How new AI-powered tool will benefit fans and athletic departments

A new AI-powered tool is coming to an athletic department near you.

Satisfi Labs, a leader in conversational artificial intelligence, will launch Thursday its patent-pending Context LLM Response System. The new platform offers markedly advanced conversational AI to the company’s 450-plus clients in sports, entertainment and tourism, including a bevy of professional sports franchises and some two dozen major college athletic departments. 

Satisfi Labs, launched in 2014, has long offered an AI-powered platform that provides custom and conversational search engines for fans. But the new platform aims to provide a far more sophisticated and valuable chatbot tool for fans seeking answers to countless questions:

How much are tickets to the season opener?

Is there a senior discount?

Can I bring in a bag and a water bottle?

And because the technology aims to significantly streamline fan inquiries, it hopes to alleviate a potential source of friction for the already thin athletic department and university customer service staff across the country.

Calling it a “revolutionary technology advancement,” Satisfi Labs believes the comprehensive platform offers brands both evolved flexibility and control in conversational AI. And Don White, Satisfi Labs CEO and co-founder, characterized the enhancement as a “significant milestone” in the conversational AI space.

“The adoption has been excellent,” White told On3. “The uniqueness of college athletics is the number of sports that they have to support. This technology is going to really help, especially providing more diverse information for women’s sports – if you have a field hockey team, or if you have a lacrosse team. There are other sports that maybe the information wasn’t as easy to promote or wasn’t as accessible that this tech is now making accessible.”

Satisfi Labs’ collegiate client list is approaching 25 Division I athletic departments, including Mississippi State, Providence, Penn State, Georgia Tech and Florida. The company has added 85 new accounts overall so far this year, including Stanford, Miami and South Carolina. Ultimately, White believes, college athletics can be its largest client category, with potentially hundreds of partnerships.

Chatbots that understand what fans are ‘trying to do’

Satisfi Labs’ AI technology may not be something fans typically think about. But when they, for instance, need to unearth and assess a laundry list of logistics so they can bring their family to Saturday’s big football game, it could be invaluable. Making the information-gathering process more efficient is paramount.

Fans can access the AI-powered chatbots on the school’s sports website and in the athletic department’s app. The system supports voice conversation, but all interaction currently is deployed through text. And Satisfi expects that people will want to communicate through text.

The new technology will roll out in earnest among collegiate clients over the next six weeks before football season kicks off. White said some people’s general frustration with chatbots is “going to go away very quickly because they’re going to see a much different experience and have a much higher aspiration for what it should be.”

The platform aims to move conversational AI beyond traditional chatbot creation and management. It is designed to ensure that the chatbot’s answers are always on-brand and compliant, one of the features that Satisfi Labs believes distinguishes its technology.

The upgraded platform allows athletic departments to continually transact with real-time data and payment functionalities for AI chat commerce. Athletic departments can also anticipate fans’ needs and proactively provide relevant information. It combines the power of its contextual response system with large language model capabilities. 

White said the large language model is far superior in what he called intent detection, the ability to understand what the customer/fan is “trying to do.”

The enhanced chatbot can essentially take the fan by hand and help lead him/her to the desired location amidst a treasure trove of information. That contrasts starkly with the traditional process of trying to find precisely what you’re seeking on the athletic department’s website, which for some may be akin to finding the proverbial needle in the cyberspace haystack.

The new platform enhances the accuracy and granularity of user responses. An example of how this will impact the fan include combination questions, such as, “Can I bring in a water bottle and diaper bag?” It can be more easily generated. And questions that are heavy on context, which might have tripped up older platforms, can be understood and answered more conversationally – such as, “Someone has a banner and I can’t see, what should I do?”

‘You’re going to see a rapid transition’

To get a sense of how the chatbots can, in many cases, better streamline conversations with fans than college athletic department staff can, consider these metrics for Mississippi State’s and Providence’s fans’ use of Satisfi’s traditional chatbot: At both schools, 70% of all messages came outside of traditional business hours.

For Mississippi State, fans asked about more than 240 diverse topic categories. For Providence, AI Chat saved an average of 20 hrs of work a week in Q1 this year, which is equivalent to having a part-time employee.

White, who works with collegiate and professional sports clients, said an athletic director is uniquely positioned, mindful of both the next-generation consumer (students) and experienced consumer (donors). They understand that their student fan base transitions every four years. Plus, they understand the limits of human staffing.

“They have to be ahead of, I think, even some of these large [professional] sports teams that have 20-, 30-year followings,” White said. “I’m impressed with how detail-oriented they are. They know their business, their buyer, their student.”

In the future, White envisions, websites in general and athletic department websites specifically morphing into something very different. The decades-old habit of hunting through pages to navigate a website, “that is in the past.”

New website designs will emerge, his guess is next year, where the primary element on websites will be chats that open, similar to a Google-like bar, on the screen. And as you are typing, the enrichment around the chat emerges, displaying images you’re searching for or information on how to buy a ticket.

“It is going to become the center of all communication with websites,” White said. 

Satisfi’s new AI-powered product helps brands have automated, on-brand conversations with customers. The platform continuously learns from the community to create a data-rich experience that can answer questions, execute transactions, and collect unique data. As a result, the goal is for brands to maximize marketing, save staff time, and increase revenue.

“You’re going to see a rapid transition,” White said. “Our clients are being transitioned right now. You’ll see it’s been scaled. We gave them things to test in February, and now they have more things to try in July. So there’s a little crawl, walk, run. But then it’s going to be much faster after that.”