Outside the offices of IBM clients, you may not have much direct day-to-day interaction with Watson AI these days. That is, unless you are a fantasy football player looking for sleeper draft picks or setting your starting lineup each week.
The tech company’s nearly decade-old partnership with ESPN’s fantasy platform is one of the biggest consumer showcases for watsonx, IBM’s portfolio of enterprise AI products, including various analytics integrated into the app and website. IBM recently announced an expansion of this control panel with a weekly GenAI scouting report of sorts, as Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s VP of sports and entertainment partnerships, describes it.
The AI insights column builds on various analytics IBM already offers within the app, like boom-and-bust probabilities for a given player and waiver or trade grades. The app also aims to identify new categories of players like “buy low, sell high,” “diamonds in the rough,” and “trade bait.” Stanhouse said IBM pulls data from sources including player stats and media reports.
In an effort to show off its fantasy partnership, IBM invited Tech Brew to an event at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on a dreary weekday. There, we ran football drills with various former NFL players, catching passes, zigzagging between pop-up dummies, and attempting to kick a field goal (not even close).
Big business: Since IBM first began its analytics partnership with ESPN Fantasy nine years ago, fantasy sports has continued its transformation from amateur hobby to multibillion-dollar business. ESPN claims its fantasy football user base is now around 14 million, and the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association pegged the total number of fantasy sports players in the US and Canada at 62.5 million in 2022.
As AI has also taken off in recent years, players have increasingly turned to the tech to get an edge. In July, the English Premier League signed a partnership with Microsoft to provide users with AI tools for fantasy leagues, among other tech integrations. The National Basketball Association teamed with Amazon Web Services this week to provide AI-powered stats for fans.
Stanhouse said IBM has evolved its tools to keep up with this increasingly savvy and engaged sports fanbase.
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“A lot of this is synonymous with how fans have evolved in experiencing games,” Stanhouse said. “It’s not just about watching the game; it’s about how I am consuming media content 24/7 that is allowing me to be more engaged. So as we’ve seen that deeper engagement with the sport, we’ve created tools that are allowing people to be more engaged with the app…We’re creating more tools that will help them simulate like they’re more of a professional.”
International Sports Machines: Fantasy sports is one area where consumers tend to enjoy thinking like business managers: They dig deep into stats, scour media reports, and conduct analyses. It makes sense, then, that IBM sees the venue as a mainstream gateway into its generally enterprise-focused AI tools.
“What we like to do with our partnerships is create relevance for IBM,” Stanhouse said. “A lot of people don’t know us, or think of us as a computer brand still, so sports allows us to have a conversation with consumers in a way that we wouldn’t normally before. [It] allows them to touch and feel our technology.”
The same goes for other sports. For decades, IBM has partnered with the US Tennis Association and Wimbledon to provide analytics for tennis championships as well as the Masters golf tournament. More recently, it has also signed on with the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Ferrari’s F1 team.
Stanhouse said IBM’s stats have become a key tool for tennis commentators looking to fill time in the broadcast booth. Sometimes players even use the tool to size up opponents, she claimed.
But she did affirm she doesn’t see Watson AI ever replacing the jobs of commentators or media analysts in the future.
“We’re helping people better do their jobs and be more efficient so they can spend time on the things that matter,” she said. “They’re not having to do the research, because we can actually provide that for them. For media analysts, we’re giving them better insights, better talking points, better ways to create storylines.”