation by the team is always much higher um when the team has won versus when they lost even though it's the identical thing The Identical product of course but that's a really important Insight I think to take where where AI has been extremely helpful on that frun right can I offer up two extreme use cases please um every single pro sports team we've spoken to who's trying to optimize for the inating experience what do you think is the number one issue for their concern of the fan experiences when going to a game a match whatever any guesses I'm trying to feed our athletic director the answer here park you have now just optimized for the the frosty in middle of the Oreo cookie but how much is it bookended by the hassle to get there and then the hle is the bigest hey if you guys resolve that everyone will love you forever but this is a it it seems like you should be like a VR headset will not solve that um it's interesting so I would say for those um who may not be in the field don't hesitate to ask a lot of what you might think are dumb questions because we go in my me and my colleague go in we say please be patient with us we're gonna ask you a lot of dumb question this is how we found out parking is the biggest challenge right and now you've got likea fraudulent parking passes I don't know where I'm supposed to go I can't even get my right share card in the right place that's a big one but then if we kind of think about to where are the winds happening well if we look at these younger audience gaming is actually doing the best because they're providing small Snippets of content that are asking for some level of interaction and to point now my team's not just focus around own one team I might have six teams or essentially entire lineup that I'm now following I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity then to start to look at other fields like mobile games which are exceptionally good at keeping people on the platform and then it's free and then you start buying tokens right so I think there's opportunity Sports Media or these package deals start coming out and you start to think about what are their ways to feed this future fan in the way that they're currently consuming I ask my students all the time how many of you are paying for K what's anyone who raises their hand and said is it your parents yes they're watching Clips in Short and they're saying I watched the G that's the other thing the verbage itself is being applied to I'm trying to figure out what my future season ticket holder looks like but I have to work Way backwards and I can assume that the way I'm selling today is going to get me the same of result I think that's where I'm really interesting is personalized content in a small format and I think there could be really an interesting opportunity to take away the $80 monthly subscription fee that I'm not going to buy at as a college student likely and look at all of the free content and find ways to then maybe have that at a higher resolution a little bit more unique but then find small are ways to pay for it yeah and the the old of statistics on the games like like for they fantasy sports platform and if you like created for game and then you're watching on the mob phone and you see your scores your ranks move up and down it's just like a very different experience than just sitting on a television and just not like you know people need to be interactive so if you give them that experience on the mobile you can do so much more like the prediction given what's going to happen next um so some examples like how you seen these Sports and they're trying to do a field goal like what's the probability of hitting it or not it just keeps the engagement going throughout the game as well so that passive viewing and that's what fantasy sports kind Sol that passive of games nothing to do is like I don't think people that want they need a lot more engagement and that's why these these everyone from of the world everyone is investing in those apps right how do we make the apps to make a lot more engaging how do we create a connect with the user from our fans and understand them a lot and then use technology to actually sell them things get more imers into experiences Etc yeah I mean I remember having a conversation years in years ago with a senior executive from the NFL when Fantasy Football was really taking off and the phrase was very simple and straightforward and one I remember it's like this is like Mana from heaven from us for us right um and so the engagement level is just so much higher and then obviously with the with with Pasa uh you know being overturned and then you have the um you know the legalization of sports outside of Nevada um and across the the the 50 states um leading up to the states to do so um even more so right um because gambling is in many ways like fantasy sports on steroids right um if you think of it in in that context right so BR one of the things that we talked about though this is not all great right so we talked about microing and a lot of the issues um you know how quickly it needs to be done and everything else and some of the fraud issues and integrity issues that come with it but there's another side to the micro b um issues um in particular and that's the impact on player and player mental health um and sometimes physical health but really mental health um if you could talk a little bit about that um you know just to inform the audience of that I know that I did say if you primed me on this I talked about it for a while so we can put a pitch clock on so so in particular one of the areas that Scott and I had talked about earlier is player abuse but before I talk about that Scott you actually frame this question in a really ideal way because you generically talked about players and so here I'm going to talk about not just the players and the athletes but also the players those who are buying the tickets those who are placing the bets and in particular with micro betting I want to point out I just spent you know five minutes talking about how engaging this is how important it is how great it is to be able to have this live interactive engaging tool Well turns out Frankin perfectly Scott micro betting is also one of the highest risk uh bets that is possible for when it comes to predicting problematic part so you have both the highest engagement but it turns out that the highest engaged vs are also those who might be more prone to problems so that's something you always need to keep in mind when we talk about engagement there's a cap on how engaging you want to be especially when you're talking about incorporating any of risk product you can talk about that in terms of risk management that's the very common business phrase that might be used you can talk about it in terms of harm prevention that's the more public health or psychology phrase that might be used how you could talk about in terms of compliance that would be your law and Regulatory space same concept whatever you want to do when you engage any sort of tool that has risk involved with it is it's a balance you have to make sure that you're optimizing what you offer to everybody who plays in a healthy capacity also limiting the capacity for any sort of harm it's extremely difficult you will never get optimal because human kind is a risk-taking being that's part of the human in the loop P there uh but that's an incredibly important piece to keep in mind moving then to the player side athlete side of this player of use is one of the things that we've seen as this very big growth in in play betting has risen is player use somebody you know just betting on the outcome of the game we talked about right it's betting on individual uh moments within the game so let's say I bet on field goal doesn't matter which sport we'll just go with field goal as a whole and uh and it misses I go online and I say oh screw I'm gonna kill you next time I see you you lost me I've seen everywhere from $5 to $5,000 or more uh that's it uh you're you're dead next time I I conf find uh these are real these death threats are very real bullying as a whole is very real and this is something that's incredibly important to to think about because these are all both data generated types of activities the human peace of it of course or data is not telling people to write these things but there also are ways to use data to look at what might be happening to identify some of these threats before hopefully they even get to the ath themselves I'll also note this is not a solved problem if you're looking for something to work on maybe you're a student looking for a project that you want to use to apply for the next round of dream fellowships uh prevention of athlete abuse is an incredibly valuable thing that needs to be solved because it's incredibly harmful not just for the individual who's the victim of this bullying and abuse but also the bully themselves we need to find out who this person is we need to be able to punish them and we don't really have a good mechanism for that yet there are certain reporting structures in place you might complain to the compliance director underneath the Athletics director but even that that's not solving the problem that's identifying it after the fact so one of the major areas in which AI can help is um identifying and predicting where that kind of behavior might come from and again not a solved issue yet something to be done in the future so we're we actually don't have that much time left based on the the clock that that I'm looking at we've only got a few minutes so again feel free students now if you others to to chim in with questions um but with students present always curious and when I when I hear career advice kinds of pieces um so so first I I read a statement recently um that AI is not going to replace you right someone using AI will or hey what is your thought with respect to that specific comment true false absolutely um yes uh you know as llms do more and more these days and you know generative AI in general um they're not perfect obviously they're getting they're certainly getting a lot better but the human in the loop in that process is really really important um providing that feedback providing that level of judgment I think there's something very subtle two things that are very there one is that because they produce such good content both from a coding perspective from a writing perspective and everything else
2024-10-18 12:29