#387 - Shripal Shah - Chief Digital Officer at Next League

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to another episode of for the Love of Sports. My name is Michael Rozeal. This is the show where we get to talk about sports, we get to talk about business, and we get to talk about everything in between. Wherever you're listening, however you're listening, you know what to do. Five star review on Spotify, like, and subscribe on YouTube over on Apple Podcasts, give me a nice review for me and my incredible guest today. I, uh, have Sripal Shah. He is the author of Leveling up with AI, A Strategic Guide to AI and Sports Marketing, author of the Art of Victory, AI and the New Frontier of Global Sports, and recently named Chief Digital officer over at NextLeague. Street Ball. How you doing, man?

Speaker B: I'm doing great. Thank you for having me, Michael.

Speaker A: Pleasure's all mine. Second time Sri Paul has been on the show. We had him back on about 10 months ago. A lot has happened in AI. A lot has happened in sports since then. So we're going to talk about some of it. But the first question Sri Paul, I have for everybody on the for the Love of Sports podcast is why do you love sports so much?

Speaker B: I love sports for the way it really can, like, bridge gaps, right? Like in political differences, cultural differences and things. It's just the one thing that can really be a uniter. And I always thought that was like sort of lip service, but as I've gotten older and really sort of seen it, you know, and now that, you know, my kids have gotten older, I really feel like that's one of the greatest things, right? It really is this great connector that when you leave the arena, you could be on polar opposites of whatever it is, right? Doesn't have to be politics. It could be any point of view and. But it can be a thing that could bring people really different points of view together. Or you could be really good. You could have a lot of same interests, be good friends. But sports could also be why you're right for that moment, you're rooting against each other. So it's this great dynamic, right, where people can be, uh, you know, rivals during the game, buddies after. They could be rivals outside the game, yet they're really, you know, they're bonded in that moment for rooting for that shared passion. So it's a really interesting dynamic that I really appreciate.

Speaker A: It is beautiful, man. Uh, I've said it on this show once or 100 times at this point. If I walk anywhere in the world and see someone in a Mets hat, I'm gonna walk up to that person and say something. I don't know what I'm gonna say to that person, depending on the country, but I will walk up and say something. And that's. That's why we love it, man. I mean, think about, you know, we're a, uh, couple days away here. We can change away from the Super Bowl. I'd say the United States kind of stops for a day for one football game, which is pretty wild. Right. 120 million people might tune in. That's about a little over a third of the entire country. There's really nothing else on that day except super bowl pregame and then the super bowl itself. Yeah, people are getting ready, cooking food, doing whatever they have to do. It's just. It's just wild. So. Yeah, no, it is absolutely incredible. So I do love that aspect.

Speaker B: I do, too. And I think, right, like, when World Cup's going on, I had our honey. We had our honeymoon in Greece when the World cup was going on, what, many years ago, and just watching again, everyone outside different countries and, like, the bonding, it just, like, it just stopped when the games were going on. You couldn't hear a pin drop. And, you know, cricket, when India. Pakistan play in India, it's that, uh. Right. It's when you have these moments, and, like, for us, it's the super bowl here, as, you know, growing up here. For us, it's a Super Bowl. But that's what I think is so, like, really interesting.

Speaker A: You know, it is beautiful, man. And you. You worked for the commanders, correct? Back in the day. They almost made it. They almost made it.

Speaker B: I know they almost made it. So I would. I spent nine years. I was the chief strategy officer there. Um, and, you know, really drove a lot of their innovation around emerging technologies at the time. And, you know, we were. Back then, they were one of the top teams in overall revenue, digital revenue, social media revenue. So it was a really innovative time. So I, you know, so to see the commanders now come so close to getting to the super bowl and again against the Eagles, it really just brought up a lot of those old memories when I used to travel with the team, be in the press box, right. And you'd have to. You'd serve you every breath. You're like, what. You know, in watching. Because, like. Right. Because it's your job as well. So, like, everything on the game would kind of determine how Monday is. So it had that emotion and watching the game, you know, when this year for the NFC championships, really brought that back because, you know, I had, uh, been working outside of sports while I was doing angel investing, consulting stuff. As we said, you know, a year ago, it wasn't the same. So now it's like kind of knowing that I'm going to kind of come back into sports full time. And, you know, it was just. It was just really interesting.

Speaker A: That's awesome, man. Yeah, I really wish Washington won that game, but unfortunately, here we are, uh, with the Eagles in another Super Bowl. So I know who I'm rooting for, but I guess that's just me, man. Um, but no, I want. So I do think it's really interesting. Right. Again, you came on the show about 10 months ago, last April. Uh, just about 10 months ago. And we talked about a lot of things revolving around AI and sports, how people can start to utilize it. You and I have had personal conversations over those last 10 months. Hey, how can I start to use it more for myself, for my family, for my job? And I've appreciated those conversations with you as well. What, what are some of the, like, the, the crazier things? I mean, there's a couple more recent things, but, like, can you give us like, a quick what's kind of happened over the last 10 months? Not really specifically from a, uh, what has AI been able to do, but more from like a, I guess, perspective of people not just accepting, but starting to be like, okay, this is clearly the future. Let's start to utilize this a little bit more. Where are some of the areas that you're starting to see that I think

Speaker B: you're seeing it, um, across a few different areas. Right. I think there is more of an acceptance around AI generated content than I think there was a year ago. And I think part of that is a lot of media companies have been very transparent on how they're evolving. I was, um, in November at the ESPN Edge conference, and they were debuting or speaking to.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: With their partners, Accenture and Microsoft and AWS and others. The things they were doing with AI around media and. Right. One of the things they're using now is generative AI to create dynamic video packages for articles that they may not have custom content for. And it's to drive more engagement because 60% of the traffic we're going to pages that had, uh, videos on them. And now for the other sites, they can now create these custom packages. And it just makes it for a more enriching experience. And it's not like AI is speaking to them. Right. It's allowing them the talent and the resources to then go do more. Right. And I think that we had talked about a year ago and now we're actually seeing it in the market. And I, I think now that you look at the search engines, a lot of the generative AI searches are built in like with Google and Gemini, right. So there's a lot more integration. Microsoft Copilot and the tools. So I think that's the other advent that we had sort of talked about of uh, a lot of our day to day tools are going to have some of these AI features in them. Um, and it should be used to help us do things faster. And I think that's starting to materialize. I think the quality of the output and the models has as we predicted, exponentially grown. Right. In terms of intelligence, reasoning complexities. But even from like an image and video creation, the level of images and videos that can now be AI uh generated are materially better than they were a year ago. And I think that is something that's really interesting. You know, I wrote an article about this when I was using like a service that was used in the retail world and I was able to create AI generated composite imagery based off of essence, just like a product shot of a Lamar Jackson jersey. And uh, we were able to create scenes of a family by Big Ben. If in, in the hypothetical scenario like the Ravens were playing in London, you know, a wedding in the Eiffel Tower where the groom's wearing, you know, a Lamar Jackson jersey. What if, you know, the Ravens Lamar were to sponsor a NASCAR race car. Different like families doing a, you know, a family of, full of Raven, uh, jerseys in front of like destinations within Baltimore. All AI generated, right? The people, the backdrops and it all. If anyone were to look at that article, you'd see that it looks very realistic, the text is readable. You don't have the distortion that people associate with the ChatGPT generated images. The caliber is really crisp and I think that's a great example of how fast things have changed. They went from cartoony imagery that people are using to real photorealistic content that you could basically get on your credit card and start using this. And if you're a designer, photo production potentially save hours. And you're talking about something that might be a few hundred dollars a month, right? So that the cost have gone down, the quality has gone up and now you're starting to see it across the board, integrate into search, integrate into your tools in content production. I think what you're also seeing and you know there was a little phenomenon going last couple of weeks, this thing called bord, a little Voice generated AI that sort of, you know, the claim is that the AI sort of spoke to someone, it's a voice AI and raised $8 million themselves, pitching themselves to VC. We can go into the spin versus PR versus the truth of that. But the point was like uh, if you were to interact with Bordy and it has like this Australian accent, it's really a Voice AI used to in essence connect people. It's acting as an ultimate networker. It's free to use. I spoke to Bordie just like I'm talking to you. It was a 20 minute conversation asking about my career, asking about my interests, asking about what motivates me back and forth. And you wouldn't, I would argue the majority of people who would talk to Bordy would just think they're talking to some Australian guy who just called them.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And I would argue it was a more pleasant conversation than I get solicited on my cell phone from vendors multiple times a day, um, for technology, for whatever. And the conversation, the crispness, the natural was better with the AI than it was with some of the cold calling reps that are calling me. And I think that is also what we're going to see in 2025. Because major retailers are looking at Voice AI to reduce their uh, call center cost. That is like a reality, not a theory where they could potentially reduce 60, 70% of their cost. With knowing all these retailers that are starting to run into like bankruptcy issues like Party City fault, that's a real benefit. But now you apply to sports. You know, I was talking with an ad, um, at uh, a John Wall street event at the College football Champion the morning of the college football championships. And we're talking about AI and I'd done a bunch of presentations the night before for a bunch of different ads and commissioners showing different use cases. But we're talking about like how like for a bowl game the ticket office gets inundated by single, uh, you know, single game tickets. But, or even for like someone with a season, right? Like if it's a university ad, how could you solve for that? With Voice AI, you could handle something that's just for the single game ticket holders. And then you could put your folks with your, your full season ticket holders and offer that prioritization without losing any of the uh, the service layers. And I think that is going to be the types of things that we'll start seeing in sports or we should because it could potentially save an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in either staffing cost or lost opportunity. Because you know, that single game customer could have a single game party suite and they may have a quick question or it's a guest to them. You don't know who you're turning off by making them wait for 20 minutes. And if you can make that experience better, it should hopefully allow you to service your customers in a better way. I mean, a lot's been going on this week. I think there was a major disruption in the AI space that sort of shook the stock market. So that, you know, so I think there's a lot of things going on. But the big thing is the models have gotten materially better. The level innovation, you know, every two, three months is like what would have been years in terms of iteration and improvement. And the cost to deliver that has also gone less better. They're better and they're cheaper. And I think that's the other thing is the computing cost to do this is actually getting. Has actually gone cheaper than it was a year ago. And I think that is also a great, is great for what can spur a lot of innovation. Knowing that a lot of sports organizations have very tight budgets, is that you can now take these things for amplification, automation, and really bring some innovation that can drive real cost savings that allow folks to reinvest that into other areas of their organization to hopefully create a better product.

Speaker A: I love it. Uh, that was a great, great, uh, recap, I guess, of kind, uh, of what's been going on. I always thought, going back to like one of your first points, I always thought people like making fun of AI because the images weren't great. It's like, well, it just started and it's like, what's Moore's Law? Like, the computing power doubles every 18 months. Like, I feel like it's every 18 days with this shit that it's like it is getting better and better significantly. So like I, I use ChatGPT to make funny images all the time. It's just a fun thing to do, right? I'm thinking about this. Let me do it. You know, if I'm watching a football game, I always do like this team's mascot versus this team's mascot and funny, hilarious images. Um, and m. Then I send them to my friends. It's gotten better from that standpoint, but also the answers, right? I've been using ChatGPT since you pretty much when you and I spoke the first time a little bit before then. It's probably about a year now. And just like the, the opportunity, the yes ands, the, the more ability, the Ability to be able to, as you said, just derive more content from it quicker is incredible. I also spoke to, spoke to Bordy. Great conversation, super nice guy. I think the Australian accent piece was like the best possible marketing outside of the, the PR spin that you're talking about. If it wasn't, if it was just some dude, it wouldn't have been the same thing. The fact that it was some Australian guy, like, I don't know, I just, like, it felt, I don't know, more real or as weird as that sounds, like it felt more realistic having that conversation. Um, but yeah, I, I also spoke to Bordy and I agree there was like some slight hesitation, slight pauses, but like, you could have just taken that as someone trying to think about their answer, which is literally what he was doing. Right. So it's, it's very interesting from that perspective.

Speaker B: I agree. No, I mean it. You know, and that shows like in four months, Bord is going to be potentially even better. And I think that's like the scale. And uh, you know, we talked about this a year ago. Like if you hire an intern on day one, the quality isn't going to be anywhere close to something that you could just use. Unless they're an amazing intern. Yet over 10 weeks you may train them and now all of a sudden you have something that could be like, uh, an employee. Right? But in many cases, then that intern leaves if that a fraction of that effort. And instead of 10 weeks, we did 10 hours training an AI model. That output is going to be materially better. But everyone's reaction is always off the first MHM response, which isn't optimized. They don't know how to interact with as we had, you know, which is why I wrote their books originally. But the corollary to that is what's changed is because those models have gone materially better. Even if you don't know anything anymore, the initial response is five to ten times better than it was a year ago when you and I first spoke. Right. Like you used ChatGPT01, you use the latest version of Claude 3.5, you use perplexity. It's now just immediately giving you high quality output. Even if you just talk, you just type it in. So like it or comparatively where it was a year ago. And I think that's the other thing is like these things are just getting smarter and smarter. So even like the nuance not knowing them, like the, the gap has shrunk, which makes the ability to then go to market with something even faster.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it is incredible. Um, some of the cool things are happening. One thing that I personally do is I have a, on my work calendar a 30, uh, 30 minute scheduled call every single week with chat GPT just to talk about everything that's going on at work. Hey, what would, how would you do this? And I feel like because it's scheduled, because it's there and because it's like talking, right? I'm literally talking back and forth to it. It's a very, it's not the greatest conversation I've ever had but again like I know the more I do it, uh, the better this is going to get and the more adept I am going to be at ah, speaking to it, it's speaking to me. And then again in four months, five months, six months, it's going to be 10 times better than it is today. So just continuously having those conversations with, with it. I think, you know, it has been helpful so far. But I know like, it's more uh, the reason I'm really doing it is because in the future it will be something that everyone will have to do at some point during their work week because it's just, it's the best thing you could possibly do.

Speaker B: I mean what you're doing and what you're explaining is what I tell everyone, right? Like by using this even in like, like the funny images, talking to it, right, you're breaking down your own procedures, your own biases, the way you do things. You've m, you've, you're forcing yourself to actually go back to being curious, going back to like just trying new things, that openness. So then when, like a new, say, your organization wants to bring in voice AI for their service reps, right? Since for, for where you work now, if you had to train that model and that system on your policies and service rules because of what you're doing with ChatGPT now just for fun, you're going to actually be better equipped to do it in a more commercial setting because you've already broke down all of the insecurities and the, you know, the awkwardness. So now you're actually making yourself more efficient to do these type of tasks when they start uh, arriving. And I think that's the part of this, the people who just start doing it are inherently right. By doing it as long as you have for the last year since we spoke, you've developed a new skill set. And as these other tools arrive, you're also more adept to now be able to apply it immediately, which then allows you to do more Therefore you're gonna have a better output which then could give you a uh, faster track and like say your career projection or whatever else you're trying to do, sales, et cetera. So I think, I think more people need to continue doing that.

Speaker A: You know, I agree, man. I tell everyone like I don't really Google much anymore. Like I try and chatgpt everything because then I. You always want to ask Google a follow up question. I uh, don'. Feel like clicking into an article and reading halfway down to find the answer. Like give me the answer and then I want to ask a follow up and ask another follow up and then I want to reframe the question so I want to ask it differently. Kind of getting to a different answer. Like that's just kind of how I've been training myself essentially for the last year is just trying to get at it. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm perfect, but I'm definitely better than I was a year ago, Sripal. I can promise you that. And I think it's benefited me significantly.

Speaker B: And I think for sports organizations and media outlets, right, that's one thing they got to think about now. How do I make content that I want to be indexable by the, by the AI, um, LLMs, so that when people are starting to use this to look for content, my content, not something that's inaccurate, starts surfacing and I'm actually getting it to drive it back. Right? Like I think just like people had to learn about SEM and SEO, learning about optimization so that your content can show up on Perplexity or Gemini or ChatGPT, uh, or you know, Copilot, uh, or Alum, right? Like how do you, how are you going to do that? And I think that's something now that sports media companies have to really think about because when you think about the younger generator, like they're going to just start doing that. So within the matter of two, three years, if everyone's doing that, what's going to happen to your traffic? I saw a LinkedIn post and it was one of those things that I, it was from, I think the former CMO or the Current CMO @HubSpot Talking about the traffic loss, but then talking about how they're seeing more of the traffic now through the YouTube videos, through ChatGPT. And I think that's the type of thing is like the, a lot of the bot traffic that was artificially keeping people's unique visitors and monthly active views that were annoying advertisers. Like what's real. What's like clickbait? Well, by the loss of that traffic you've gone back to a standardization like, okay, this is what the people are seeing. But then it's like, how do I find new ways to now acquire those people where the ability for the media companies to now target the different AI models is going to be essential to then offset the loss of all that bot and cookie traffic that we're sort of inflating. These, these numbers that most advertiser savvy advertisers knew weren't really people. Right. There was like in some cases as much as 40% of traffic could be bot traffic.

Speaker A: Wild. I mean that's what like half of Twitter isn't real. Right? That's always like a fun statistic to throw around, like don't go on Twitter. Most of those people aren't real. Don't read the comments. Those people are not real. But yeah, man, I think it's absolutely incredible. And you, you brought up recently, uh, the, the what, what'd you call it? It was very politically of you, the market effect recently. Uh, mostly the Deep Seq model. I didn't hear about Deep Seek once until I've heard about Deep Seq now a thousand times over the last week and a half. Um, you know, the Chinese based company came out saying that they trained, um, you know, an AI model at 1/100 the cost or whatever that ChatGPT is capable of doing it with. Yeah, I mean it costs I think trillions of dollars in market cap to some of these companies. Nvidia, Meta, ah, Twitter, Microsoft, all these companies that have been working on some, some very high priced models at this point. So like I guess what is, what is your take on all that? And uh, exactly what could, could you give us a snippet of really what might be going on a little bit?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean, I think we need to put everything just said in context, right. As of this past weekend, Deep Seek is not even 10 days out. So we're talking about something that really got momentum and you start seeing all the headlines, which was really about five days after its release. So it's not a thing that's been a slow build. It's like it just came out, it kind of, it caught a lot of folks from, you know, by surprise. And I think the effect is, right, it's, you know, as you said, it's the Chinese AI startup, they've been, they've released two models, right, what they call deep seq v3, which is a large language model that could rival or some people think could surpass OpenAI, Google and Meta and different benchmarks and then Deep Seeking, uh, deep seq R1 which is a reasoning model that has already outperformed uh, the ChatGPT01 model in some third party assessments. I think the big thing was that DeepSeek V3 was developed for 6 million compared to say the estimated 60 million spent by Meta on its latest technology. The company had to use fewer specialized computer chips than their American uh, counterparts. And the reason for that is their regulations, embargoes or whatever the proper term is where the most advanced computer chips can't be shipped to China. The government sort of prohibits that. So they had to get in essence scrappier. So that has also led to by developing something now for a tenth of what it was, that should be a boon to businesses because the cost has now gotten that show that you could do right. A uh, $60 million project for 6 million. That means a $6 million project should be 600,000. 600,000 project project could be 60,000. The other thing they're doing is they're making their code base, uh, their modules open source so that, that, that will potential which none of the other major players had done, which um, other than uh, Meta. So that fosters more collaboration and innovation. It challenges the sort of the closed source models of say OpenAI. It could potentially undermine the US export limitations. But that's a different story for a different day. But I think you know, the implications are it's kind of democratizing AI because it shows that you don't need billions of dollars to build something that could be just as good. It shows that all the innovation isn't just in Silicon Valley. So we have to be more globally aware, right? It's more resource efficient, cost efficient, but also it has an environmental and eco impact. And so I think if you're a business leader or a sports owner, right, that means you get accelerated innovation, right? Faster pace AI advancements for more frequent releases. You're going to see a uh, diversified AI landscape. And you could argue it's like iPhone and Android phones. Android started creating all these different models, right. It kind of changed the cost to get a mobile device. I think that's going to ultimately lead more choice and variety is going to lead to more sol, which then the competition should lead for a better output for organizations that you know the cost. Right. Which helps on the terms of the cost considerations because now you have a more cost effective AI solution. So that's going to impact, be Bring a solution down to organizations that may have, that may have budget constraints. So I think this is, and I think that's why the stock market reacted the way it did, is that it has a really big ramification when you take what I just sort of threw at you, M. Um, on its totality.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think in a vacuum, I think, yeah, obviously, like if you can do something for 10% of the cost and have it be better, that's great. The one thing that I do see a lot of pushback online is, well, is it true? It's coming out of a, um, you know, you know, it's hard to believe something just like kind of popping out of nowhere. At least for me, it's, it's difficult that like something just pops out of nowhere. It doesn't help that it's, you know, from China where, let's be honest, their government, not that I'm going to say our government's the most trustworthy in the world. I know where you're going, there's some very easy pushback, I think.

Speaker B: But, but let's take, let's use the pushback, right. And let's, let's assume it was like being used by the military for years or whatever people think. Right. So it's not true. What is true is using a, a less powerful computer chip that inherently has lead to real cost savings. It's open source, so now other people can innovate on it. They don't have to raise billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. So it's brought the bar down. Just like we used to say how generative AI brought the bar down. And it's going to force other, the other players now to really take a stand of uh, maybe I do need to open up my APIs. Maybe I do need to offer more cost savings. So the shock and awe of that is going to actually the outcome. When we look at this and say if you were to get back together in six months, the outcome is that it did bring the cost of AI down. Now if people use them or use the known players of OpenAI, uh, you know, Claude Copilot, that's to be seen. But it is going to like I firmly believe that you take all the propaganda or the biases aside, there's a, uh, somewhat of a high probability that the net effect of this is in six months it's brought the cost down. And by bringing the cost down and making it more approachable, that's going to lead to faster adoption, which will lead to faster Progress. And I think that's similar to when other things, like when mobile, like where you think of like mobile, your mobile device, mobile websites at first were the little like M M web pages back in the day on your flip phones to people were just then just taking their, their website and just showing it on an iPhone device, trying to reformat it. And then like, oh, we need to simplify it like our M M web. And then somewhere a few years, right, it could have been Covid or a few years ago it evolved like, oh, wait a minute, I don't need my desktop and my mobile dev, uh, website or my app to necessarily all be duplicative. I can actually now create unique engaging experiences based off of the artifact that's there. And I think this is a step towards that. Because what we have to get to is how do you have AI, you know, voice AI. AI is in your tools. AI is for, uh, content creating. How do you get it to a point where it's no longer considered the same generic I'm typing and going. It's becoming its own artifact. Right. So what could be like in the Ray Ban glasses versus what's in your Alexa device versus what? Everything will no longer be repetitive. It'll start becoming more organic in terms of integration, which ultimately I think then leads to what all the people in favor of AI have been dreaming about for years is once you get to that level of organic integration, the experiences are going to be seamless where it's like in like the Tony Stark talking to his, right. Uh, the AI and like his, you know, in the movies. Are we going to get there fully? Maybe, maybe not. But I think you're going to get to some level of organic acceptance and that I think that's going to change. It's exciting because it's going to change how people look at it. Like, could it help people with disabilities? Can it help the elderly? Can it help, you know, people recovering from a stroke, having these, uh, like by getting to that level now, those things become attainable. And that could then change people's life quality. And I think that then becomes no longer a productivity cost savings thing. It becomes a, I've made someone's experience truly better. And I think that's the side of it that I'm actually really the most excited about. And having elderly parents even, I've talked about our parent issues and stuff. Um, having these tools that could potentially increase quality of life for people at later stages, I think that could be a really impactful thing that I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I Think like the way that you, you broke it down. I do appreciate it, right. Taking out the propaganda of uh, deep Seq and really just looking at it from like a, a very logical perspective. Costs will go down, which means, and adoption will go up because of the open nature of it, which means more innovation, more adoption and more opportunity. And then that, when that, that, that snowball continues, right, it's been rolling down the hill, right? Slowly, but it's been rolling down the hill. Once that starts to really pick up speed and this is more integrated into our everyday society, right? I mean this was only what, a year and Change ago when ChatGPT came out and now like you're you, I at least see, I mean my algorithm's a little bit different than most people, but you know, I see a lot more of it. But my company is taking a pretty firm stance of it's coming, you know, let, let's get ready for it, right? You know, you don't have to be like 100% ready today, but make sure you're taking steps to be ready for it. Because in the very near future we believe it will most likely be a, uh, pretty important piece of everyone's everyday life.

Speaker B: You know, what you just said is in some ways what the Nvidia CEO said. He's like, you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose your job to someone who is using AI. So either you get on board to learn how to use it or you're going to lose your job to the person who does know how to use it. And I think that's the right, you hit the nail. That's in essence, I think what you just said, and that I think is really being amplified by all these business leaders is that it's the human element. We're going to lose our jobs to other humans. They just happen to be the humans who have embraced this versus those who don't. And it's similar to other technology challenges, right? The humans who embrace social media versus those who didn't. And that's why you started seeing a skill set disparity. The people who embraced originally the computers versus people who didn't. And that created a skill set disparity. So I think that's going to be the skill set disparity. And it's like you want to embrace it because it's actually going to keep you, the person valuable versus the one who doesn't. And the speed of this is just going to be what would have been a 10 year curve. We're saying, right? It could be a two, three year curve, so we better get ahead of it.

Speaker A: Agreed. That's what we're trying to do. But now that we're talking about jobs, you should probably talk about your new gig, huh? Chief, uh, digital officer over at the Next League. What's that, like cdo? That's kind of cool. That'll look really good on a name tag. So kudos and congratulations to you on that. But, uh, tell us a little bit about what exactly is the Next League? What are you going to be doing, how you're going to be helping them level up here?

Speaker B: Yes, Next League is a company that's been around for three years. They're a global team of strategists and technologists that specialize in creating, uh, designing, building, um, and operating technology solutions for sports organizations. So, um, you know, they're trusted by the teams. You know, behind all these sports teams and organizations, they have been navigating complexity, uh, complex technology, you know, landscapes, uh, to help their partners maximize revenue. And what I liked about the organization is that they value that the, their superpowers, their people. And you know, I think when you think about like they just recently launched the website and app for the tgl, the Tiger Woods.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker B: And taking that from conception and ideation to what it is, and I think anyone who'd seen that experience, it's phenomenal. They've been working with NASCAR for many, many years. They were working with the USOC and others. So they had all these, um, big clients. And I think for me, as we talked a year ago, if I wanted to be able to take what I had seen in retail and other industries with AI, as we had said, retail was about five years ahead of sports and media. Where could you go where they already had the relationships, They've already demonstrated this ability to tackle complex problems and have this, this philosophy of our, our superpower, our people, like that just felt like a really cool place to be. So I am so excited to be a, uh, part of Next League because it's still an early startup. They've only been around in essence for a little over three years and they're working with some of the biggest leagues and brands in North America. And that makes for me and my idea of taking the innovation and driving it really opens up that opportunity to do those things faster. As when we spoke a year ago and I was sort of trying to advise and help other startups and teams. There's only so much you could do as an individual. And I was writing for I've been writing for this website, John Wall Street, a newsletter, you know, that's trusted by all the senior executives trying to really speak to thought leadership. I've been recently talking about loyalty, changing, uh, loyalty, taking the best practices I see in retail into sports. But when we're talking about cost savings, the advent of AI is now taking what would have been 20, 30 million dollars expenditures and making it uh, attainable for the sports teams to actually afford, implement and execute. And that I think is going to open up hundreds of millions of dollars in lost opportunity that teams aren't seeing today.

Speaker A: Hundreds of millions of dollars will probably make those billionaires ears perk up for sure. Very, very uh, good, good sales pitch on your part, I guess. What are, if you're allowed, like what are some of the specifics, right? You talk about technology but not to everything's technology at this point, right? So like what are some of the specifics? Is it integrating this type of AI, is it integrating voice AI into the ticketing department like we kind of talked about before? Or is that kind of more a little bit further down the road? What are some of the things that you guys are helping these teams in these leagues tackle now? Um, specifically with the partners that you currently at.

Speaker B: So I think in their ongoing engagement, but I think a general problem that a lot of teams are trying to figure out is they have all these millions of social media followers, yet they still don't know a lot about the people that are actually showing up in venue. And then for some of those that have some information for the people in venue, they don't know a lot of their information for the people who, what they do out of the venue. You think about all the touch points someone might do to enter and leave an arena, right? They leave their house, they may stop at a parking garage, they may stop at a restaurant, they may then go to a retail concession outside the venue and then they enter the venue, what do they do after? They might go back to a different bar or restaurant. You know, all that sort of, that gives you a sense of the different types of people that allows you then contextualize your engagement. And that's being done in the retail space, right? In the travel and hospitality space. Think about how the hotels, you know, if you're a business travel, you know that most of the hotels already know your room preferences. Are you a high flow or low flow person? Are you a double bed person or a king bed person? Are, do you, what airlines do you normally travel, right? Are you a Delta purse frequent flyer? Or United, do you take Ubers or you take Lyft? They use all of that to then create targeted experiences which is what's fostering that extra loyalty, right? They do that in the retail space. I think, you know, when I was chief digital officer of Shop your Way most recently, we knew a lot about our members because we had Shop Your Way had 50 million members. You know, uh, they have an active base, a subset of that, you know, millions of active members, a subset of that also in the millions had their credit card because it was the credit card you would see, you would, you have an uh, awareness of all the transactions someone's making in their life. And that allowed a ah, loyalty and credit program allows someone to then really understand their constituent in a true life level. You know like they're a Walmart customer now, they're a Target customer. They go to, you know, they um, they go to Gold's Gym versus if they're still around, um, or you know into um, Planet Hollywood, right, Like whatever it is. Or they go to eat at Planet, like that's bankrupt. But like you know like I think that is really the power, right? Are they, you know, are they shopping, are they, where do they get gas or you know, how frequently do they get gas? Then you can really get a sense, okay, this person has long commutes or they're driving a lot or they. And then, and that allows you to then really create this more targeted um, marketing vehicle that can then unlock more revenue. So other, other industries have been doing this for a while and people, our sports fans are used to it, right? They're used to it, expecting it for their travel. They're used to going to Starbucks and using their app and their points and the game, right? And a lot of that is AI driven. Like you think of, you know, it's AI driven in terms of how you take different currencies and merge them together. So think of a hotel chain that had, that has acquired five different chains. How are they making sure that all the points still work when all the systems are disparate and different? It's using some level of AI to then do those conversions and assessments in real time where then to the consumer it's seamless, like I don't have to worry, right? The biggest fear originally like um, I'll use Marriott was if I had my Sheridan Starwood points and I have, you know, Bonvoy points, what happens? Am I going to lose this? Are they going to work? You know, uh, Marriott can't use my. And they've made that frictionless. So therefore it's allowed those types of brands to now be more integrated faster. Which leads to the bigger reason why people usually do acquisitions. But a lot of times when they're failed acquisitions, the biggest issue is that integration hasn't happened. Not by the marketing but usually by the systems. Right. And that then leads to, or the people and that leads to the interoperability which can then cause other things. I think, you know, I think that's where um, uh, the AI can be really helpful. I think some examples though are you can use it right for your CDPs, your customer data platforms and you can automate things, right? How do you automatically merge ticketing, retail and sponsorship data, eliminate the silos so that you really have a full complete profile of your customers behaviors and preferences. So now I know Michael, you're a club seat customer. What you know, you prefer, you know, pizza, you know, Papa John's for your concession and uh, you're likely to buy a jersey and a hat and then you can tailor the offering around that. You know, I think there's also, you know, predictive analytic platforms can identify ticket renewal risk, spot high value fans and recommend dynamic offerings to, you know, boost retention. And then you have your AI powered personalization tools like Person Offer Fit that can, you know, Persona is used by a handful of baseball teams to create automated campaigns based off individual uh, fan behaviors and uh, preferences. So like in that scenario, 20, 30,000 people in theory all could get a completely different email based off their individual preferences. And that's a really powerful thing, right. I've now Talked to all 30,000 people. You know, it's some combination of offers but I don't have to treat them the same. And that allows me to really, you know, cater to everyone uniquely. And I think that's the stuff that without AI was is possible. But it requires you know, hundreds of resources to do all this and it's a much more labor intensive thing now. It's been automated to be somewhat ubiquitous which then allows for that efficiency.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think efficiency is the key to pretty much everything. It sounds like everything that you're saying, mostly it comes down to efficiency and effectiveness. Right? Like if you're going to be one thing, be efficient. Because if you can be efficient, you can be good, you can be good enough I guess is a good way. And it sounds like as you said, if you're capable of giving people what they want, right. Uh, my brother always says fish gotta eat, you might as well feed them. Like just give the people what they want. It's really not that hard. When it comes down to the end of the day, they want a winning team. If their team's not going to be winning, they want to at least have a good time at the ballpark, maybe grab some Shake Shack. Shake Shack's my favorite. Not Papa John's. I just wanted to it the Shake Shack in Citi Fields. The best Shake Shack that ever existed. If anyone's never been highly, uh, it's the best Shake Shack that ever. I don't know what they did. It's incredible. It's better than all the other Shake Shacks, but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that, that. I think it just, it makes sense from that standpoint. It is wild that sports is so far behind considering the. The opportunity that comes with. You know, I'm. I'm not a retail person, right. I'm not going to go out on a. I love my Lululemon pants. That's about it. That's like the only brand, the only thing that I care about is, like, I would prefer Lululemon pants, but everything else I really don't give a shit about. And if I wasn't wearing Lulu Lemon pants, I'm not going to, like, lose my shit. I'm going to be a Mets fan. I'm always going to be a Mets fan. I'm never not going to be a Mets fan. As much as I hate the Mets and the Mets hate me back, I'm always going to be a Mets fan. Right? So, like, there's that, there's that level of fandom that you really can't get in, like, any other industry. Yes, I'm sure, like the top 1%. Absolutely. But I feel like, you know, you can go down to like 50% of fans and there's still like, there's that, that level of fandom. Um, you're not going to find, you know, for the 50th percentile for shake Shake Shack, Right. Like, there's just not that computation. So it is wild that they've been. Sports in general has been so far behind. And thankfully, here comes our white knight in shining armor. You know, everyone make a couple dollars. Dude, I love it.

Speaker B: I hope so. You know, that's the. I mean, I'm really excited about a lot of the conversations that, you know, just a few weeks in, it's really invigorating. You know, I think it's exciting because it's not. It's not theoretical. You know, Um, a lot of the European teams are ahead of it in terms of a lot of things we're talking about, um, to their credit. So it's also a matter of parody. Like we do, the US um, based teams want to be behind their European soccer, you know, or football, as they call it. You're right, compatriots, because we have global Paulines that are also billion dollar franchises. So it's like you want to make sure that you can compete because you're still competing. You're competing, in essence, for a share wallet of that sponsor. There's only so much sponsorship dollars to go around. They're going to spend it. You want a higher share of that. And to do that, you're going to have to have the tools. Because if someone's generating a better ROI for that advertiser because they now have that infrastructure, not only are you trying to do it to your ticket customers, you owe it to your corporate sponsors to have that same level of sophistication because it's becoming expected at once they start seeing it.

Speaker A: No, it's beautiful, man. Yeah, it's, um, you know, I have a lot of friends. They have, you know, oh, my number one is, uh, my number two, you know, my number one's Arsenal. My number two is the Kansas City Chiefs or whatever. And it's just like, oh, okay. What that tells me is like, if it came down to do I want to buy a jersey for, I don't know, soccer still on Arsenal. I don't really know. I'm sorry, I'm not super up to date. Do you want to buy a home jersey or do you want to buy a soccer jersey? Apologies if he's not on the team anymore or whatever was. You're. You're probably gonna. As you said, your share of wallet's gonna, most likely. And you know, there's only so much disposable income to go around, so I think it's awesome. Sri Paul, this was great. I really appreciate the time. I really appreciate you kind of going over everything. What's been going on with AI, your new job, the stuff you're going to be able to do to help people make a lot of money, uh, which I'm really excited about. Everyone's always happy about making a dollar one last time. Uh, where can everyone find you on. On LinkedIn? Where can they find your John Wall street articles? Where can they find some of this stuff?

Speaker B: Um, so you can find me on LinkedIn. John Wall street articles are on johnwallstreet.com and, you know, the books are on Amazon. And then with the new, with the new role. At NextLeague.com, you can learn about the clients, the process, and, um, you know, I'm pretty accessible.

Speaker A: I love it. Very accessible. You answer my email, so I appreciate you for that one. One last time, we have Sripal Shra. He's the author of Leveling up with AI Strategy Guide to AI and Sports Marketing, and the Art of Victory AI, the New Frontier of Global Sports. Who knows? Maybe another AI book's coming our way. We'll never know. He recently named the Chief Digital Officer of NextLeague. One more time, Sri. Paul, this was fantastic. I appreciate your time. Time's the only thing we don't get more of. So thank you for yours and thank you for everyone else's. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Have a good one. Thanks, everybody.

Speaker B: Bye.