Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
As sure as it's Labor Day Weekend here in New York City, it's the opening rounds of the US Open, truly one of the great spectacles of international sport. The tournament first held on the grass courts of the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island in 1881. By 1915, it had made its way to the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens. And in 1978 arrived at its current home, the Billie Jean King USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, built on the site of the old New York World's Fair.
But so much has changed since 1978 when Jimmy Connors beat Bjorn Borg in the men's draw and Chris Everett outlasted Pam Shriver in the women's championship. Rackets have gone from wood to steel to graphite composite and prize money has ballooned to $3 million for the winner in each gender, if you can outlast the 127 other players who want the crown just as much. As you watch the quarters, semis and finals this week, see if Carlos Alcaraz of Spain or Iga Swiatek of Poland can retain their titles or if other contenders are going to be crowned the next king and queen of New York.
I've always loved the big sporting event. On one of our episodes earlier this year with ESPN, chief Jimmy Pitaro, I waxed on about the bucket list opportunity I had to attend the first round of the masters in person at Augusta National, thanks to my ICE colleague Alex Albert, who hails from the cradle of American Golf. And now I've made another pilgrimage to Flushing for the 23 US Open to watch some of the second round matches. But I had an ulterior motive. Two New York Stock Exchange companies, ESPN, part of the Walt Disney Company and IBM, the firm once known as International Business Machines, are business partners of both the Masters and the US Open. Each bringing their technology and creativity to bear on enhancing the fan experience either through the television screen or our smartphones. Where IBM provides the statistics and scoring and increasingly relies on artificial intelligence to allow us to dive deeper into the data and the drama of sports as never before.
IBM and Disney go back a ways as our portal to sports immortality. One of my obsessions is the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley where Alex Cushing, a fixture of New York City and Newport and a World War II veteran convinced the USOC and then the International Olympic Committee in Paris to bring their winter spectacle to a basically undeveloped mountain and valley in the Sierra Nevada range on the California border, somewhere near Reno. To pull off the impossible, he relied on three men leading New York Stock Exchange list companies, William Paley of CBS, Walt Disney himself and his imagineers, and Thomas J. Watson Jr, the CEO of IBM, and the son of Watson Sr, the storied IBM founder.
Paley provided the live television, Disney provided the pageantry, and Watson provided the precision scoring to give Cushing's Winter Circus the credibility it needed to redefine how the world gets and enjoys its sports, from then the comfort of their living room, and now the palm of our hands on our smartphones. In a minute, our producer Lauren Sullivan and I will take you out to Flushing Meadows, Queens to visit with the modern day inheritor of the legacies of Disney, Pale and Watson, IBM's Noah Syken, the company's vice president for Sports and Entertainment Partnerships. Our conversation with Noah Syken on sports technology, data and AI and where our immersion into new forms of entertainment is headed. It's coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Noah Syken, is Vice President for Sports and Entertainment Partnerships at IBM. That's NYSE, ticker symbol IBM. Noah has been with the company for nearly 25 years having come up through the ranks of the advertising industry to help IBM and it's Watson franchise make the most of it's Jeopardy challenge, it's sponsorship for the Grammys and it's partnership with the Masters Wimbledon and now the US Open. Back in July, we hosted IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna at our monthly Whiskey Wednesday on Wall Street with Wapner series. And as you might expect, artificial intelligence was basically topic one, two, and three.
Some time passed. And then our inside, the Icehouse producer, Lauren Sullivan and I, were curious about all the advances in technology that delivered the most cutting edge AI driven stats to the palm of our hand and make these IBM enabled services deeply immersive for fans wherever they are. So it's brought us out to Flushing Meadow where we're sitting in Noah's very busy IBM command center this week in the heart of the Billie Jean King USTA National Tennis Center.
So Noah, you've been part of IBM for 25 years. Does showing up at another edition of the Masters, Wimbledon or here at the US Open ever get old for you?
Noah Syken:
No, we have a great tradition around these events and 30 years ago we started sponsoring and bringing technology to these great events. But what's always exciting is trying to up the ante every year. Setting a new bar, doing something first, painting a picture of what's possible. That's what gets me excited every day and I know that's what gets our technology people focused all year long.
Josh King:
I talked about it a little bit in the introduction, but for our listeners, just basically sketch out what your job is. It's a unique position, Vice President Sports and Entertainment Partnerships. What does that entail?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, so when we think about these programs that we run at the Masters or Wimbledon US Open, they kind of break down into three parts. One is amazing, innovative technologies that we can bring to life for our partners and for people around the world. Then if we have an amazing innovation or an amazing story to tell, we like to share that with clients. So how do we bring our clients into the fold, paint a picture of what they can do with these technologies. And most of them are running big businesses and we try to draw that parallel between the tennis event is a business just like a bank, insurance company or any other enterprise. So technology, great client experience, and then storytelling. How do we bring the story to the world through all the modern techniques, whether it's social media, advertising or other forms of communication.
Josh King:
I mean, storytelling definitely hits Lauren and me where it counts because we do storytelling about businesses every day at the New York Stock Exchange. And thanks to my friendship with your colleague John Adashek, I've been a guest of IBM for the Quarterfinals Night, I think for the last two US opens. In terms of what you're going to be offering in 2023, how does it compare to 2022, 2021?
Noah Syken:
Well, 2021 was still a pretty interesting year for us. We're kind of emerging from COVID, but it's actually a natural extension. We have a couple programs, one around AI commentary, one around a predictive draw. And there's a lot of buzz today around generative AI. And we just launched our Watson X generative AI platform. But we were actually using generative AI in 2021 for the Grammy Awards, for the US Open. We were having debates, we were soliciting feedback from fans around the world, who's the greatest tennis player? For the Grammys, who's the greatest rock musician?
We took all that input in and we used generative AI to develop a hypothesis around what the answer to that question was. So a lot of buzz around generative AI. Flash forward to today, we're using video. Taking the data off of the courts, teaching the AI tennis language. The players from around the world, what Arthur Ashe Stadium is versus Louis Armstrong Stadium is, and producing highlight clips using that data and generative voice technology. So it's all a natural extension, but this whole generative AI wave really for us started a long time ago.
Josh King:
IBM has been partners with the USTA for 30 years, you mentioned it. If that brings us then back to 1993, my first year working at the White House, there was barely a whitehouse.gov. How has usopen.org evolved from 93 to 2023?
Noah Syken:
So people, we get so enamored with where we are today in the technology arc, if you will. But in 1993, we were still learning about what this internet thing was, right? And if you think about it, it sounds amazing today to say, but just getting a live score on the internet was a huge deal in 1993. So it started with painting a picture for the USTA of this emerging technology platform. Then helping them see how it could help them engage fans more. Let's deliver scores, live scores, point by point scores. Then we move into the video experiences.
So whether it's bringing the USTA online, moving into the mobile space, over the top programming, unique applications, AI and now generative AI, it's all one long arc that starts from have you taken advantage of all the data that you have available? The data back in 1993 was the internet, right? So we look forward to the future, but again, it's just part of a long journey.
Josh King:
I did get to see Spain's Carlos Alcaraz beat Italy's Jannik Skinner in the quarters last year. In June, Noah, your Watson X technology made the unpopular call predicting Alcaraz was going to beat Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon. Is Watson going to go out on a limb this year at the US Open? How does that all work to make that predictive outcome?
Noah Syken:
Yeah. Well, we don't necessarily think that was so far out on a limb. Carlos Alcaraz was the reigning US Open champion, so there was a lot of energy out there around Novak, but to us it's all in the data. And for us, we do predictions for every single match. And it's not so much about we want to be right a hundred percent of the time, but the reality is what we want to do is generate conversation. We want to generate conversation around the US Open. The folks at the USTA want people talking about their event, getting excited about the event, maybe thinking about coming out to the event. So whether it's the predictions that we make, the predictive draw or even the AI commentary bit, it's really about fan engagement and getting the US Open into popular culture in these two weeks and getting people excited about watching on ESPN or on usopen.org or coming out to the event.
Josh King:
On the topic of AI commentary, as you and I were talking about before we started recording, before we had your boss, Dr. Arvind Krishna at the NYC a couple of weeks ago for one of our Whiskey Wednesdays on Wall Street evening sessions, I listened to some of the IBM Watson X powered AI commentary videos from Wimbledon. How close, Noah, do you think Watson X is to supplanting the call of Al Michaels when he famously said in 1980-
Al Michaels:
McClanahan is still there. The puck is loose. 11 seconds, you've got 10 seconds, the countdown going on right now. Morrow up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracle? Yes. Unbelievable.
Noah Syken:
Yeah. Well, it's a really good question. I think the capabilities around Watson X are mostly focused on speed. Speed and innovation. So leaving that to the side for the moment, the reality is today there's 17 courts of action out there. There's commentators on two or three courts. So those other 14 courts are pure white space. There is no commentary. And so we think about how are we bringing these capabilities to the white space not replacing Johnny Mac or Chris Everett.
And I think the other way to think about it is those types of commentators, they have personal relationships with the players and the competitors out here. They show up at nine o'clock in the morning, they go to the practice court, they talk to the coaches, they talk to the players. They've, in many cases, seen these players grow up from when they were 14 years old. So we certainly have a lot of optimism about where our AI commentary solutions are going. And we can talk more about that. But I don't think Johnny Mac should be awfully fearful. There's that inherent understanding of the players that's going to be pretty hard to replace.
Josh King:
... Let's geek out then for just a minute because I've listened to it a little bit. Tell our listeners, bring them on the journey. What does the voice actually sound like? How's it generated? How does it work?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, well look. We use our text to speech capabilities of Watson to generate the voice. The voices are synthetic voices that have been trained. It's really a matter of teaching the AI the language of tennis. Now, what do people expect? People probably expect their GPS in their car. They might experience a little smart device in their house, and those voices are very recognizable to people. And I think that's basically what you're going to get in the AI commentary today. But we're going to advance that for sure.
Josh King:
Will you sample Johnny Mac's voice and let him call the 17 matches?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, I mean, look, we think there's a lot of opportunity there across sports, there are iconic voices in the world of sports we were-
Josh King:
John Facenda, bring him back from the dead.
Noah Syken:
... I don't know if we can bring people back from the dead. It does take a little bit of live training, but we were talking college football before. If you think about the voice of Keith Jackson, right? Great amazing commentator. Imagine if you could have canned that voice and generated it all these years later and have Keith Jackson call the national championship game. So those kinds of things are certainly on the forefront, but more viscerally for the USTA. If you think about tennis, there are players from, not every country around the world, but a wide swath of countries around the world. There's a lot of languages represented on the courts.
So we're doing English language AI commentary. All of these highlights can be published in multi-languages almost instantaneously. So we're going to be bringing that to the future. So engaging fans around the world is what the USTA always asks us to do. AI is one of the tools to be able to do that instantaneous language translation for these highlight clips.
Josh King:
I'm just waiting for an AI version of Bud Collins. If you can recreate that, that would be a miracle.
Noah Syken:
I think the media room down here is named for Bud Collins, if I'm not mistaken.
Josh King:
You mentioned also the IBM power index earlier. And if you're paying close attention to it, match insights and likelihood to win. I mean, how much, Noah, do you think it could affect the joy of watching athletes at their best and the randomness that one FL team can beat another? As Al Pacino once said, as Coach Tony D'Amato of the Miami Sharks on Any Given Sunday.
Speaker 16:
I don't know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. And either we heal as a team or we're going to crumble inch by inch, play by play till we're finished.
Noah Syken:
Yeah, that's what we see. We see upsets all the time. And so how do you actually determine where an upside might occur? Well, world rankings go back 52 weeks and they rank the players based on 52 weeks of data. I think we could probably all acknowledge that how a player played in Wimbledon just a couple weeks ago is probably most representative of how they're going to play in the US Open. So the power index is all about driving knowledge about recency. How are they playing coming into this event?
And so you may have a very low rank player from a world ranking standpoint, but the power index is going to probably rank them maybe a little bit higher. That upset may not be as big of an upset as you might have thought if you only paid attention to the world rankings. So we think the power index provides a new perspective on what to expect in this tournament, not necessarily going back a year where injuries may happen or the performance may have varied.
Josh King:
I'm curious how much you think the players themselves mine your data? I watched Alex Gibney's documentary on Boris Becker the other day. Boom Boom Becker would famously dig himself into a hole and into a match before mounting this heroic comeback. Could AI powered tools have helped him and other players add a few grand slams to their record? What are you hearing from players today about using this stuff?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, I think going back into history, we were providing some insights to players years ago. But I think when you think about patterns, patterns across the court, how do we recognize the patterns of play for particular players, successful players, unsuccessful players? AI has an opportunity to mine that in new ways. One of the other pieces that we're bringing to AI commentary is visual recognition. So bringing new kind of texture to the AI commentary in the future. So bringing vision to the court, mixing that up with artificial intelligence and reflecting on the patterns of play is one of the areas that the players certainly reflect on when they speak with us.
Josh King:
I'm curious, I had one of those bucket list moments in April watching round one of the Masters in person, but you can't bring your phone into Augusta National. Only when I left could I enjoy what you were offering on the Masters app. How close did technology let you get to those fairways at Augusta?
Noah Syken:
Well, look at the Masters, there's all kinds of data being collected from across that course. People really don't see it. It's buried in the trees and very smartly disguised. But one of the things that we really think about is personalized experiences. How do we deliver an experience for you that's different than me or some other fan? And so the My Group application is really a step on the road of personalization. Give me my own personalized highlight reel and then stew it together with the best moments from across the entire tournament. Now the broadcast partners were collecting every shot from every hole at the Masters for a couple of years, but that led to a lot of really quiet golf.
And so that was the need. It's nice to hear ambient noise and birds chirping, but just a little bit of texture around those clips was what the club was desiring, and that's why we brought the AI commentary on top of the My Group feature at the Masters. And again, we'll continue to progress that.
Josh King:
And when the tournament in Augusta wraps up, how do you and your team sort of look at usage of the app and what was popular, what was not popular? What was your learning after the 2023 Masters?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, so are they engaging with the content and are they engaging with the actual commentary feature? So at varying points over the course of all three of these tournaments, we had commentary turned off as a default versus turned on. And we would see people come, see the clip and immediately turn on the commentary feature. So when we see that kind of behavior, we know we're onto something. I think at Wimbledon we saw over two and a half million views of those clips.
Josh King:
So here at the Billie Jean King, USTA National Tennis Center, I can look at my IBM US Open app to my heart's content. I have it open right here. For our listeners, what can they see to compliment what they're actually going to be seeing on ESPN?
Noah Syken:
So they're going to be able to see obviously all the scores and stats in the most basic form. They're going to see all the winners and passing shots and all that. But I think they're going to see some perspective in terms of, again, predictions for each match. Who's likely to win. They're going to get some great factoids that were generated by AI around each player. They're going to get the power index, which is our own ranking of the global tennis players. And they're going to get the predictive draw. So for each player, depending on where you are in the draw, how difficult is it going to be for you as a player to make it to the next round or make it all the way to the finals? And again, that's a new feature that people can tune in for.
Josh King:
As a fan then, myself, take me as an example. How do you balance keeping your eye on two screens? The screen up on the wall in your living room and the thing on your hand, on court action versus in-app data? There's a magic to just immersing yourself in the production itself.
Noah Syken:
It's an interesting challenge, but in the world of sports, I actually think this is one of the areas that we really haven't truly tapped into. The second stream, the augmented reality kinds of experiences. They're out there. They're starting to make their way into the world of sports, but in some of the big arenas, big stadiums, I think we need to get the connectivity and the bandwidth at scale in order to really deliver the richest experience as possible. So you mentioned the Masters, no phones. You mentioned people in stadiums who may be a little bit distracted. I don't think we fully tapped into what can be delivered to make it a true natural benefit to people in the stadiums. And frankly, that's one of the things I'm excited about for the future.
Josh King:
I had Jimmy Pitaro on my podcast a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about what he's trying to... He just looks at his two teenage sons and do they have their heads buried in their phones or are they watching the action on the screen? And when you mic these players up live pitcher and catcher battery in a crucial situation, they're riveted purely on the screen. And as you think about championship tennis and championship golf, where's the potential to get actual audio of what they're doing? You certainly can hear what's happening on a tennis court. Sometimes you don't necessarily want to intrude on the privacy of two people walking down the fairway at Augusta.
Noah Syken:
Yeah. Well, I think we saw that at Augusta for the first time this year. So we see interviews happening live on the course. Probably hard to interview a tennis player in the middle of a point, but we get that ambient noise. For me as a huge golf fan, in all candor, I just want to hear the caddy golfer relationship.
Josh King:
Yeah, sure.
Noah Syken:
Frankly, I don't know if I need an announcer, no offense to my favorite announcers. But that caddy golfer relationship I think is incredibly important. So the other thing I think we reflect on is how people consume content these days. You mentioned younger people. Well, the social media landscape has completely transformed what people expect in today's world. First of all, the attention spans are about 42 seconds. But they also get unique perspective around their favorite artists, celebrities or athletes. Every celebrity and athlete, they have their own Instagram. They're showing what they wore this morning, what they had for dinner tonight. So I think overall, the expectations in society today are different. And as this next generation comes up, I think sports properties are going to need to wrestle with that. They already are.
Josh King:
I mean, you mentioned that you're a huge golf fan. I mean, you are a product of the University of Miami, certainly a hotbed of athletics. What are your memories of your first major sporting event?
Noah Syken:
My first sporting event that I can viscerally remember is walking into Yankee Stadium. And walking through the tunnel and seeing the grass for the first time and looking for Reggie Jackson. And I think from that moment on, there was something special about walking into a stadium and the energy. I was saying to somebody earlier here at the US Open, my favorite part of the US Open is actually between sessions. And as the day session's clearing out and the fans for the evening session are coming in, there's kind of a buzz in the air. And for me, yes, it's the competition on the court or on the grass, but it's the atmosphere around it and those kind of intangibles that I always remember.
Josh King:
How do you think some of the data spun out from Watson X would've helped you excel? And how's it being put to the test now on college campuses and pro locker rooms?
Noah Syken:
There's a lot going on here. We talk about data a lot and how do you protect data and use trusted data? I think one of the big things people and players and the players unions are thinking about is as players become more instrumented, as their heart rates and all their biometrics are captured, who owns that data? How do you use that data? How do you use that data in contract negotiations and otherwise?
And I think video analytics is a real game changer. It's going to be next in terms of our rollout of some of the AI commentary features. But the subtleties that you can catch in video analysis, I think are so insightful along with the patterns we talked about as well. So I think, again, we're just scratching the surface, but I do think some of the issues around who owns that data, should the player own the data or should the team own the data? Can that data be used against them in contract negotiations? I think those are really important issues that we're going to have to wrestle with.
Josh King:
I mean, you're touching on some huge issues, and I want actually get into a little bit of that. Were you conscious at the time back in Miami of the big business of sports, whether it was football or basketball, that intercollegiate athletics represented back then?
Noah Syken:
The money was always very clear to me. And I became friends with many players on the football team and I personally witnessed some of the greatest players in college football have monetary problems. And I was scratching my head all those years ago, how is this possible? We're national champions, right? There's advertisers coming out, but the players, they're asking me for meals, literally. I kid you not. So I guess I was sensitized to it at that point. I'm not a big fan of how it's all developing, the kind of unrestrained nature of how some of the NIL work is developing, but I think that's got to be figured out. It's not sustainable where it is today.
Josh King:
I mean, these big issues, the transfer portal, NIL name, image, likeness, which really allows players to receive compensation. What's your perspective on the professionalization of college sports?
Noah Syken:
Well, I would draw a line between recruiting players versus when players are in a college or in an institution. The notion of, hey, I'll pay you $2 million if you come play at my university. For me, that's probably not a road that's awfully healthy for college athletics. But once you're at the university and the local car dealership wants to do some promotional activities with you, I do think players should be able to engage in those kinds of relationships. So again, I think overall we're moving in the right direction, I just think we need to kind of be a little bit smarter about how we're doing that. And don't get me started on conference realignment.
Josh King:
Back to Noah Syken. I mean, your first job out of college at the storied advertising agencies of Madison Avenue, Ogilvy and Mather as a media planner. And for those of us whose understanding of the ad world is limited to Jon Hamm as Don Draper, how does media planning fit into the creative mix?
Noah Syken:
Well, sports runs on media. Make no mistake about it, the sponsors, the advertisers are the ones who are paying for everything that we see on screen. To me, when I started my career, I was so excited because the internet was just kind of coming to life. And to me it presented a lot of opportunities. Today we take for granted all those graphics that we see on screens, the probability of the guy making the catch or the probability of the guy sinking the putt. That wasn't the case back then. And so to me, I was working at Ogilvy, but also working on the IBM account.
And it was so amazing to be able to work with the colleagues in IBM, the technologists, but have the access to media platforms to work with the ABCs at the time, the ESPNs before that. To actually bring data into the screen of sporting events. People may not recognize that IBM goes back to the Olympics in the sixties with bringing data instrumenting sporting events, but then bringing it into the media landscape to enrich broadcasts. I don't know if we need credit for it, but I think that's one of the things that IBM was instrumental and in the evolution of broadcasting of sports.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about the guy sinking the putt. We'll fast forward to 1999. There's this job that opened up at IBM and Purchase, New York for this manager, media planning, advertising. Bring us back now 24 years. I watched an old ad of Tim Clark holding out at 18 in Augusta. What was it like going from the agency to your in house role?
Speaker 17:
As we reached seven o'clock here in the East, we're in the closing stages, marathon day at the Masters. He got that out and it runs nicely. Does it ever. Does it ever. Could it be? Oh, my word. That gives him second alone.
Noah Syken:
Well, thanks for acknowledging that ad. I love that ad. It's one of the greatest Masters ads I think we ever created. IBM's a great company, there's no doubt about it. We have a long history. If you look back at the companies that were on the stock exchange when we were founded in 1911-
Josh King:
Right.
Noah Syken:
... IBM's still here. And at that particular time, the company was challenged. So I thought it was a great opportunity. I knew we had a great heritage. I knew about IBM research. I knew what we had been doing in the Olympics for many years, and I just looked at it as amazing opportunity to join the reinvention of IBM. And we continue to reinvent IBM. That's, I think, one of the special parts of our company, is that ERAS may come and go and leaders may come and go, but there's kind of an enduring ethos to IBM. And we keep reinventing ourselves, so it's great to be here today.
Josh King:
I mean, skip ahead 12 years, and you're now manager for IBM's Smarter Analytics Leadership Marketing program, which was really the company's number one growth initiative at the time. What was that program and how did marketing help actually grow the business?
Noah Syken:
Again, analytics is all around us today, but we were trying to help people understand getting their hands around their data and how it can help drive their business forward. So just like today, we were trying to spark people's imagination around analytics. We had some great products and services at the time. And it was foundational to everything that we stood for at the company at the time, but we continue to grow and move on to new things like AI.
Josh King:
Then starting in 2014, you began your current role. And one of those was the partnership with ESPN, helping them build out their fantasy platforms. And I was talking to Norb and Mark before you came in and they were going back on their fantasy drafts and full confession, the fantasy sports phenomenon has completely passed me by. But help unpack what the hold that has for so many millions of fans.
Noah Syken:
So I have a 21 year old, and I'm pretty sure that he loves his fantasy football team more than he loves the Jets and the Giants. We live here in New York.
Josh King:
That's amazing.
Noah Syken:
I actually think the ESPN program is one of the things I'm most proud of because it's really easy to recognize there's a great tennis event, there's a great football game, there's a great golf course. But fantasy football doesn't take place in a location. It takes place in a purely digital landscape. And we were talking earlier about people's consumption habits and how it's changed. And fantasy football is a perfect encapsulation of how people are engaging in sports in entirely new ways. They have their own team, they pay amazing attention to everything about that team and we get to engage over 15 million people every single week for four months straight. So these are things, some people just don't get fantasy football, but for the people that do, it's a lifestyle.
Josh King:
In one of the videos promoting the ESPN partnership, you said that unstructured data from Watson brings, I'm going to quote you here. "The power of enterprise grade AI to millions of people."
Speaker 18:
Every Sunday, the biggest game in the country doesn't take place on the grid iron. It happens in the ESPN fantasy app.
Noah Syken:
Over 10 million people use the ESPN fantasy app during football season, and that means billions of minutes in time spent playing our games.
Speaker 18:
But fantasy sports is more than just a game for many football fans. It keeps them connected to friends and family and is the primary way they enjoy the football season.
Josh King:
And Noah, that was four years ago, really four years before Chat GPT became a household word. It really is part of IBM's DNA, isn't it?
Noah Syken:
Yeah. Well, look along the line of my career here, I did have the opportunity to work on the Watson Jeopardy project. And so we've been on this journey a very long time.
Josh King:
So Noah, for most Americans, the name Watson is really synonymous with the evolution of your technology since Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess in 1997, but it's the really namesake of IBM's founder Thomas J. Watson back in 1914 when he ran the company until his death in 1956. How much hold does the old man's legacy have on you and your colleagues?
Noah Syken:
We often reflect on the Watson family, and again, the heritage. We talked about why I joined IBM. The guiding principles of client centricity are always not far from the surface when it comes to our work around IBM. And naming Watson was absolutely part of that. I had the opportunity to work on the project. I got a call one day in 2008 from IBM research and they said, we think we have a computer that can play Jeopardy. Can you help us? And from that point on, it was really all about bringing the legacy of Watson to life and bringing it forward to today.
Josh King:
As the Watson legend goes, IBM's Charles Lickel was in a restaurant one night when everything went quiet. Ken Jennings was in the middle of his 74 game run on Jeopardy, and everyone wanted to stop eating their steak and just watch.
Speaker 19:
And here it's, one day. This is the culmination of all this work. To be honest with you, I was emotional. I just thought about all the genius and all the talent of these researchers. I mean, they changed their lives, they changed the way they work, which is not always easy. They made this thing happen. When you look at that stage, you see Ken and Brad and Watson, and there's 30 people standing behind Watson. And that's just the core team. There's a whole army of people that have helped make this happen.
Josh King:
How was Watson eventually able to beat Jeopardy contestants on a regular basis, and how did the Jeopardy IBM challenge turn out and evolve into what Watson would be going forward?
Noah Syken:
Back to why I'm at IBM, I get to work with brilliant people. And how did Watson win? A lot of tireless dedication from IBM research and the entire team that worked on it and great collaboration with the producers of Jeopardy. We played, I forget the number, but over a hundred practice matches with Jeopardy champions over time, and we just refined the system, refined the system. And flash forward today, the DNA of that is still with us. Frankly, I laugh at all the focus on AI today. I say, where was everybody 12 years ago? And obviously the AI journey's been decades in the making, but this is just another stop on the journey of our AI innovations.
Josh King:
One part of your job includes IBM's sponsor partnership with Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. On Friday, my colleagues and I are going down to Atlanta for the Aflac College football kickoff. Tell us about how IBM's integrated stadium technology platforms really enhances a fan experience if you've got 80,000 people watching a game?
Noah Syken:
So whether it's Mercedes-Benz Stadium or some of the work we do up in Canada, the stadiums themselves are kind of living, breathing cities. They have all the kinds of dynamics around that. They have people need to get in and out. They need food and beverage. So these are a great kind of showcases for us. We get to work on the stadium, but we also get to work with the teams to develop their digital platforms for how they engage in stadiums. One of the use cases around generative AI today is chatbots and bringing chatbots for live use cases. Where's that bathroom? How long is the line? These are the kinds of things that we see businesses are going to need, whether it's a stadium or a bank who needs to service their customers.
Josh King:
Going really deeper into what you're just talking about now, that same video that I saw from your earlier career, you talked about Watson helping customers with, I'm going to quote you, "thousands of business scenarios where you're assessing value and making trade-offs. This is what the future of decision-making is going to look like. Man and machine working together." For IBM, where does sports end and business begin?
Noah Syken:
Well, I don't know if it does. Again, these are businesses. They call their customers fans instead of customers or clients. And so does a sporting event or a bank need to engage their customers, grow their customer base, generate more revenue, have a solid digital platform, embrace AI in new ways, have an amazing cybersecurity platform that protects these platforms from the bad guys? These are all the same needs that companies around the world have. So I really don't draw a distinction between sports and business at all. I think sports is probably one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. As a matter of fact.
Josh King:
I mean things have progressed for Watson since its use in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there's now IBM Watson Group. It works as a teaching assistant in schools. It's become a staple of weather forecasting, tax preparation. There's even Chef Watson. Where do you think the future's heading?
Noah Syken:
I think enterprises, I think businesses are going to make much more substantial use to it. I think the cat's out of the bag. I think everybody's now had an opportunity to touch it with their hands. And I think huge productivity is going to be gained in businesses. And that's not by replacing people, it's by making people better at what they do and supplementing them with new skills and new capabilities. So I'm really not a great forecaster of the future, but I think productivity is where we see the future of AI.
Josh King:
We began our conversation talking a little bit about the power index. As we wrap up, I've been spending some time this morning on where IBM's power index is for both the men and the women's singles. As of today, or when I left the office anyway, Novak had moved up to number one. Carlos dipped to number. Two on the women's side, coco and Iga are stable at one and two respectively. What goes into the power index? What accounts for maybe the world's number 15? Russia's Liudmila Samsonova, jumping nine spots from the 17th most favorable spot on the draw now to 12 in the span of just one day.
Noah Syken:
It's recency. Recent data. Again, how they played yesterday is probably pretty indicative of how they're going to play tomorrow. Coming into a tournament, we read millions of articles and words to actually hear what people are saying or what pundits and experts are saying. Is that player injured? How did they perform in Cincinnati or in DC? And then how they played yesterday is probably pretty important. So all that comes together on a daily basis to update those power ranks.
Josh King:
Does it dip into sort of the odd social media post where someone tweets and say, I think I just saw them turn their ankle?
Noah Syken:
We do have some protections. We use trusted sources of information. We work with the USTA, we work with our partners to make sure that data going into the model is appropriate to be used.
Josh King:
Where's this all headed? I mean, how do you think advances in AI technology are going to change the sports industry in the near term from growing global audience engagement to media coverage to really aiding more players and coaches as they evaluate their work?
Noah Syken:
Look, I think across the board, whether it's the stadium, the coaches, the broadcasters, the media companies, they're all going to find ways to create new experiences to evaluate their players better if you're an owner of a team. To evaluate yourself better if you're a player of the team. To provide a better experience to folks who come on site to get what they need. So I think we're really just at the starting point of the journey.
Josh King:
As we probe on what's next, I did read that IBM's running a proof of concept trial for new application that uses computer vision technology powered by AI to analyze streaming video footage really in near real time. How does the realtime video analysis work?
Noah Syken:
Yeah, so today we're using the data feeds coming off of the courts. We're not using vision yet. We're doing proof of concepts. But if you think about it, there's only so much information you can get from some of those structured data feeds. It's a passing shot, it's a winner, et cetera. The subtleties that we can catch from the video analysis is something that we think is going to enrich that content even more. Are there particular... We talked about patterns. Are there particular positions that the players take? We think that that vision actually provides a richer set of data that will supplement the structured data coming off of the court. So that's part of how we think about it.
Josh King:
Well, Noah Syken, I look forward to looking at my US Open app from IBM and going out on the court and watching some tennis and learning a little bit more and getting a little deeper into the power index.
Noah Syken:
Yeah. Well, thanks. Download the app for sure and thanks for the time. I appreciate it.
Josh King:
Thanks for joining us inside the Ice House.
Noah Syken:
Absolutely.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our Guest was Noah Syken, Vice President for Sports and Entertainment Partnerships at IBM. That's NYSE ticker symbol IBM. If you liked what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at icehouse podcast.
Our show is produced by Lauren Sullivan and Pete Ash with the production assistance and editing from Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you.
Speaker 1:
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