In the frenzy of excitement (and frankly, bubble inflating) about AI, there’s a confusion that I have seen emerge about the subtle difference between “automation” and “AI". This difference matters to the sports industry, because you need to be thinking about both, and how to take advantage of both approaches to make your work more efficient. So what is the difference?

Automation

We’ve had automation in our lives for a long time. Generally, automation involves using a mechanical or computational system to either remove or improve human intervention from a process. For example, a toaster automates the heating of bread and ideally avoids burning. Robotics help reduce error on a car assembly-line. And in sports business, we’ve been using automation steps to improve our marketing and sales for a while, including automating emails, social posts, or promotions.

Artificial Intelligence

The promise of Artificial Intelligence is possibility that our systems can learn from input over time. A well developed AI evolves as we communicate with it, and give it prompts to react to. Our toasters don’t generally improve because of the toast we put in. In theory, Claude and ChatGPT do evolve and learn from our input—in fact, how the learn, and how they ingest more inputs to learn is the subject of debate and litigation.

Why Does this Difference Matter?

While some sports executives (myself included) are experimenting and finding some value using Claude or ChatGPT or other AI, tools, to a large extent the sports industry is not as effectively leveraging Artificial Intelligence in our work. The performance-side of the business for some of the bigger sports teams are looking to use AI to find a competitive edge, but to a large extent, the AI that is being used in the front offices of the sports industry are "automations” that are branded as AI by tools that we are already using like our CRMs, or our Marketing Engines. Even our “generative AIs” that are making creative output (or writing emails) are not necessarily “intelligent” they are just automations that use a deep dataset of language to inform how they create.

Where does this confusion come from? Frankly, it’s the interface. Because we are chatting with an anthropomorphized (human-like) agent, we assume we are interacting with an AI. It feels like the automation is intelligent because they get better and better at passing the Turing Test.

Ok, But Why Does It Really Matter

It really matters to your work because understanding the difference will help you strategize when and how to use both approaches. Here’s some thoughts.

• You should look at every step of your sales and marketing processes to identify repetitive actions, and ask yourself, “could we automate this?”

• You should look at how you ingest data about your consumers (fans and partners) and ask yourself, “could we automate this?”

• When you look at your database (likely in your CRM) you should be asking yourself “how are we identifying patterns and learning from this?” (AI)

• When you deploy any new software tool (especially ones called AI) you should ask yourself, “does this tool get smarter as I use it?” (AI)

Harsh Truths

Automation and AI is coming for your sports business. Period. The question is, how ready are you for this transformation? At a minimum, it’s worth looking at how your business is being run from the standpoint of the difference between automation and AI. Both are valuable, and you need both, and it begins with a simple look at your operations.

Look | Think | Move just launched it’s first AI tool for the sports industry, Parla. It is an AI Fan Assistant that you can embed on your website or app that communicates with your fans and gets them the information they need, 24/7. No more looking at FAQs. No more digging for emails about transparent bags at the stadium. Immediate answers, custom branded for your business and in your voice. You can try a demo out today.