Speaker 1: Since you're a subscriber to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought
Speaker 1: you'd be interested in a new four episode sponsored podcast
Speaker 1: called The ROI Rules of Ai, produced by IBM and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Media Studios. It explores how business leaders are thinking
Speaker 1: about the return on investment of artificial intelligence projects. You
Speaker 1: can subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Here's
Speaker 1: a recent episode. Imagine you're the head football coach of
Speaker 1: a major college football program. It's third down and five
Speaker 1: yards to the goal line, with the game clock winding down.
Speaker 1: There are one hundred thousand spectators in the stands and
Speaker 1: millions more watching on TV. Your whole season, and potentially
Speaker 1: your job, rests on what happens next. But in fact,
Speaker 1: the game may well have been determined months before when
Speaker 1: you recruited this roster of players. What if you could
Speaker 1: have used AI to help determine which players to select.
Speaker 1: That's the challenge a startup called Edge three dot AI
Speaker 1: is trying to address.
Speaker 2: We have called his amateur sports for a long time.
Speaker 1: It's a business that's Kenya and Rashid, a co founder
Speaker 1: and CEO of Edge three, a former co captain of
Speaker 1: the Oklahoma Sooners, and a running back for the NFL's
Speaker 1: New York Giants and Jets. Rashid has spent the past
Speaker 1: two decades developing and commercializing emerging technologies for the sports industry.
Speaker 1: For the past three years, he and his partners, who
Speaker 1: include CBS college football analyst Brian Jones an NFL Hall
Speaker 1: of Famer Warren Sap, have been using AI to build
Speaker 1: a product that will help college football coaches find the
Speaker 1: right place players and assist high school players in finding
Speaker 1: the right college team. From IBM and Bloomberg Media Studios,
Speaker 1: this is the ROI Rules of AI and I'm your
Speaker 1: host Edward Adams. On this podcast, we're exploring how companies
Speaker 1: of all sizes are using AI to remake their operations,
Speaker 1: increasing their return on investment and that of their customers. Today,
Speaker 1: we're investigating how to apply artificial intelligence to athletic intelligence
Speaker 1: remaking top collegiate football programs nationwide. Like a lot of industries,
Speaker 1: college football is being disrupted, but rather than being challenged
Speaker 1: by a competitor, the disruption is coming from within, with
Speaker 1: both student athletes and some schools pushing back against the
Speaker 1: status quo. In twenty twenty one, the US Supreme Court
Speaker 1: ruled in favor of students, finding that the NCAA violated
Speaker 1: antitrust laws because it prohibited compensating college athletes. That same year,
Speaker 1: the NCAA dropped the requirement that players had to sit
Speaker 1: out a season if they transfer schools. So suddenly players
Speaker 1: were unrestricted free agents and could be paid by groups
Speaker 1: of alumni, supporters or advertisers. The NCAA has even proposed
Speaker 1: that top schools should be able to pay athletes directly.
Speaker 1: With some of the best players now jumping from one
Speaker 1: school to another in search of more compensation and more
Speaker 1: playing time, Rashid says that increasingly the scholarships that used
Speaker 1: to go to high school recruits are now being given
Speaker 1: to more experienced transfers that have a better chance of
Speaker 1: making an immediate impact on teams. With fewer scholarships available,
Speaker 1: high school recruits are left to their own devices to
Speaker 1: find a college program that best values their talent and abilities.
Speaker 2: Never in the probably the last fifty years, have we
Speaker 2: seen such a paradigm shift in this business model and industry.
Speaker 2: You have both sides trying to react to it in
Speaker 2: real time, and so what Edge three is doing is
Speaker 2: providing efficiencies on both sides to help them adapt to
Speaker 2: this new way of recruiting.
Speaker 1: And the business of college football. Recruiting is big business.
Speaker 1: The average college spends one point four million dollars a
Speaker 1: year on recruiting, and costs have shot up fifty one
Speaker 1: percent since twenty twenty one, according to Client estimates. Today,
Speaker 1: lots of companies rate high school players, but they're comparing
Speaker 1: them to each other. What EDGE three does is quickly
Speaker 1: compare them to current and prior college players, using new
Speaker 1: predictive models to determine their odds of success playing at
Speaker 1: each program.
Speaker 2: AI allows you to create new recruiting models that don't exist.
Speaker 1: To After crunching the data on more than fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: college players, EDGE three has found some surprising results. For instance,
Speaker 1: it's the conventional wisdom in high school sports that the
Speaker 1: best players should play only one sport, both to maximize
Speaker 1: their focus and to avoid injury in the secondary sport.
Speaker 1: But the data says that's wrong.
Speaker 2: What we found is that most of the successful athletes
Speaker 2: at the next level, let's say at a quarterback position,
Speaker 2: are two sport athletes.
Speaker 1: Take Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the three times Super
Speaker 1: Bowl champ. He's well known for his ability to throw
Speaker 1: sidearm while scrambling away from tackles. It's what coaches call
Speaker 1: a quarterback's arm angles. Gotchrill.
Speaker 2: Mahoone's dad was a baseball player, and so he grew
Speaker 2: up playing baseball, and so he developed those arm angles
Speaker 2: from playing baseball.
Speaker 1: Edge three can predict the odds a high school player
Speaker 1: will train ansfer from a certain program.
Speaker 2: There are certain kids that come out of certain programs
Speaker 2: in high school that have a higher risk of transferring
Speaker 2: if they go to certain geographical areas. As a coach,
Speaker 2: I start weighing those probabilities when I'm deciding on where
Speaker 2: to give this money and this scholarship.
Speaker 1: To EDGE three isn't just aggregating a high school player's
Speaker 1: on field stats.
Speaker 2: We're also looking at social data. We're looking at digital
Speaker 2: mentions and sentiments based on each individual athlete to start
Speaker 2: to give you an overall value of what he is
Speaker 2: to the actual program.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, EDGE three calculates the dollar value of a player
Speaker 1: to a college team. How do you go about predicting
Speaker 1: what a high school player ought to be paid in college.
Speaker 1: It seems like it would be almost impossible to figure
Speaker 1: that out.
Speaker 2: Well, they figured out in the NFL all the time
Speaker 2: using the same type of data points.
Speaker 1: After Edge three uses AI to aggregate mountains of player
Speaker 1: data from both structured and unstructured sources.
Speaker 2: We then are using AI to run predictive models against
Speaker 2: it to notice patterns against baselines.
Speaker 1: The software also uses conversational AI to allow high school
Speaker 1: players to ask the database about the best schools to attend.
Speaker 1: Schools can input their own data into the system. Limiting
Speaker 1: data access between competing parties is part of what's known
Speaker 1: as data governance and it's crucial.
Speaker 2: I don't think a coach would trust Kenya a Rashid.
Speaker 2: What is data? And the first question we're going to
Speaker 2: get from teams is if I give you any part
Speaker 2: of my data, how do I know it's safe. The
Speaker 2: biggest reason why this partnership with IBM was so important
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of data companies out here, but
Speaker 2: IBM has been around for years. The reward of working
Speaker 2: with IBM is they have enough resources that we can
Speaker 2: find the right people with the right products and services
Speaker 2: that can help us at the stage that we're at.
Speaker 1: Working with a company of IBM's breadth and experience is
Speaker 1: enabling Edge three to go to market faster than it
Speaker 1: could do on its own.
Speaker 2: The time that it would take us to get these
Speaker 2: pieces together and actually just even put them in predictive
Speaker 2: models would be astronomical for a startup in our position.
Speaker 2: So we needed an IBM to help us accelerate these
Speaker 2: things and really tell us things that we didn't know.
Speaker 2: We didn't know how to go get the data, and
Speaker 2: we knew it was there, we didn't know how to
Speaker 2: pull it in, we didn't know how to configure it.
Speaker 2: And so really the guidance and some of the consultants
Speaker 2: around IBM have been able to help us kind of
Speaker 2: understand how we need to formulate that.
Speaker 1: The sales pitch to schools boils down to helping reduce
Speaker 1: the constraints that they and all businesses face, reduce expenses,
Speaker 1: increase productivity.
Speaker 2: I can go to a coach and say I know
Speaker 2: how much time and effort I can save you, and
Speaker 2: I can equate that to dollars because I know what
Speaker 2: you're spending in recruit and no coach wants to spend
Speaker 2: more money and waste more time.
Speaker 1: While Edge Three's product has a targeted market, its experience
Speaker 1: with IBM holds lessons for other companies AI.
Speaker 3: Is a technology that can be applied to every size
Speaker 3: of company, even if you are a startup. You can
Speaker 3: make a difference in the market. You can disrupt what's
Speaker 3: already in there using AI.
Speaker 1: That's Marcella Viro, vice president of Data and AI at IBM.
Speaker 1: While where Sheid has worked in sports marketing, he's new
Speaker 1: to artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: First of all, they know a lot about their business,
Speaker 3: but they are not technology experts, so they relied in
Speaker 3: our partnership to build a successful, unique solution using AI.
Speaker 3: They were aware the data is available from different sources
Speaker 3: all the time, but they had to find the tool
Speaker 3: that would help them to manage that data and to
Speaker 3: trust that data. Governance is related to your brand, to
Speaker 3: your reputation. This is fundamental to any size of company.
Speaker 3: It's important for a company not only to start a business,
Speaker 3: but to stay in the business.
Speaker 1: For Rashid, the parties bringing different strengths to the table
Speaker 1: is key to building a successful product.
Speaker 2: This is a bunch of athletes who have gotten together
Speaker 2: with a technology company and said, let's go build something
Speaker 2: that works. And that's what this partnership with IBM represents.
Speaker 1: Edge three dot AI is scheduled to become available to
Speaker 1: both schools and players in August. We wish Rashid and
Speaker 1: his team all the best. This has been The ROI
Speaker 1: Rules of AI, a podcast from IBM and Bloomberg Media Studios.
Speaker 1: If you like what you're hear, subscribe and leave us
Speaker 1: a review. I'm Edward Adams. Thanks for instin