AI Native NBA Slam Dunk Strategy: How the San Antonio Spurs Take a Human Centered Approach to AI Adoption

The webinar, hosted by Natalie Cone, focused on the integration of AI in sports management, exemplified by the San Antonio Spurs' innovative approach. Charlie Kurian, Director of Innovation and Strategy, and Jordan Kolosey, VP of Business Strategy, shared their experiences and strategic insights on adopting AI to enhance fan engagement and operational efficiencies across the Spurs organization. They discussed the critical role of strategic planning, cultural acceptance, and leadership support in successfully implementing AI technologies. The session highlighted specific applications, such as the creation of a custom GPT to leverage historical content for decision support, underscoring the tailored use of AI to meet organizational needs. Both speakers emphasized a human-centered approach in technology adoption, focusing on creating tangible benefits for both fans and the internal team. The webinar illuminated the Spurs' forward-thinking strategies in AI, providing a model for other organizations considering similar technological integrations in the sports industry.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the OpenAI Forum. I'm Natalie Cone, your community architect.

We launched the OpenAI Forum in 2023 to collaborate with interdisciplinary experts in pursuit of our mission, ensuring that artificial general intelligence, AGI, benefits all of humanity. Since then, the forum has brought together a community of Nobel laureates, touring award winners, leading faculty researchers, and more than 10,000 expert practitioners from diverse fields to foster meaningful dialogue and create tangible opportunities to shape the development of OpenAI's technology.

As a bridge between OpenAI and expertise beyond our walls, the forum helps us collectively imagine and build a positive future with AGI.

This event is the beginning of a new era, and only the second live stream that we're performing for the public. We are now going to begin to share the expert talks hosted by our community with you all.

Tonight, we get front row seats to learn how Charlie Kurian, director of innovation and strategy, and Jordan Kolosey, VP business strategy, innovation, and data operations for the NBA's San Antonio Spurs are leading the charge in AI adoption. The Spurs recently became the first team in the NBA to roll out an org-wide enterprise chat GPT initiative.

I don't know if you all know this, but I'm a San Antonio native and a huge Spurs fan, old school Spurs fan. I did taekwondo with Sean Elliott. David Robinson used to visit my elementary school. I cheered for Manu Ginobili for years and years, and now my 14-year-old son is a huge fan of Victor Webinyama. So tonight is a really special event for me.

Charlie is director of innovation and strategy at the Spurs. He's a visionary leader at the forefront of sports innovation, combining a decade of experience in venture capital, consumer tech, SaaS, and global strategy to redefine industries and drive transformative growth.

His innovative mindset has fueled projects generating over 500 million in revenue and has positioned the Spurs as pioneers in cutting-edge technology and business strategy.

From orchestrating the launch of iPhone 6, the most popular iPhone in history, to reimagining the global business model for the RFK Center for Justice alongside Kerry Kennedy, Charlie has consistently turned bold ideas into impactful realities.

He was instrumental in helping the NBA break into the Indian market, inspiring over 18 million kids across five years, and has earned the trust of sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East to steer billion-dollar investments into transformative early-stage startups.

At Spurs Sports and Entertainment, Charlie has championed initiatives that blend innovation and strategy, making the organization a leader in sports technology. He led the adoption of AI-powered fan engagement platforms, integrated immersive technologies like AR and VR, and made history by launching the first-ever NBA team deployment of ChachiPT Enterprise. His work continues to drive cultural shifts and set new benchmarks in the industry.

Charlie's expertise in human-centered design, behavioral science, and market strategy has shaped solutions replicated across industries, bringing value on a global scale. Whether shaping technology used by millions or forging pathways for next-generation innovation, Charlie's ability to envision the future and execute with precision has made him a sought-after leader and trusted voice in business.

Jordan Kolosey is a data-driven leader in sports and entertainment, bringing over 15 years of experience across six different professional leagues to his role as Vice President of Business Strategy, Innovation, and Data Operations at the San Antonio Spurs.

Passionate about using data to enhance fan engagement, drive innovation, and build stronger communities, Jordan is committed to creating memorable experiences that deepen connections between teams and their fans.

Originally from St. Petersburg, Florida, Jordan played four years of collegiate basketball before earning a BA in economics and an MBA from Rollins College.

His career has been defined by a unique blend of analytical expertise, strategic leadership, and a love for the game, making him a dynamic force in shaping the future of sports business.

Outside of work, Jordan is a proud father to Scarlett, 4 years old, and Jude, 2. While his last dunk attempt in 2017 was a success, he no longer plans to try again, ever.

Wade Morgan has a passion for innovative people and companies, particularly those who push boundaries and redefine the status quo. This admiration for trailblazers led to this deep love for the tech industry, a space Wade sees as fostering freedom and empowering individuals.

Wade began his career at LinkedIn in the Business Leadership program, launching his journey into go-to-market and sales as an account executive in Talent Solutions. He later joined Airtable as the company's second account executive, where he played a key role in laying the foundation for the sales team during a period of rapid growth.

Seeking to bridge the gap between go-to-market and product development, Wade transitioned to Airtable's product team, contributing to the establishment of the company's product development strategy and operations function.

Currently as a member of the go-to-market team at OpenAI, Wade is dedicated to helping organizations create transformational AI-driven experiences that benefit humanity.

Outside of work, Wade is an avid sneaker enthusiast and performance car aficionado. He admits to spending way too much time, way too much on sneakers, and indulging in countless car reviews on YouTube.

Later, we'll also be joined by Charlie's team, Andre Moyse, Associate Director of Retail Strategy, and Raghavi Nimmala, Behavioral Economist at The Spurs.

For now, please help me welcome to the stage, Charlie, Jordan, and Wade.

Wow, I need to carry Natalie around everywhere that I go. I feel so, so honored and really excited to kick off today, to welcome you, Charlie, and to welcome you, Jordan. Thank you all very much for taking the time to connect with us and to connect with the community.

Where I thought would be great for us to start, after such a wonderful introduction, is really just on acknowledging that I think you both occupy some really cool seats. Obviously, a lot of the folks in the crowd, I imagine, are big sports fans, big basketball fans, but also big technology fans. We'd love to maybe just start with how you got to where you are today and really what inspired you to really want to work at the intersection of sports, technology, and more.

Maybe we can start that with you, Jordan.

Absolutely. The intro, the very wonderful intro, thank you, Natalie, said I played four years of basketball. For a long time, that was my life. When I was in school, my playing time was coming to an end, and I needed to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wasn't going to play overseas. Ultimately, I did what other folks in my business school were doing and got a finance internship. I did that for the better part of a summer and realized pretty quickly that that was not what I wanted to do with my life.

I quickly thought of the coolest thing I could think of. Growing up in Central Florida, working for the Orlando Magic, this was Shaq and Penny's heyday. That was the coolest thing I could think of. I landed an internship. Internship became a full-time role. Full-time role became a career. Very fortunate to have watched the industry blossom. My career arc has really mirrored a lot of the growth of analytics in sports as well as adoption of a lot of cutting-edge technology.

I think one thing you realize pretty quickly working in professional sports is you can end up looking pretty smart by peering outside of the industry and seeing what the best practices are and learning from peers, solving different challenges in creative ways, and learning how those technologies can be applied within the industry. I've really kind of leaned into that principle and have enjoyed learning alongside you, Wade, during this whole process.

Awesome. What about yourself, Charlie?

Yeah. Jordan and I, unfortunately, are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Fortunately or unfortunately, Jordan is a life for sports. This is my first pro sports year I'm working for, and that's partly why this partnership really works well between us. I had no intention of working for a sport team but have just continued to just chase passions all around and kind of seeing where it kind of leads, and that has...

fortunately landed me in some pretty cool moments. I think being part of big tech and startups and venture capital, I think those are all very different areas and that probably shows you how my brain works. It's hard for me to kind of narrow down into one box that I can fit into. That is why I dropped out of pharmacy school after two semesters. And, but I always knew I had a passion for sport.

I think the passion for basketball comes pretty deep. I grew up as a soccer player, but I actually moved countries when I was 14 at a pivotal age. And I found myself going from India to America and basketball fandom comes from that being the sport that helped me make friends in a very strange, strange land.

And I had always thought about, it would be amazing to use my skills that I've learned in different industries to be able to help work for a sporting organization for many reasons. One, being able to help organization that has had a lot of success or legacy organization pivot into the future is incredibly rewarding, but also too, it feels amazing that as a dad of two daughters to be able to bring them up around the sport that I love. I feel like sometimes it doesn't feel like you're working. Sometimes you feel, it feels like you're just creating memories for yourself and them and no better way to spend your time.

Wow, can definitely see how that would be the case. I always, I'm a little bit envious when I see those pictures of like, Steph Curry running around the basketball court and 30 years later, here he is. So I think at a different scale where you're doing that for your family.

Jordan, you spoke to something really interesting, which is that with your purview, you've really been able to see the growth of technology trends within the industry, both across sports holistically, but also across different sports. And I'm really curious about your perspective there. What are some of the unique things to be mindful of when you're thinking about deploying a new technology to a sports organization specifically? I imagine that there might be some things that are really beneficial, but maybe also some things that are a little bit different from other traditional businesses.

Yeah, there's a high barrier to entry because it is very nuanced. You know, each sports franchise has been carved out a region by the league. So we're a franchise of the NBA. And so we do have a certain level of autonomy within our space. So that pressure, being the necessity of innovation, right? I'm sorry. Necessity being the mother of innovation is I think you have to create a lot of that urgency for yourself to deliver best in class experiences for your fans. You really have to be passionate about delivering experiences. And that's what I found for myself is what gives me energy is, yeah, the players are nice and it's fun to see them. And you don't stay in this industry for 16 years unless what gets me the excitement of seeing, you know, a father and his daughter walking in the door after a long day, you've been in the trenches and you walk up and you see this human connection that's growing. And I think that's really the consistent thing that I've learned is as new technologies are introduced, as paradigms shift, like there are just core universal principles around what we do that don't. So these are all tools and solutions.

I think one salient example for me is when social media platforms were coming out kind of in that mid to late 2000s, right? As I was getting started, there were a number of teams that started up their own social network. And because it was a place for their fans, they spent a lot of money on it. For their fans to come and talk about that, right? But those decisions were being made very much about the team and not about the fan and connecting fans. Those, they saw usage really fall when fans were going on to broader social networks and having more dynamic conversations. Yes, about the teams, but also about other topics. And so really understanding what it is we're delivering for our fans and anchoring in that as these new technologies and solutions, staying rooted in your values, staying focused on your vision and seeing how these new opportunities provide clearer paths to success, whether it's through efficiency or cost-saving speed, whatever, but not getting too distracted by how shiny it is, but how useful it can be in achieving your goals and those things that are evergreen.

Yeah, I think that that's really insightful. One is kind of, like you said, I think to that latter point, not just being distracted by something shiny. And I think that that's something I'd like to maybe pull out as we transition a little bit into the AI adoption that you've seen with Chat2BT and some other things. I'm curious, because I actually don't even know either of your perspectives on this, even though we've worked together for a while at this point. How close or far would you say your initial impression of AI was to the cool, shiny thing that might not be useful versus something that actually really has a bit more legs? Like, how do you really discern between something that's a fraud versus something that's really real and here to stay? Would be curious, both your perspectives on that.

Yeah, I think Jordan said it really well. And I think at the core of what he's saying is, which is something that I resonate with across industries is being human-centered. And that shows up in different ways. In this industry, it shows up as understanding what unites and what brings people together and what's beneficial. I think in different industries, it means very different things. But that being a core guiding North Star is something that I have really, really loved and been part of. And so that's a little different. And when I was investing, it was all about thinking, as you can imagine, investing is a lot about taking bets on what is shining and what is here to stay, really. And in that situation, this is 2020, couple of years after 2020. And right when there's a lot of noise around Web3, AI, boom was starting and crypto was booming, everybody's building something amazing, which is incredibly beautiful to see. But at the same time, how do you really weed out what you think is gonna stay and what's not?

I think a great mark that I've kind of used is to be able to understand and really hear from founders and know why are they doing what they're doing. So if Jordan was a founder and if I heard him, I would fund him right away because I just know that what he's talking about is coming from a place where it doesn't seem like he's chasing something that could be fleeting in my definition. It seems like he's trying to do something that is bringing people together and collectively trying to create an experience that is unforgettable. And that's something that is common, no matter what shape or form it takes, what tech comes or what goes, that's almost a basic essential need for community. And if he is gonna use AI to be able to go there, I'm gonna back him 100%. It doesn't mean he's gonna be successful. So I think thinking from first principles is what I've kind of used to be able to look and think about how do I make that decision for myself regardless of the industry that I'm in.

Yeah, and I think being very well-versed and rooted in change management principles is a big thing because when you bring new opportunities and new technologies to folks internally who are, you're coming at them cold, right? They've never seen this before. It's very easy to dismiss this thing that as well-intentioned as you are, it's easy to dismiss it as, oh, they're just chasing the shiny thing, right? You can, it's easy to diminish it or to dismiss it, move past that. And so I think being very clear in the why, finding your internal champions, understanding the temperature and the environment that you are going to be introducing this new opportunity into, all of those things that are critical parts of change management, moving through the technology adoption life cycle. Like again, all these are core principles that don't change with the application. And I think that they stood the test of time for a reason. And I think that human-centered approach that Charlie is highlighting is a key part of that. We've been fortunate that Spurs Sports and Entertainment kind of, if not in name specifically, has a lot of those human-centered qualities involved. And I can, I think can think very specifically about when AI sales reps first started coming around. This isn't full LLM, but to give you another anecdote that you didn't ask me about, another anecdote that you didn't ask for, but so the AI sales reps came around and you kind of had this test group of teams that took the, and tried to completely independent of their sales reps, have this AI manage a sales life cycle. And what I think we found was that last mile is so nuanced and specific to the individuals that that's really not what the AI is built for. Where teams found success was combining it with the humans and augmenting the ability of the humans. Again, just being understanding.

how this tool is going to help us sell and make our best salespeople better. AI was able to reach out to all of the leads and sort out the hand raisers from the people who are going to hang up on you or upset at you for one reason or another that really makes a rep's life very difficult and not great. You can allow AI to relieve that burden, create opportunity. And I think a lot of the upside of that is really cascading of longer tenured reps. So they're even more effective than they were before. This very high turnover space in our business traditionally was completely flipped on its ear because of this tool, because it was applied in a human centered way as opposed to how do I use this to help myself in my own situation to just move as many tickets as possible. So, yeah, no, I definitely hear that. It sounds like some of the themes that, that are kind of really shining through are, you know, first and foremost really becoming familiar with the technology, but then also being really clear on what is the problem statement that you are trying to solve, or what are the set of problem statements that you're trying to solve? How can you actually bring people in along the journey? Right.

So how do we avoid making decisions, you know, in a, at the top of a castle, but really like get even better results because we enable them further, or we actually look for their input as we're going along the way. So I think, I think that's a great transition to maybe start talking about how you all have actually started to approach this with, you know, your specific rollout with chat BT and also with, with, you know, just other things you've learned from other technology rollouts.

So I think where would be interesting to start is like, let's maybe take us back maybe last spring or summer when you're, when you're, you know, starting to have some discussions around like, Hey, you know, open AI chat to BT, you know, AI tools, more broadly speaking, really, we see some opportunity here. I'm curious and I'm sure the audience might be curious, like what were some of those initial conversations like? And how did you think about setting that foundation, knowing what you know about change management, about aligning things to goals? How did you try to set that foundation to make sure that if we did this, we did it right. And that if we did it, it would be effective.

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a couple of things that have really worked for us, which are unique for our situation. And I think you may touch on some of them and other people across the call can probably relate in their organizations. We're fortunate to have a leader in our organization that was the GM of the year twice responsible for the championship dynasty or the players that we all know and love and has that since then brought the innovative mindset on the business side. So having a leader in your corner to push you in that direction is really valuable and beneficial. I think Jordan and I live in the space where our day-to-day job is to have a pulse on things that are disrupting. And it's our job to think about, and weed out as a first line of pass of is that relevant for us or is that not, or is that relevant for us, but, but not right now, or is it a version of it that's relevant for us? So I think, I think as Jordan highlighted, the dabbling in the AI space and finding value from there has been dated back to 2018, 2019 for the spurs. But as the LLM curve has been growing, that's something that we have kept a pulse on. We have personally used it. I think a pivotal moment for me was over last summer. I had a close family member who went through a double lung transplant and in a, in a time where not, you can, you can make sense of anything. I really found that chat GPT was something that was really helpful for me to translate a lot of medical terms into just common personal language. So I got to experience the power, so to say of why it's beneficial. But at the same time, just because I did, doesn't mean that's the right solution for the organization.

And we really had to come together and think about what is our thesis around and along with human centered design, which is a core methodology that we use for everything. The core of that is always about what is the lowest way, least friction way that you can test. So we really took that approach agnostic of, I know we were on an open AI forum, but we were absolutely agnostic of open AI or chat GPT. And we just kind of looked at the market and what is the least barrier for us to test? And we ran two pilots. One, the first pilot was with co-pilot because we are a Microsoft suite of products. And that was, we just took 30 people through it, 34 leaders that kind of raised their hand to be able to understand the experience. And the second one was more of a theoretical bootcamp, which is chat GPT driven. And we had learnings from both. And using those learnings, we had a conversation with our leadership to be able to recommend, we went through a plethora of solutions. And ultimately I think the, the thesis that we formed for us was that in a time where AI landscape is changing so fast and new tools are popping up every second and new advancements are being made in terms of models or tools. It probably wasn't the best bet to chase after how many models we can have, or what's the best tool that we can have for us. What felt right is knowing our organization, knowing that there are power users in our organization, but a vast majority of our organization are beginners.

Or I would even go as far as to say they're nervous and they're apprehensive of this tech that is disrupting. And they have very real concerns about privacy, accuracy, job safety, job security, all those things. How do we set this in the right way where cultural change can be prioritized over what Jordan alluded to let's chase whatever is the fastest and whatever is the shiniest looking. And we really prioritized who was going to be the one to help us bring our people along in the best way, in the most unique bespoke solution way and create that custom solution. And fortunately it was you guys and, you know, rest is history and it's worked out really well.

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll expand. I think like we had a similar, I just came back from a leak meetings and it sounds like we hit a similar point to a lot of organizations generally, which was that lockdown freeze of when legal gets wind of what's going on. Right. And they're like, everyone stop, like step away from your computer. No one use AI. Right. For every, I think most organizations have at least a brief window if you're a certain size. And I think this that's when the executive sponsorship really came through to help and follow a lot of things, huge credit to our legal team for their flexibility and understanding.

And I think it really opened like the door to that really paramount question, like what needs to be true in order for us to use this platform safely and really kind of peeling back a lot of those objections. And then really looking at ourselves as a group and saying, we've told the organization what they can't do, right. We've listed all that out and all the things that are wrong with it, but it's equally our responsibility now to tell them what they can do because we're not going to stop people from using AI. I think it was pretty clear at that point that folks that had, that were beginning to use it, we're going to continue to use it. And so the question was, what is, what is the solution we would like to build out for them? And that really shifted the conversation into more productive where we could begin carving out of, okay, can we use it for helping us draft ideas? Can we use it for emails?

And so we were able to quickly, we were only in that free state for maybe a week before we kind of had these revised rules that had come out of like, don't only use it in this context, do not use it in this context, education, while we were weighing ultimately the different roads that were before us before we ultimately chose the, the route of using open AI and leaning into the education tools and the curriculum and the support you guys were able to provide in that way.

Awesome. Yeah, no, it sounds like the, the support really kind of helped overcome some of the potential and reasonable hurdles, you know, that a new technology can really introduce in terms of increasing risk for your organization and things like that. And I'm curious, like do you find that this is just something that's inherent in the Spurs culture of like really looking to be at the forefront, really looking to set the trend? Because as you can imagine, I imagine some people in the audience also might be at organizations that don't really identify that way. You know, that might be just a bit more averse. So, so would you say that this is something that's just for the people at the tip of that spear or kind of how would you speak to the broader landscape of organizations as well?

Yeah, I, you know, I, I think that like most organizations, there's warring factions internally. You have a lot of folks, you know, some folks are kind of rooted in the how, how are we going to do it? All of the, all of the reasons we shouldn't do it the kind of the product protectionist mindset, because it's a, it's a brand that's found a lot of success in operating and really driven by, I think, a lot of the success of the team on the court. Right. And, and I think that's a big part of it.

And you can get in the way of that at a certain point, and you definitely don't want that to be the case. And so there's very valid reasons to be in that camp.

And there's also the pushing, prodding, trying to find that competitive advantage because we work in sports and everyone wants to have that competitive advantage. And I think ultimately, our CEO, as Charlie highlighted, being kind of the decision maker on that was key.

And I think a lot of the relationships that we had built and the credibility and really anchoring in the why and explaining how this is going to help us achieve our goals more efficiently, how is this going to be beneficial to you as an individual that is less sexy but is the hallway conversation, is the grabbing lunch, finding opportunities to introduce it to folks so folks can be a little bit more honest about what their true concerns are, I think is just all part of the process, probably in change management in general, even less specific to AI usage.

I think just adding to that, Jordan and I also have the privilege of half or a big part of our jobs are also helping our leaders go through the strategic planning process. So we sit at that cross-section where, one, we have intimate knowledge of how the organization is thinking about where we're placing bets.

And two, we're responsible for thinking about what are the most efficient and creative ways for us to get there. So I think a lot of how we've positioned has not been about, hey, here's a cool thing, and we should definitely try to use. It's more so looking through the lens of, OK, for us specifically, knowing our strategy, knowing our bets that we're placing, can this help us move faster, quicker, stronger, whatever it is? And if that is, what needs to be true?

So I think building connectivity and speaking the language that everybody can understand and being able to bring a point of view of what kind of competitive advantage does this bring from being, so to say, in your words, first to adopt? Or is it first to adopt for the sake of adopting is probably a really good conversation to have, which I would recommend most people on the call to really think about before presenting a solution like this.

How can I build connectivity? How can I speak the language of an exec team, what they care about? They care about, obviously, making sure our big bets are achieved. How can I build a bridge between what the solution is? And that can go a long ways in being able to build that narrative.

And the second thing is, going back into being fan-centered, one of the things is that as, obviously, ChachiPT has played a huge part in the wave that's happened. But even with the adoption of Apple Intelligence and ChachiPT being on every iOS device, we've seen how more and more people, not even by choice, are naturally just grandfathered into this wave of using AI.

So understanding and thinking from a fan-centered lens, knowing or without knowing, people are starting to use it. Our fans are starting to use it. And we don't want to get caught flat-footed. And we don't want to be on the back end of fans driving and asking for what are ways we're activating where it's meeting them.

But more so, if we can understand this better, we have a better chance of meeting fans where they're at, given the behaviors that we're seeing from their tech adoption as well. So those two things can be really beneficial.

Yeah. No, I definitely love that. And I can see how marrying what you're doing internally with also what your fans are likely experiencing just enables you to think more creatively, think along things that are going to really resonate. So that definitely makes sense.

There's a couple other ideas that I was always really struck by when I engage with your team. And we can kind of talk about these two before we dive into some of the use cases that you guys are starting to see.

One, I was always really struck by your ability to communicate the intimate knowledge of your team and how you wanted to weave that into really what was the right way to enable the team.

You often had a lot of signals for like, hey, let's do it this way, not that way. Hey, let's plan this type of session and not that type of session. Can you talk about how that organizational nuance and understanding really helped create the adoption that we're kind of seeing?

And just so everybody knows, we have 100% deployment of the licenses. We're seeing really strong adoption. So can you just talk about why that was so important for you to be able to communicate when we were really plotting out the enablement plan?

Yeah. Ultimately, I think we were anchored on how do we get our organization to use this technology in the most meaningful way. That's the problem statement, a version. That isn't a problem statement, but you know what I mean. But how are we driving usage of the technology?

And I think that frees us from having a preconceived version of how this should roll out. And I think just the culture in our department and the one that we're advocating for internally all the time is one where that feedback can come unsolicited in its rawest possible form.

And so I think a lot of what reached you in that form was a synthesis of all of those conversations, the concerns, the seemingly offhanded comments, but you know where it's coming from and you can process through because you understand the intent.

And really trying to build the best solution because at this point, our customer were our internal stakeholders and our people. And the solution that did not address those concerns, the deep, those consistent concerns that we were hearing, wasn't going to allow us to achieve our goal.

And so credit to you guys for being nimble enough and not being so templated to meet all of our quirkiness and nuance where we are. But I think it was really effective in landing and moving the needle forward for our organization.

And I think the other thing I can add is we did as a part of understanding how we rolled this out. And this is a tip that worked really well for us, which I'm free to offer to everybody.

We co-created this rollout process with our folks. So we knew right off the bat that we were going to roll this out to 150 different people. But we did a broad organization-wide survey to understand what current usage, what appetite for learning, what concerns there were, all of that. So we did a pretty detailed understanding of that.

And that really helped Jordan and I to step outside of our box and empathize with the end users of who were actually going to be using it. And if, in Jordan's words, if the problem statement was or the solution that we were trying to hit to was, let's get the most amount of adoption for people to actually try it or use it without us forcing it on anybody, it felt like, since we had the most intimate knowledge of what people were feeling, what concerns people had, what blocks people had, let's just sit in the middle of that space between you guys as the experts and our people as the people that have never seen it.

And let's just be their voice and communicate really well. If we could co-create and co-tailor a very specific solution and speak to some of their concerns and address that, I think everybody and anybody is willing to at least give it a shot. And from there, credit to you guys that the tech spoke for itself and we didn't have to do much of the talking. Sorry.

And just one more thing to expand on that. I know we're running short, but I heard just the conversation around this of another leader who's working through similar change management and really positioning themselves as the catalyst within the organization for change.

We're not leading this change. Leading kind of implies some kind of ownership that Charlie and I would have moving out. But again, going back to that pitfall of this being seen as a shiny object or a Charlie and Jordan thing would ultimately not lead us to success.

And so to be effective catalysts, we have to be the one who's, we have to be the group that's sitting in the middle as Charlie eloquently put it, between you all as the experts and our internal folks to help meet those challenges.

And then when those hand raisers, when the folks who are really excited about using the technology, raise their hands, step up, we're encouraging and we're helping them move forward because that's going to help inspire the rest of the organization to move forward as well because then it moves beyond just our group and the OpenAI team.

It's actually taking root and really watering that and putting our energy into that and not trying to own or control or over-engineer anything.

Yeah, I definitely see how that comes to fruition where you kind of enable this environment that created a little bit more like group ownership. Like this isn't your thing, this is our thing. It starts from what challenges would you like this to solve? What worries do you have? Like, let's be honest, let's be transparent about them. We can address those head on.

I think that that really shines through and I think really ties the knot on kind of that human centered approach that you all have mentioned a few times. I think the other thing that I heard was it sounds like you kind of made it very intentional not to be only prescriptive about how people should be using.

I'm sure there are some use cases that you guys anticipated, but it sounds like you also did something to build up a culture of bottoms-up exploration and things like that. Could you maybe speak to that a bit?

Yeah, I can start us off. I think we were very clear from the beginning. There are two approaches we could take. We could go with a very localized smaller team and go with the highest use case that we could see, the best use case we could see, and just mobilize that, or really get out of the way. What helped us make this decision is, once again, coming back to that design thinking, human-centered design thought about, there's power in collaboration, and people are inherently creative. If you can empower people and give them the tools that they have, they know their problems a lot better than Jordan and I know. I think everybody wants to solve their problems. Everybody wants to find the best way that they could do their work most efficiently and creatively. Tool agnostic, I don't think anybody's biased. As long as the tool works, and it's something that's beneficial, and as long as we address the cultural needs, as in the barrier to entry, so to say, and the nervousness of using something like this, or accuracy, or the guardrails of where you can use it or not. As long as we can remove those, we really believed that the best way that this could be used is to democratize it across, so that we could see a wide number of ranges of how people are using just bubble up organically. Unfortunately, that's actually what has happened. It has been less about us pushing something and us pushing a use case or a way to solve, and it is a lot more about a pool of people reaching out to us and saying, "Hey, can it be used for me to do X, Y, Z, or I'm in this season of going through something like this that's important. How can I use this for that?" Which is a great problem we have.

Yeah. That was well said. I think the only thing I'd add is, there are real resource constraints. I think we were talking about where is our bet with AI best placed? Is it on a singular use case that us not being experts in the technology are trying to read as many white papers to make that bet, and then we potentially construct an overly rigid solution that as fast as things are moving is not useful? Or do we invest, choose to spend that money in our people, and as tools change, they will be able to pull from that knowledge and that experience, and we'll be able to meet the future where it lands. There's a little bit of a leading way to frame it, but you can see which one of those that we ended up utilizing for our vision path forward.

No. I think that's a great transition where we can maybe start to talk a little bit more about some of the use cases that you guys have seen. I know, Charlie, you've helped architect a few, some that have really encapsulated a lot of the value that the Spurs have seen, a lot of the vision for the Spurs. Can you maybe talk about that, and then we can maybe be joined by the rest of your colleagues to talk about other use cases that your team has started to see value with?

Sure. I'll kick us off with one, about a custom GPT that we built pretty early on. As Jordan talked about resource constraints and really optimizing what you already have. We went on this in a true classic Spurs fashion. We celebrated our 50th anniversary last year, Jordan?

Yeah. That's the point I'm just saying. Recently, we celebrated our 50th anniversary, and in true classic Spurs fashion, we created 50 different docu-series to be able to highlight and storytell around that. So you can think about the amount of effort that it's taken. It's all available. Plug, you can go on San Antonio Spurs YouTube channel. It's all available for free, and it's pretty incredible and job well done.

But an initial thought that we had was, how can we leverage that content, which is in video form, create a GPT out of it? Essentially, it would be somebody that knows every single thing about San Antonio Spurs legacy, history, and culture. If there was one person, or in this case, a GPT that had all that understanding, how can that be used to drive forward some of the solutions and some of the answers to the way that we triage problems or set strategies? We basically went through a process of transcribing using AI, all of those videos and created a custom GPT that uploaded all of those transcripts and did some fine tuning. And we ended up with a GPT that had intimate knowledge of every single thing that has happened over the last 50 years. And that's something that we used to deploy across the organization to one, not just be an artifact of, hey, if you have questions, here's an encyclopedia, but more so leveraging the understanding of the last 50 years, how might you recommend we prioritize what's important for us in the next whatever timeline, so to say. So a lot of future forward facing, or another use case is knowing the culture and the ethos of who the Spurs are, what type of partnerships and sponsors should we consider that really resonate with our brand values and our voice and purpose built, so to say. Yeah, that's been one that's been received pretty well.

Awesome. And I know you guys invited a few of your colleagues to speak to these as well. Can you maybe just introduce them briefly and then we can bring them on stage?

Yes, I can kick it off to, we have Andre Moyes joining us, who is the Associate Director of our Retail Strategy. It's a ball of creativity. So a lot of the amazing work that you see on our end, even from merch side and the amazing apparels and things like that comes from his brain. And we're lucky to have him. He was one of our early power users and they were also joined by Raghavi Nimmala, who's on our team. She is a behavioral economist. We're one of the few teams to have a behavioral economist on the team. And her job is really to understand people and understand people's behaviors and help us guide how can we better meet them where they're at.

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and really excited to hear about how you all have started to see value with things like Chatgpt. So maybe we can just start with you, Andre. Sounds like you were already kind of naturally drawn to this type of technology, probably had some ideas going. What were some of those initial points that really the light switched on for you in terms of where this could be valuable and how did you transition that from any personal use cases into business use cases?

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. And as Charlie and Jordan mentioned, kind of an early adopter myself personally, it's just a great way to human center myself and how I communicate with others and get some things that maybe are expert topics in my world into some terms I can share with folks who maybe aren't in my world. And the more that I continued to kind of have those conversations with ChatGPT, I found a lot of use cases that really kept bleeding in between nine and five. So was really excited when Charlie and Jordan mentioned that this was something they were rolling out to the organization and it's really become a wide use case for me.

As Charlie mentioned, I like to stick my hand in a lot of pies. So for me personally, it's been very, very useful across a wide number of areas. So we have double kind of problems to solve. I have to deal with products and services, right? So as many retailers do, we have to solve for supply chain, waste, pollution, all of the normal things that you would have to solve for as a retailer, but also as a basketball team and rooting all of the things that we do when we go to market in that world and the things that folks want to show up in the ways they want to show up in their lives. And ChatGPT kind of enables us to do that with agility. So I will use the most recent use case. We welcomed a new coworker recently. He was in the news. We're happy to have De'Aaron and family back here in San Antonio. And we can't stand up websites and create jerseys and build things for him. And our fans who want to kind of follow him from Sacramento or excited to welcome him to San Antonio without rapid tools like ChatGPT to build not just site infrastructure for websites, but the ways that we talk to our fans and saying that they can come and be a part of this family with De'Aaron if they're maybe new to us. So it really helps in a lot of different ways, whether it's communication, products and services, the services themselves on the backend and the ways that we can be agile as an organization. There's just so many ways we can continue to move forward.

And Raghavi, for you, I don't know if everyone's familiar with the phrase behavioral economist. So can you maybe just talk about your remit overall and then how that translates to where you've seen value with ChatGPT?

Yeah, absolutely. Behavioral economist is essentially just a fancy way of saying I try to understand how people make decisions in different contexts. And in the sports world, fans are what you would call not the most rational. There's a lot of elevated emotions going on. There's a lot of passion. So it makes decision making all the more interesting. And from that lens, I came to sports to just understand fans and what are the different elements of fandom and a game day experience and all the other things that go into it that we can tangibly improve on. So that's like behavioral economist. And then being someone who sits under Charlie, I remember we were having these conversations so early on before we even talked about ChatGPT.

In the spurs of all the different ways, like we are personally using it. So that was already a back and forth that was happening. And being on his team, just seeing the open overall integration of AI into the company just made so much sense.

And like the survey, all of those things, we just had a pulse on it. So like, again, it goes back to understanding how people are making decisions in new contexts. But then specifically, a use case that I found really powerful is we play 44 home games.

So 44 home games, that's a lot of data we accumulate over many different sources that tell us different things about our fans. They give us all of these puzzle pieces. And then we have to go in and put it all together and make sense of it and know what to activate on for the game that might be playing literally tomorrow, but also how can we improve the game for the next season?

And one of those things is qualitatively, we have post-event surveys, but quantitatively we have an external partner who tells us very, based on facial recognition technology, like who's in the bowl? How old are they? How is that different from our ticketing data? How are they moving through our bowl? How are they buying concessions? What are they paying attention to? Outside of the actual game, the business side, we have like 50 overall activations going on in the court that are important for us to know what's garnering attention.

So all of that is so much information and you can only imagine, it's not possible for one person to have a pulse on all of that every single day. So that's where ChatGPT really just pulls it together, gives us insights, but also it's just like democratizes it. Like you don't need any kind of data fluency to have to go in and understand the dashboards. You can put those dashboards into ChatGPT and someone who's working in security can understand that crowdflow information. So it's been extremely powerful in that sense.

Wow, that's really inspiring. And I think maybe one question that we can end on, because I'd be curious on all of your perspectives here, is how are you thinking about where things go from here? It sounds like we've done a great job of setting the foundation. We've done a great job of getting the kind of community buy-in for something like this. We've even started to deploy company-wide use cases, started to deploy vertical use cases within particular departments.

What do you kind of see as the next steps for yourselves within this AI journey?

Jordan, do you want to hit it?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's kind of three phases we're roughly following, creating access, obviously granting everyone the ability in an approved space to activate and utilize the tool, then giving them exploration and education to explore.

So that's kind of where we're at right now. We're allowing people to experiment and get comfortable and understanding any kind of separation. And I think really we're going to move a lot more to more of an incentive and a reward in advocating and celebrating champions and celebrating the behaviors a lot more.

I think aligning with our season, which is hopefully there's an extended into May, but as we move towards the latter part and towards the off season, we'll have a lot more time and energy to kind of move the staff as a group, as opposed to allowing for a little bit more organic space to explore during the season as well.

So I think that's a big part of it. And then hopefully we can be all just little project managers with our GPTs that we're utilizing across. And then that moves to a whole new phase of education and how folks see themselves within the organization as they're managing their GPTs, that they and the rest of the organization will hopefully become reliant on as their ability to innovate expands.

Awesome. Well, really appreciate the time here. With that, we're going to invite back Natalie to the stage. Thank you so much, Wade, Charlie, Jordan, Andre, and Raghavi. That was so awesome. And what an honor to host the San Antonio Spurs, my hometown team. Go Spurs, go.

If you're a member of the forum, you can join us for the Q&A now by drilling into the notification or navigating to it through the agenda. Just look for the Q&A tab. I'll be there in a moment. If you're a guest, thank you so much for joining us this evening. And we really hope to see you soon.

If you missed it this morning, we've already published OpenAI's Super Bowl ad with Kate Rao and David Drogo. So you can find that in the content section. It's available for on-demand replay. And our upcoming events include Sora Alpha Artists Preserving the Past and Shaping the Future. If you're interested in learning how to use Sora or how visual artists are currently using it, please tune in.

We're also hosting a hybrid event. It's both in-person and being live streamed. Music is Math, an interdisciplinary exploration of sound, science, and creativity. I hope to see you all very soon and have a wonderful evening.