Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP528 Chat_UP Live - The Race to Build SportsbizGPT Pt1
What if we could fix the conference panel? You know the format—interesting people, good intentions, and about ninety percent of it forgotten by the time you reach the bar.
Chat_UP Live was held at FUSE headquarters in London. Rather than just another AI panel, we ran an experiment. Working with the team at TFG Labs, we built a custom AI co-pilot that captured the onstage conversation in real time, took in audience questions, and offered evidence-based responses that pushed the discussion in genuinely non-obvious directions. Think of it as a second brain for live events.
Did it work? Partly. Was it interesting? Very. This is test and learn in public—and we're sharing the results.
In this episode, you'll hear how we approached football club valuations with the system running behind us. If you want to interrogate the model yourself, there's a link in the Unofficial Partner Substack newsletter—but it won't be live forever.
Part two drops Friday, where we go deeper into the race to build the operating system for sports business.
A huge thank you to our friends and partners in this experiment, in particular the following people:
At FUSE: Helen Burford, Louise Johnson, Monica Conway, Zainab Zaman and Annabel Wilson, Lucy Basden Smith and Sean Betts.
At Twenty First Group: Blake Wooster, Andy Shora, Omar Choudhuri, Dan Zelezinski, Chris Woodcock and Conall Milligan.
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
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Hi there richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner, so this episode and the one on Friday is. Derived and based on a live event that we did in December, just before Christmas, in partnership with Fuse in the UK and 21st group. like you, I've been wondering what to do, what our position at Unofficial Partner is in relation to ai, to give it its banner headline, but things like large language models, co-pilots, foundational models, all those questions that we are all sort of bombarded with. And at the top end, quite often the conversation goes to the big foundational models chat, GPT, anthropic, Gemini, which one to go with. Is it a bubble? How much of our money is gonna go with it? All of those questions feel outta reach. But I'm very aware that there is something, there's a race going on within the sports business bubble, and there's gonna be winners and losers. And I thought it would be interesting just to try and do something different one of the aims was to. Just push a bit further than the usual panel chat format and to solve one of the problems of the conference format genre more generally, which is that we forget about 90% of what was discussed and we have little way of interrogating the views and opinions of those on stage beyond the q and a, which is a sort of flawed device quite often. So. We and I talk about we in a moment and who we are. We created a second brain, which a sort of copilot for the evening that captured not only the onstage conversation, but. It took in audience questions in real time. And then, and I think this is the really smart bit, offered up a range of evidence-based answers and then extrapolates on them to push the conversation forward in, in pleasingly sort of non-obvious ways. you'll hear us mention the visualization behind the stage, which lit up sort of common threads and, and there was a bit of theater involved. And again, I'll talk about how and why we did that as we go through. And I think this sort of thing will, I think quite quickly become the expected product in the conference world. It wasn't perfect. It was an experiment and it was all the more interesting and fun because of that. And. I've not seen it done in the same way. And it goes without saying that to achieve that level of sophistication requires deep tech and sports sector expertise. So we went to the smart people at uh, TFG Labs, which is the offshoot of 21st group, who essentially created the thing that we're gonna be talking about. It was a really fun experience, and I hope you that comes across in the podcast. And I wanna thank some individuals before we go any further. Helen Burford, who has been really supportive of the idea and instrumental really in making the whole evening work as well as it did the venue as superb. And we're hugely grateful to the team at Fuse, including Louise Johnson and Monica Conway and their team in particular, Zainab Zaman and Annabel Wilson. Thank you very much for your, time and effort and hard work. You are here on the podcast, Lucy Baston Smith, managing director of Fuse International, who took part on stage with her usual intelligence and smart insights. Sean Betts, who is Omnicoms lead when it comes to AI features heavily in Friday's episode, which is more of a deep dive into AI and its impact on the sport and marketing sectors, and we'll talk about that separately. Our other partners were 21st group. So again, a big thank you to Blake Worcester and his team, including Omar Chowdry, who you, you'll hear later on one of the panels, Andy Shoa, who built the model for the evening. Again, you'll hear through the podcast and also Dan Zelinski. I hope I said that right. Dan, chris Woodcock and Connell Milligan amongst others. So big, thank you. First up you hear myself and Andy Shoa. Just set up the first panel But also if this topic is interesting, I really recommend Friday's episode because again, it builds on this session, but also takes it much deeper into more of a conversation about AI and its deep implications, and it gets back to that question about who's gonna win the race, what are the characteristics of the winners in this race to build what we might call sport business, GPT, or Bloomberg for sport? Who knows? But keep listening. It's good. So I came with a, a really sort of ill-informed basic idea about, okay, well what could we do? And then I spoke to Andy and every time I had a meeting with him, he said, well, we could do this, we could do that. And I said, well, hang on a minute. You can't do that. That's ridiculous. So it just became, it just got a bit momentum and I mean, enormously grateful to the work you've done. Let's just talk about, first of all, TFG labs, first of all, and then we're gonna talk about what this is and what they're gonna do.
Andy Shora:Thank you, Richard. So I'm Andy Shoa. I'm head of TFG Labs at 21st Group. We are essentially the innovation arm of the company. We experiment with emerging technologies and introduce them into the sports industry.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. Right. So let's talk about what this is. What are we trying to do here? There were two phases. There's a first panel, which we'll explain in a minute, and then there's a second panel, which is more about AI itself. But let's talk about what we are doing here. What does this do?
Andy Shora:So we've designed a system just for this evening's event where we wanted to give you a kind of idea of how we think about ai and that is not really a chat bot that's gonna spew out wallpaper responses. It's not gonna be a useless summarizer of an evening that you're gonna get after the event, although, I dunno if you are gonna
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:I'm the useless summarizer, Don't, don't come for that gig.
Andy Shora:so you can ask questions or send in concerns or ideas. About the topic we're exploring tonight, and this isn't just gonna send back a response from an LLM that's trying to please you. Um, we have a number of principles that we follow where we break down problems. We wanna point AI at the right data to solve a task and not just respond with pleasing language.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:So the conceit, okay, we needed to be about something. So it needed to be about something in, related to the sports business. So what we've landed on is, We're gonna buy a a, a football club. So we're gonna look at the, the market for football and the football clubs. And the first panel is just gonna sort of pick apart the sorts of questions that would be useful, would be valuable and interesting. And the ultimate question is, well, can AI help this? And is it gonna actually improve or just make things faster? how can the audience get involved?
Andy Shora:so you should be all within close proximity of unsurprisingly a QR code, which you can scan. If you send it an email, click on the link, you can submit your question. I'm sure probably more emails are gonna get queued up than I've been testing with late at night. But within a few minutes, you are gonna see your response on the screen, and you're also gonna get an email back, which contains a lot more information than what you're gonna see here this evening. It actually contains strategic advice that's from our private company archives, which hasn't strictly been signed off by Dan, our CCO, but I'm, I've decided to give it away, um, since like all of the sensitivities removed, of course. And you're gonna get back some of our proprietary data. So some of our models, which might have club valuations, club ratings for this evening's event only. Okay.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. And what is this
Andy Shora:Right here you're seeing,, questions, being classified into six different areas. someone's just asked a question about fan engagement, for example. So we might see the yellow cloud burst in activity. we are gonna hopefully see towards the end of the evening the brightness of this visualization increase, which will represent the interactions that we've had here in the room tonight. And, and recency affects the speed of the clusters. So we are really hoping that the topics that the panel are talking about, will be soon represented behind them in terms of activity.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay? Right. So find that thing there. Point your phone at it and just ask whatever questions you like. We will, again, it's an experiment, this, and I want you to sort of come with that frame of mind. They're taking a risk here. It's okay for me and Sean. Unofficial Partner failure is sort of embedded in the DNA of Unofficial Partner Disapp. Vague disappointment is what we stand for, but other people, you know, are serious about this stuff. So take that. it could fail. There's a nice element of jeopardy to this. And I want to just thank Andy again while he wanders off too. Whatever that, whatever's going on over there. Dictionary corner. Perfect. Right. Round of applause for him and the football group. Can we get them on? So joining me, we have, uh, Maggie Murphy Fresh from her journey from Aston Villa, who's the, she's the managing director of Aston Villa Women. As everyone in the room knows, and we have Lucy Bain Smith, who's managing director of Fuse International has a shorter, route to the stage. And we have Omar c Choudry. Omar, I want you to set us up here because the job of valuing football clubs can you just give us a frame this for us, because. everyone in the the room will be saying, okay, well it depends on who the investors are. It depends on the sort of types of, um, the, the, the framing of what type of club it is. But just give us an idea and then we'll, we'll throw around some question ideas.
Omar Chaudhuri:Yeah, I mean that's exactly right. It, it. The valuation comes from the investor in the first place around what their overall thesis is. Um, and you can start with a thesis of, for example, um, wanting to find an undervalued asset, um, and seeing that there's potential to take advantage of natural growth in that that might be a chef at Wednesday, for example, today, um, you might have, uh, an investor who thinks about. Investing in kind of efficient, well run assets and can therefore ride the wave of a good management team. You might have investors thinking about completely different business model that might be women's football, that might be a play trading model where I'm gonna buy a club in France and, you know, be able to connect as clubs in Belgium and England and, and sell players and whatever that thesis is, you then assign a value to that based on where you think you're gonna be able to appreciate that asset value over the course of 5, 10, 15 years. Work out how much money you're gonna lose on the way because football clubs lose money. Um, they pretty much all lose money, men's and women's. Uh, and if you can get that equation to add up, then um, you know, you're
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:okay. So we are looking for Sleeping Giants Chef of Wednesday, or we are looking for, for not necessarily lower league clubs because we could start to say, right. Okay. Is there a, is the Premier League a good place to invest?
Omar Chaudhuri:It could well be. So, you know, if you take, uh, I dunno, a club like Arsenal today, I, I think if you, uh. Let's say the cronies were interested in seeking minority investment to support them in a different part of the business. You know, we, we are a big believer in supporting performance, kind of underpinning valuations of particularly men's clubs. But one of the things you might wanna know with Arsenal is their success recently. How much of that is ML Arta they found an amazing coach and therefore when he leaves, the whole thing is gonna collapse. Or they've built something more institutionalized within that. And so,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:and do we know the answer to
Omar Chaudhuri:well, that's one of the things that I guess we try and find out and maybe some of the, the kind of AI can help us understand and understand how does a team's performance vary based on different circumstances, different managers, different ownership, et cetera.'cause that, again, if you're an investor coming in and you're looking to invest in something that's already kind of working, then having a kind of feel for
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. Maggie, when I know you know this, but you were CEO of Lewis and that went, you went through a process of someone trying to buy you. You had Mercury 13 coming in and looking at the club. It didn't happen, but you, through that process, what did you learn about this question, about what the money wants from a football
Maggie Murphy:Well, first of all, I think the, the money is different there. You've had three, roughly, three motivations, a financial return. I feel like there's something in there around ego. You think you can do it better than someone else. You've got a better idea, you know what to do. Um, and then the third one might be about reputation, something like that. Like you're actually interested in investing into a, a big shiny club. Don't really care about the return. And it could be a sports washing on that end of the scale, or it could be just, you know, you really love to be aligned with a nice London club. So I think there's three motivations and then. That doesn't really matter. Um, if you don't have the cash to fulfill those ambitions, you can ramp up the cash, you can ramp it down, or you might not be able to ramp it up or down. And then the control element as well, there's no point you wanting to go and control, have a, have a majority control if you don't have the cash. Um, or if you don't have the ego. If you don't, you know, that's, it's like cash. I think you can ramp up and down control, you ramp up and down and then maybe level of certainty you ramp up and down because you might wanna go into a very, very stable club. or you might want to go straight into a top tier if you want to be more sure, or you want to go into a closed league if you want to be more sure. But if you're happy with the level of risk and uncertainty and jeopardy and excitement, then you might be more likely to be in a free flowing position or be lower down and think that you've got scope to grow. So I think just on the very first basis, the, the money is different. And I don't think this consortium here has come to an agreement. I'm not sure in the drinks whether you did as to what kind of a investor we are.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. If I am a sort of hardnosed American, private equity is sort of method acting here, but what, what will I then want?
Lucy Basden Smith:I imagine you want something that is probably for the future, as supposed to the past. So maybe, am I right in thinking that you'd probably want something where they have an amazing digital infrastructure that then a really kind of active fan group? You'd probably want a good base of sponsors and maybe a famous, I imagine you'd want a, a famous football club that's gonna give you a big brand with security through merchandise and a maybe a, a pretty good commercial, base to it in the first But then would you also want, like how embedded into the community would you want it, would you want with it like lots of land or you just looking at a team with a big stadium and a, and a big, and a big fan
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:So you're getting to quality of the operations. Athletico, Madrid Springs to mind here.'cause obviously that's a recent. case. and one of the stories running is that it's very much a property buyer where is a, you know, with a football club attacks that might be doing Athletico down a bit, but that's one of the readings of it, is that,
Omar Chaudhuri:yeah, and I think the really interesting thing with private equity, you know, you think about the, the life cycles of funds, you know, five to seven doesn't tend to work in a football context because there's so much uncertainty that exists in any given year. You know, if you were to, you know, try and understand what's the probability Spurs making the Champions League each it's probably never gonna be above 30, 40%. And so some years you'll, you'll be really high, and some really low. And, um, and so with Athletic and Madrid, and you look at private equity investing in Chelsea, you, there's an element there of trying to pay a premium for a level of certainty. That sporting product because, you know, Athletica probably qualified, majority of the last 10, So that's, that's one of the things that private equity is looking for is certainty in a pretty uncertain
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:So a bigger club in a less competitive league is a better bet for private equity.'cause you can guarantee, you know, they can guarantee champions league football more than Spurs camp because as you say, we're a, we're a mercurial, that's word.
Omar Chaudhuri:but even a club in Denmark, like an FC Copenhagen or a Belgian club, like, have got uncertainty around, around their revenues and around Champions League for them might be worth
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Maggie, there is a button there in gray community. What does that mean and where is the value do you think, if you, under that enormous heading of community, what does it mean in football terms terms of valuation?
Maggie Murphy:Yeah. It's, it is interesting coming in and seeing, and I dunno what's going on behind my head with this big visualization behind me. But I, I thought it was interesting because that's the first time I've seen it, just so that everyone is aware and those kind of six categories are slightly different from the categories that I would've chosen when thinking about building a, a football club. But maybe just because I need.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:so add, add a couple of categories. We're not gonna put'em on the ball. Uh,
Maggie Murphy:That's fine. We don't know. We don't have to change everything just for me. Um, but like, say take, um, you were talking about community. I think there's something in there about people full stop and obviously you're looking at the quality of your players, your quality of your, um, AC academy, like the potential that you've got in there, but you've also got the quality of your staff. And I think the, the leadership there and their relationships and connections and connectivity with the local community. For example, there might be access to land that you can purchase, but only if you've got a good relationship with your local council. That's quite a difficult different thing for you to be able to monitor and just check from the outside doing a scan. You, you don't understand people relationships when it comes to, uh, people. You can also then include your, your fan base. Are they active? Are they not active? Do you have a lot of fans? Do you have few fans? I think that this is a really important thing. Again, coming back to the motivations of your investor, because in some cases an investor might not actually want a big fan base, and I know that sounds counterintuitive, but this comes back to your motivations So let, let me give you a real life example, and this is just me throwing out propositions to the floor. During the, um, negotiations, the conversations we were having with Mercury 13 around potentially investing into to Lewis, we have a very active, um, and very vocal and punchy fan base. They have opinions, they care deeply about the club. The first investment that went into a club in the championship went to London City Lionesses through Michelle Kang. They had a very limited fan base, close to just a few hundred people. Didn't care that much. There was no, uh. Big fan base that was going to push back, but also you didn't have a fan base that was gonna buy shirts and it was gonna show up on day one. So the investor there is taking a completely different track and they're thinking, we don't actually want a major fan base. We'd actually like to go in clean sheet, build it from scratch. We are willing, we've got the cash, we want the control, and we, we know that we can invest into this and the fan base will come and we're gonna focus on the product first, and then we'll figure out the rest. So I think that's like a, when you think about community, your fan base, a big fan base, a boisterous fan base can be brilliant, but not necessarily in the eyes of the investor.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. And what about, so Lucy, what about this, let's, let's just pursue this then. You've got fan base, you've got audience. One of the stories of the last few years has been Ryan Reynolds and Rexam. How does that play in, do you think, into the sort of total value scheme? Is, is Ryan Ryan Reynolds experiment, is that useful or is it, do you think it's an outlier?
Lucy Basden Smith:I think it's a DI think he's shown a different way of, of running a club, of introducing different audiences. I think in Europe, everyone has done football in a particular way for a, for a long time. And he's shown that actually the. A global audience is very useful. I like the fact that he's taken and championed a team with a really strong community that aren't at the, that were definitely not at the top of their game. And then he's created an entirely new revenue stream through, uh, through streaming, through what that's opened up with regards to just even celebrity, just that the power of celebrity, that celebrity endorsement, and then how he's lent into the community on it. I dunno, like Maggie, how important or how detrimental would it be then if you're investing in a club that where the fans have equity, does that make a big difference? Like not just a voice, but
Maggie Murphy:I, I guess again, it, it kind of comes down to the kind of investor that you are and the kind of level of control you want. I mean, there's plenty of clubs take Brentford, they have a seat, um, at the table, which is a fan that they protect representation and equity on the board for the fans. The fans are represented by, I think somebody that's on the foundation, but is, you know, coming at it from a fan perspective. Plus the owner there is a fan. So there are instances where you have highly successful clubs that are highly influenced by a fan base. For me, it kind of comes a little bit back to the governance and maybe the purpose of what your club is if, do you have a really clear purpose? And maybe that's another, does the club have a clear purpose and does the investor have a clear purpose and do they align because they were very clear with the Rex in case they did want to be part of a regeneration project and you know, they wanted it to be part of something bigger than the club and prove that football could have a massive impact
Lucy Basden Smith:Well,'cause I don't, I don't know whether they would've had the story without the So I I don't think they could have done the, um,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:my question was wrong, wasn't it, in that way, in that sense, because actually I, I was saying that question was more about fan bases in Western the US rather than the local
Lucy Basden Smith:like Birmingham
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:it was a Yes, exactly.
Lucy Basden Smith:they're, so they, they've come in and then the, all of their, the, their bigger partners are now global partners. But then actually their story, I imagine will then become a community story. Because if they're then building out, the ambitions that you, you're reading are true around them, creating a sports quarter Birmingham, I imagine it'll go from a global piece in the first a community piece in the second. how that translates to what we see or consume from a media point of view or how it's streamed or how we find out about it. I don't,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Oh, Omar, there's some, some very interesting questions coming up that are channeling over what, if you could just flick through, there was one from Ed dunno who Ed R is. We might get might, he might actually exist in real life, here we go. We go. I've got it. are you able to quantify the level of irrationality in a given football club valuation relating to an owner's ego status fandom versus what would typically contribute to a rational valuation, which is commercials? So can you quantify the irrational, the ego?
Omar Chaudhuri:Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I think you probably can to a degree. I, I think you can. You can look at ultimately, like football club is, is it the, I always forget the terminology. Is it the winner's curse? Like whoever kind of is bidding for a club, you end up ultimately overpaying. And I, I think that's partly a kind of function
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:of does I, I looked at that and thought that. It's getting to a sort of product and brand question, because I think there might be a correlation between measuring the, the intangible of a brand and the ego irrationality of Todd Boley. And whether or not that is a similar process someone will jump in with econometrics or whatever, but there might be a way that you could get to a part of the question. One of the bits that we're gonna get to in the second part of this is actually can AI help with these questions? So we're storing up these questions and then actually we're saying, right, well, is it just a fast idiot, or are they actually going to help us do the really difficult
Maggie Murphy:I think there's also some rational irrationality. So for example, you might put in all the things that you really want from a club, and then it spits out that you should buy Plymouth Argyle, and then you're like, I, I don't wanna go down to Plymouth.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Maggie Murphy:Plymouth is lovely, but it's it, you know, you you might just be like, actually I'm flying in, flying out. I can't fly in, fly out to Plymouth. So there is like some level of rational irrationality.
Omar Chaudhuri:Yeah, and it, there's also, I mean, everyone talks about the losses that that championship clubs make. If you kind of do the maths on it the probability is that someone will win, someone will get promoted, and they will make money because the valuation of their club goes million to or 300 But a small subset is winning. The rest are all losing. So ultimately most people who get into it, probability you'll lose, value is that you'll win. And, and so there's a, as you say, a rational
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:but the, the, we just did a thing with Brentford and they are always the case study.'cause it's a, you know, we're in the English market and there's, there's variations of this across Europe I'm sure. But are Brighton and Brentford have they sort of sold a false dream?'cause you look at someone like Ipswich and we had the people from Ipswich on, you know, a couple of years ago and their plan was, let's get to the Premier League. They did and then they're back down again. What does that do? Is that just Okay, once you get into that yo-yo category? Yeah. Does that mean that you are better off than Ipswich five years ago?
Omar Chaudhuri:Firstly, I mean, there's a lot of luck involved. So Brighton Brentford in their first season, first couple of seasons in the Premier League, they weren't a million miles off being relegated, uh, for both those clubs. They would've had a 20, 30% chance of being relegated a given point in those season. So there, there was another narrative where those, another universe, an AI universe or whatever
Speaker 28:sliding
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:doors Yeah.
Omar Chaudhuri:exactly. Where they, where those teams go but they're able to stay up and then reinvest, et cetera. So there is a kind of flywheel effect that a lot of clubs, to, benefit What those clubs have demonstrated though, is that you can massively punch above your weight if you've got some level of operational organizational intelligence that, that enables you to do that. And again, with some of the metrics, behind me, like speak to how do you find those clubs that are doing, so with very
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:I've got a question before and, and we're going to sort of spin the groups in a minute. When buying a women's club, do we know what that is now if you're looking at it from a 10 year perspective, Sevens is that one bet might be that sevens becomes the thing that sets the thing a light in a commercial sense and that goes off and becomes a sort of 2020 of women's football. Is that a realistic, is that a conversation that you think is being had?'cause you've pop these sevens competitions are coming up a lot of money attached, so they're getting the attention
Maggie Murphy:I think it's a separate podcast, probably. I think, um, I think there's still lots of uncertainty, right? And so again, coming back to that phrase of like dialing up or dialing down, you need a lot of cash. You have to be happy with not very much certainty, but with that you do get a lot of control over where you're investing. So you've had about a hundred million, I think, dollars, um, put into the World Sevens, uh, format, which has only had one competition just at, in the summer, just gone. It's got this next one in the US in a couple of weeks time. I assume there'll be another one in six months time in Europe. Um, and I do think that there is a potential that if that builds momentum interest, uh, the first one was popular. More digitally than in person, but there was a level of intrigue and popularity that, yeah, I do think that there is a potential world where in five years time you go to Arsenal's website and you have men's, and then you have Women's First Team Elevens, and then Women's First Team Sevens. And it might be that they're completely different types of players are being produced for a competition that is lucrative, that gathers its wheels, like what's the flywheel effect and then takes off. But there's so many things that have to come into play for that to even
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:And the investment, the investment thesis of that is gonna be
Maggie Murphy:a big, A big gamble? Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. Right. We're gonna talk ai, thank you very much, football panel. But we're gonna, yeah. Round of applause, right? Okay. We're just gonna do a quick debrief. And how was it for you? What was going on over there?
Andy Shora:So we had way more interaction than we expected, but very pleased to say nothing fell over, we had over 40 questions from the audience.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Excellent. That's good.
Andy Shora:As well as, as well as, um, quite a few input from the panel discussions and, um, I can assure you there are quite a diverse range of questions
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:okay, so can we access those post-event?
Andy Shora:You can access them now and yes, we're gonna let this live on with a, a quick scan over the content. I'm sure everything will probably survive.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Right Just very finely, just so I know for sure. So if people point their phones at that thing, they'll get access to that and they'll be able to interrogate the questions, the conversation we've had this evening. But also it takes them several stages further than that,
Andy Shora:Yes. So on another page, which we haven't surfaced here. Um, we've actually got AI to suggest some AI solutions that could be built to address problems. It's a bit like inception. Um, I've had to feed in actually a lot of strategy on how we think about AI to try and guide these systems. Um, we've also laid out some TFG strategy, how we would approach problems or concerns that you might have. We obviously won't leave this interactive system live forever because we still need to do this kind of work and make money, but for this evening, we'll let it live for a little bit longer before we freeze it for everyone to take home and
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. So it's a sort of reward for turning up for these people in the, uh, in the room, I came to you and 21st group and Blake and I said, I've got a sketchy idea, the sort of thing I'd like to do. I don't wanna talk about AI and I wanna just, you know, have something, some theater, but also just see if we can test something on the night. And then that obviously fell to you. What was your initial of feeling and how did it evolve
Andy Shora:So initially when I, when I heard you ask, I wanted to do something different from what people would expect at an AI event, and I think, I think I'm aware of. How everyone's using AI at work and the various frustrations that attached to that. And, um, everyone's fully expecting a chat bot to be going nuts and outputting a, a load of wallpaper responses or maybe on the other end of the spectrum, providing useless summaries that skip details and not really adding anything to a live event. So. This brief being a live event and supporting a panel in a live discussion is quite unique in the sense that a client would never come to us with that kind of problem. And if we're answering a complex question, we wouldn't be limited by say, what we could show on a big screen to be digested in in a few seconds.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:okay, so there's a, I'm just trying to think if you had like a, you were narrowed by. The bot as an idea,'cause we'll talk about that in a minute. In terms of exactly as you say, people's sort of usage currently is chat bots and language models. And we are bumping into all of the sort of questions that, know, everyone's got about hallucinations and summaries and all of that stuff. So it's quite a difficult. in some ways a challenge that isn't so much technical as more of a sort of, what does it look like? Performing AI on stage.
Andy Shora:Yeah, so there, there's two elements. we wanted audience participation, so we needed to provide something compelling from a visual sense. Um, obviously we don't want people's eyes glued to a screen, but, you know, why wouldn't we wanna create a piece of art that could surround the panel and almost subscribe to the feeling in the room and to not guide the conversation in the sense taking over from, from your role on the night, Richard, but. So you provide a feeling of topics people were interested in and the parts of the, the discussion that people were engaged with in the room. So we wanted to provide something interactive and, and, and something useful when also something beautiful. You know, you, you attend an event like this in the evening and you expect to both learn something about A, but ai but also be inspired. So it was a lot of boxes to tick for us.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:and by the way, I was sort of over by it. So again, as we said many times on the, you know, on the, on the way into doing the event, took my sort expectations and blew them up so it was quite interesting. And again, you get to the difference between someone like me and my expectations and someone like you and your expectations in terms of what's possible, and people who were there saw on the screen, it was sort of visualized really nicely and you had these questions. So, and then you get to. Okay, it's about football and the, football acquisition and the value of football. So we had a part of the conversation with, Omar, Lucy and Maggie, where were just talking about football valuations and, then trying to sort of categorize the questions in some way to give the model something to play with. And so how did that work for you, you know, on the, on the night in terms of,'cause we gave the audience the route in and they, then what happened?
Andy Shora:So, yeah, audience were allowed to email in questions, and that was relatively easy to handle from an automation perspective, but in a dream world, and perhaps something we weren't able to accomplish was to have a, a live transcription of, uh, the conversation on the stage being the inputs of the system, and using those as stimuli to go off. Do some work and come back with something useful. Now, it was a technical challenge that dealt with a large magnitude of data, and ultimately it was the, uh, the technical stuff on the night, which we, we couldn't stand up, so we decided to manually splice out some of the conversations from the stage, provide them as input. label them and, you know, within I'd say 30 to 60 seconds, we had the output of a, a long automation pipeline that was relevant to the point of the discussion and could be shown on the screen, and also could activate part of our brain visualization to indicate that particular spoke of the topic was, was now active.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:So, complicated a thing? Was it because I, you showed me the workflow and the, the sort of diagram or, you know, the, what was happening diagrammatically how complex was it cause it feels like the idea was really sound. The process, actually, we created something that was really interesting and we'll talk about what actually came in in a minute. But how difficult was it for you?
Andy Shora:It was difficult from, the magnitude of work that had been done had to be done. What was difficult? Um, Eileen heavily on AI tools, but even then. That kind of increases my productivity to a certain level, but can also introduce a lot of problems. So, I mean, if you imagine a big decision tree, would take an input from an, from a person on the panel and it might ask questions like, is this a request for data for analysis? Or it might say. Is this a stimuli which needs some more context? Do I need to go and look up what this person's referring to? Should I find a football club that's been in this situation and find out what happened in order to advise, um, the conversation going forward? So many parts of a decision tree can be followed. In reality, this decision tree had many, many parallel paths. And, and let's be clear, automation and programming, nothing new. Um, but right now we're seeing automation platforms explode because of the ability to plug in large language models into them. And, and that can help in a couple of big ways. The first is helping alignment with the user. So that is the marriage of, it's the calibration of the system against what the user intends to do. And sometimes if the user input is very small, if the prompt is quite lazy, that's a very difficult challenge. And ultimately how the system behaves without any back and forth for clarification in an event like this, can be unexpected. And so. Large language models also help us decide which tools to cool. So if we don't want an LLM to kind of provide us with financial data, we have a source for that in a database which we trust. An LLM can. Read all of the tools we have access to. It can read the task at hand and it can decide to execute some code. It could even write code and execute it, but that's kind of dangerous. So automation combined with large language models, um, is simple to, uh, to an engineer. Um, the architecture. Composing all of those kind of decision tree nodes and all of those pathways and testing the system with, huge, huge number of potential inputs and validating outputs is the difficult part.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:when I, I was thinking, in the run up to, and part of it was to just sort of test what's possible. Again, just purely from someone who does a lot of events and sits on lots of panels and, you know, does these things on a regular basis. I was wondering language models are gonna then help improve and where they will improve and where they'll help and where they won't. And that's part of the fun of, you know, and part of the experiment and trying to work out well, is this what a conference panel is gonna be like now? And when you say we have got data by, by that you mean 21st. Group have got data, and the reason we used football as a sort of route in is that you've got a very rich heritage of collecting data in football. So it's not something that someone's gonna be able to do from scratch without that well of. Is it, it's gonna, I'm, I'm trying to get to the point and say, right, okay. Is this gonna be something that people will quickly become the normal expected product at a conference? what you are saying is
Andy Shora:No,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:that's gonna be quite hard.
Andy Shora:that's absolutely right. I mean, without proprietary data, anyone providing a system that can react to a live event is essentially a, a glorified Microsoft clippy. And that's, that's what not to aim for. Okay. So providing no value, anyone has the same tools at hand. What companies are doing right now, like, like GFG, we are sitting on loads of proprietary data, which perhaps we didn't even know had any value a few years ago. Um, a completed project had a process we followed, which yielded success. It might have been a very niche project. We obviously have more defined processes for problems we commonly solve, and in the context of advising owners and investors of football clubs, um, how to make decisions. We have a whole archive of, proprietary data and a lot of that can be sanitized. their processes we codify and follow internally and so they can be used in the context of problem solving at an event. A lot of questions that come up, uh, are not novel problems and they have solutions. I'm a romantic and I love the organic discussion and the chaos in the live event. And although I'm a, a technologist, I'm quite skeptical of how much of these things need to be driven by ai. And so I want AI to be piloted by humans, and I want it to in enhance the value of attending, uh, live events.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree. And I think I probably, you are trying to fix bad events in some way, and actually a good panel or a good conference or whatever it is, need this addition. So actually you'll probably, you know, and this is me, I'm starting in a different place. I'm thinking, okay, well how would you solve a problem like conferences? Be better at conferences would be one starting point and not throw, you know, AI at it. And so I was trying to be very clever about, you know, wanting a conversation about AI itself and then having this other bit of on, on football and I, my. Reflection is that the bit about AI was, was interesting. The bit about football was interesting, but these, these two things weren't connected particularly, I didn't make that link between them. So there was a sort of, the bridge between those two, two panels didn't work and that was a human failing IE mine rather than, uh, you know, a sort of technical one. But I think that's a really quite an interesting learning. We came in here with, was about test and learn and, let's see what happens and learn in public. So I'm, I'm pleased with that and I think I've learned a lot in terms of managing, I think it's about managing my own expectations, and I think that's probably true of my relationship with large language models more generally, actually.
Andy Shora:Well, I think you're, you're quite hard on yourself there, Richard. I mean, it was one big experiment. Um, we did try and cram a lot of ambition into the event and, and when you say, you know, we're aiming to provide a conference, you know, an event people will talk about and remember. When you compose panels of guests, they each come with different, you know, very diverse set of abilities. some are there to educate, some are there to be your authority. Some are, some are perhaps there to entertain and provide a bit of chaos. And the ideal composition is probably a bit of a mix and, um. I think when you have a system like, you know, AI is responding to all of the inputs from the various people, those nuances, those differences in personalities and the people's intentions aren't picked up upon. And unless it, it is calibrated that way, it's very difficult to tune into somebody, um, and provide the optimal kind of. Piece of material on the screen to support them because some people don't need any, um, whereas the educational perspective perhaps would warrant flashing up some supporting data which they could use to flow into the next conversation.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:I, it's something I think about quite a lot at the moment, which is, it's not the use of it as a live tool, which is what we It's actually afterwards. And I think about this, about podcasts that e everything becomes sort of input for someone else's language model. there's some questions for us as an organization, you know, in terms of Unofficial Partner to say, right, okay, well what, what are we doing? Where is the value? And actually. We've tried a few times to say, right, okay, what? What about taking a podcast or a series that we do and running it into and just collecting the transcripts on a very basic level making that available to listeners and subscribers for them to just go and interrogate. using, you know, notebook, LM or some other, or Claude or whatever their chosen sort of, uh, foundation model is. So I, I think that at the moment, I think that's where we are. And sometimes I, I, the conference is probably the same in that you sit there, interesting or it isn't But it's a different. Medium, but actually afterwards I think, okay, well that was quite interesting, but I've remembered about 5% of what's gone on. It would be quite useful to have the transcript and then to interrogate afterwards, and then extrapolate using model's sort of capabilities. So I think that's probably where I think the initial value is gonna be and where we will sort of try and push. Do you think, do you, do you see what I'm getting at?
Andy Shora:I do. It is a really interesting, um, point to discuss and, and I don't necessarily agree with you that you should open your transcripts and allow people to interrogate it. It kind of reminds me of the difference between reading a book and being able to reread passages and providing those, you know, you can pause on demand and, and think about something. Everyone interprets passage of text in a different way when they are reading it in their voice, and compared to a summary of a book, you know, I, I've seen various services over the years that would make you think you've read a book by either listening to a five minute audio summary or, or reading one. And particularly the audio one put somebody else's monologue in your head. And for me, it doesn't provoke as much. You know, an internal discussion and doesn't leave me as inspired. So I think it, it really does help hearing your voice and holding, hearing your guests talk about what they're, they are experts at and what they are passionate about.'cause that that passion in someone's voice can resonate with various. Parts of your own brain and it can trigger thoughts that simply wouldn't happen if you were asking a chat bot a.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with that. I think as we move forward, it's the co-pilot role in many ways in that you are sort of, you are watching something, listening something or reading something, and got questions like you always have, and it, it, gives you somewhere to go with those questions. And I think it's sort of training us in a, in a way in terms of how we're consuming So I think I can sort of see, both events, but also podcasts and also just written material being in the context of something bigger and something broader and deeper that is available. Now, some, not everything needs to be interrogated to that level of degree, but when it is. Is incredibly useful.
Okay, so that was it, and thank you for listening. That was part one of our AI experiment Part two is going out on Friday of this week, which is a deep dive into the broader questions and that issue of the race to create an operating system, the definitive operating system for the sports business, which we explore in the second. Panel from the event, and we then back that up with, again, some review material that takes it a stage further. Now, if you are interested in. This topic we have for a short period of time, the opportunity for you to go in, have a look at the model that Andy at, TFG Labs created for the evening for chat up live. So that link will be in the Unofficial Partner Substack. Newsletter. So if you have got this far, well done and if you want to go and find it there, it will be there. It's very interesting deep dive. It takes the questions that people asked on the night, and comes back with lots of insightful detail from the Data Bank of 21st group. So thank you very much to them for allowing you to have the access to that. Again, it won't be forever, but uh, go in, have a look, see what you think. It gives you some context on the conversation that we've just had, and look out on Friday for the next podcast. Until then, this is Richard Gillis signing off and it's Unofficial Partner, the Sports Business Podcast. Cheers.