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