USA Surfing brings AI to the waves
Episode Details
Transcript
When we think of AI, it’s usually in the context of offices, call centers or manufacturing plants — but today USA Surfing is using AI to understand and analyze the performance of athletes in one of the world’s most unpredictable natural environments.
On the latest episode of Pivotal, Chair of USA Skateboarding and President of the Global Action Sports Foundation Brandon Lowery discusses USA Surfing’s wave-breaking new AI solution and how it can help surfers, coaches and judges to learn, improve and even recover from injury.
Link to full episode transcript.
Produced by Larj Media.
Hayete
Welcome to Pivotal. Hayete Gallot, corporate vice president for commercial solution areas at Microsoft. I work customers around the globe to transform their business through technology. At the center of every transformation are people who give technology its purpose. And that doesn't change with the advent of AI. It's actually being accelerated. People spark visionary ideas for leveraging technology. The release of AI technology like Chat GPT this year is exciting, but it has led to big question as we grapple with the best way to harness those tools to enhance and support people behind the work. We like to talk about technology. I love to talk about it, but we often forget that technology is most effective when it supports people with purpose. This season will demystify AI by talking to the innovators using new AI technology to uplift their industries and augment their people from education, to journalism, to surfing. And it just illustrates what AI is about. Everybody thinks it's about tech. No. Everybody's using AI. That's what we're gonna show you on this season. Often when we think about AI, we think about the ways it's changing the way we work by boosting productivity in the office. But what about when AI takes us far from our laptops and into the waves of the California coast? Brandon
My name is Brandon Lowery. I'm the former CEO of USA surfing, and the current chairman of USA skateboarding. And the president of the Global Action Sports Foundation. Hayete
Brandon grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. And from as early as he can remember, is love sports. He grew up skateboarding and snowboarding and surfing in the summers, but those were not the only sports branded and mastered. Brandon
I had a pretty good career as a soccer player and tennis. I play very competitive soccer and tennis, and that's what took me around the world. And taught me international sport. But I always had my deep passion for the board sports. So surf, skate, snowboarding, and I had an accident at the skate park doing my competitive soccer career that put me in a wheelchair for a while, And that changed my trajectory. Hayete
Wheelchair bound for two years, Brandon's focus shifted. Brandon
Frankly, it put me in a better position to be more deeply intertwined with the board sports culture. Hayete
As Brandon shifted focus away from traditional sports like soccer and tennis, Boardports were growing internationally. Brandon saw huge potential for expansion of services for board sports athletes. From development and training to mentorship, mental health, and philanthropy. Brandon
Serving got to the Olympic games, skateboarding got in the Olympics, action sports grew internationally, and I've been privileged to be consistently nominated and recommended to support the sports moving forward. Hayete
Snowboarding was first included in the nineteen ninety eight winter Olympics, but skateboarding and surfing were just added in twenty twenty. As this action sports grow in popularity and start showing up at the marquee international competition so does the interest in maximizing athlete potential with a special focus on injury reductions and recovery. Brandon
Injury's a natural part of sport. I don't think you I don't think any athlete would say they've filled a hundred percent since they were probably seven, eight years old. You always have a tweaked ankle or an ingrown toenail or your wrist hurts or your shoulders bad. This is it's just a nature of sport. You're bumping and falling and pushing and grinding. So recovery has been a major part of athlete development. You always wanna get better at a technical level, at a talent level, at a mindset level, but then recovery is also a critical part of progression. So you have injuries. And even when you're not injured, recovery is a major part of becoming a better athlete. So being mindful of injuries and looking into technologies and modalities, and practitioners who can help optimize the athlete has always been part of my ecosystem organically. And as new tech has been made available, new ways of thinking have come to market. Recovery creates a distinct advantage for a lot of athletes to under stand and coaches who understand and practitioners who understand the magic and recovery to make a more competitive athlete. So seeing that philosophy leveraged against technology has created a really unique situation for the progression of sport in general. Hayete
So, Brendan, along with a team of six data scientists and engineers, worked on a hackathon with Microsoft. Centered on using AI to improve performance and reduce injuries for athletes. Using a single camera on land, The team captured surfers in motion to note strength and weaknesses in their body position and movement patterns. From there, they collaborated with Azure AI to generate insights and analysis. Brandon
The hackathon idea came to four front about how quickly can we develop a technology that's gonna advance our sport and culture. And let's make it an exciting story to tell, and let's really invest the right resources and energy just like a traditional hackathon for any other technology initiative technology integrating with support is practical and reasonable. And so to have the privilege to partner with Microsoft, and deploy a hackathon to figure out how we can advance technology and integration of tech and athletes and coaches and parents and judges That's really important. The techs, not just for athlete development, not just for recovery, not just for injury, not just for prevention, athletes can use it for perspective. Coaches can use it for perspective. Parents can use it for perspective. Judges can use it for perspective. So to be able to deploy a motion capture, AI technology against our sport, specifically surf it opens up a broader point of view for a lot of the major stakeholders who are involved in the sport. Again, the athlete, the coach, the parent, and the judges. Hayete
By uploading a surfing video, coaches and surfers have access to AI generated insights on the surfer, the changing playing field and environment. They can then use those insights to drive decision. They can improve surfer's performance and reduce injuries. Brandon
What's what's exciting and interesting is that the Microsoft package offers everything we need to explore what we're looking to accomplish. The only third party tech we're using are cameras. But that's it. Everything else comes in the suite that Microsoft offers. Only thing that Microsoft doesn't provide in their own corporate package is the hardware. But what's interesting about that is that it's agnostic to hardware. And so any hardware we use can feed back up in the software, and we're making progress. Hayete
So how does this AI technology actually serve athletes on a surfboard, skateboard or snowboard? Sometimes when we get into the weeds on technology, it all sounds a bit track. Simply put AI speeds everything up. It provides more data points to connect dots. So that you can tell a more coherent story, and it allows for off-site development. So you don't have to have a whole team capture and review your performance. It makes sense of the data for the team as you feed the machine, it learns. Hence the phrase machine learning. And this artificial intelligence tech gets more intuitive based on the content that it's fed and with the right context. Things speed up. It reduces human error, improves risk mitigation, and it gives us another dashboard, another vantage point to review and understand. Our respective industries better. AI also takes your data and analyzes it with a big data set and didiverse personalized recommendation. And I can collect data, detect patterns, and did either those insights much faster than the naked eye. But human coaches and surfers, I was there to check, confirm, and make the ultimate decision. This AI is more personal. It takes the experience of experts and makes it available and customizable to you. Brandon
You still use your human instincts and your practitioner wisdom that applied or in parallel with new technology that seems to be quite seamless and is learning in real time is a very powerful situation. Nevertheless, it still needs to be managed, but notwithstanding, having the wisdom of well trained practitioners plus new technology. It's a fascinating collection of data to make sense of situations and scenarios. Retrospectively and to be able to somewhat forecast the future because you can start to see patterns. That's what's most exciting about the path we're exploring. Hayete
So what does forecasting the future read it'll apply in practice for a surfer? Brandon explains. Brandon
A lot of it has to be with technique. You can start to see yourself getting better. You can start to seeing what, quote, unquote, better looks like so you can work towards that. You can also use it as an index clearly something's going on with his left ankle or her right shoulder because they're leaning into it or leaning away from it. And the technology can capture that. Right? A simple camera, but having that camera overlaid against other data points, helps you understand what could be happening in the future. This leg looks weak. This arm looks stronger. What's going on here? This turns getting better. This maneuvers less augmented. Like, let's have a conversation about how we can improve or, you know, adjust. And that'll that's more or less a vision in the future. So having this technology work with the athlete, work with the coach, work with the trainer, work with the judges, work with the parents, all gives more perspective of what the future could look like. And more or less, that's the point. Right? To get more clear so we can make better judgment calls going forward. Hayete
Often, when implementing a new tick like AI, you get the skeptics. When it comes to this case, skepticism could come from someone who is enthusiastic about using the tech for one purpose, but not another. For example, an athlete might be excited about harnessing data to prevent injuries, but skeptical if AI is used to assist judges in competition. This point about judges is right. We wanna make sure AI does not replace. The judge. AI can help determine if techniques and movements are right or wrong, but humans need to be the ultimate judge, especially if it means who wins or loses the competition. I like that Brendan is thinking about what you do with the insights the technology provides. Brandon
There are a couple different schools of thought when it comes to technology. Does technology interfere? Is technology unethical? Is technology really gonna work. So it's more of a let's have a crack and demonstrate it. And reserve judgment to see what happens. There's also the point of view where some athletes don't wanna rely on technology because it can influence their mindset. Well, I'm wearing this tech. It told me I had a bad night sleep, therefore, that might psychologically disrupt my mindset. Or the technology's like, that gave me some new insights that I wasn't aware of, Now I have a competitive advantage going forward. So it was a pure scientific experiment. Let's just have a trial. Let's bring in some athletes who are committed and also the naysayers. And let's, you know, collect results after the exercise. And so everybody went in with an open mind. And a little bit of, you know, biased judgments, but the net result was very, very, very, very constructive, and the projects that we've been forward is exciting. Hayete
Most people are on board with the idea of using AI to boost performance and avoid injury. And USA surfing made it really easy. Users upload a serving video to a simple web interface, and AI analyzes everything from the surface, tens, to their maneuvers and their board, to the shape of the waves around them. The resulting analytics and insights are stored as an overlay video file. It can be used by coaches, medical and training staff, judges, and even event broadcasters. These are some areas of surfing where AI integration makes a lot of sense. And other areas where some in the community need some more convincing. Brandon
I'll start the trickiest one first, judging style matters. And there are a couple style masters, and that's the reference point. Like, Rob Machado has timeless style. Jerry Garcia has timeless style. And then there's some other athletes who are really, really technically acacute, but their style might still be developing. Right? So when it comes to judging using a machine or AI, that's gonna still be a little tricky and open to controversial discussions. However, the medical side of things, the trainers, the recovery and the rehab, that's less of a prickly discussion because using AI, you can unequivocally determine if somebody's weak or strong or progressing or doing better So it's not polarizing. It's just in context. So there are some conversations where the same person have different opinions. Because of the context that's been discussed in. But that's why this is still a little blue ocean and it's exciting. Hayete
It's very cool to see how Brendan is acknowledging that we have to be aware of the scenarios and not just to apply AI to everything. Maybe AI is not the right thing for judging, but it's really beneficial for the athlete's performance or to make sure you mitigate injuries. And this is something that we at Microsoft been thinking deeply about because we build a tech. When you build such a powerful tech, you have responsibility. That's what years ago, we built responsible AI standards for our own company. Because we have to think deeply, like Brandon is doing right now about is this the right scenario? Should we enable this with our technology? Because what you don't wanna see happening is that AI will create biases or create new biases or enhance the existing biases. As an example. So we're really cautious about the use of our technology. We're putting the guardrails, and Brendan, is really helping his team think through this. This tech may make athletes face things that they may not want to face, surfacing information they may not want to have. But how do you get better if you don't face those things? My husband is a tennis player. He started verily in his carrier, and you just go back to playing. And it's it's been interesting because I think if he had this technique, this technology available to him, it would really help him understand what he's doing wrong. And I think you would welcome it. Brandon
I'm personally a deep believer in the art of the frame. How you frame things has an influence on how people think respond, react, participate or shine away from it. So I think the team that's been assembled for this initiative has been very thoughtful on how we present it and package it. The positive feedback from everybody is please sign me up. We wanna try it out. The negative feedback is why you picked them over us. Why aren't we in the demonstration? Why aren't we part of the experiment yet? Because they want the opportunity to participate. So the trickiest part of the whole exercise is bandwidth, honestly. It's like, alright. Well, They wanna do it too. When can we bring them in? And it's a function of, like, bandwidth, timing, and budgets to get more people to participate so they have the opportunity to contribute because everybody's got a different style. Everybody's got a different opinion. However, all of the styles and all of the opinions make the product Better. So we're grateful that the team at Microsoft funded initiatives made the team available, conducted multiple hackathons to keep the progress, to keep the project moving forward faster. All the parties have invested a lot of time and resources to make this happen. And literally, the negative side of the experiment is people not having the chance to yet participate. That's it. And what's more fascinating is the naysayers and the negative, the hate, the hate is coming from, well, what if and they haven't or you haven't done it this way. You haven't thought about it that way. All that is is another way of expressing. Let me get in. Let me participate. Let me have my assumptions heard, let me try to validate my hypothesis. It's a lot of that. But there's no you guys are why are you doing this? There's no nobody saying this is a waste of time or a waste of energy, and that's what's interesting. You get everybody's attention. And it's a funny space to be in right now because those who haven't yet adopted it are still deploying their energy and attention into it by making comments and criticisms because they wanna contribute. And it's a blessing to have that type of energy and attention dedicated to an initiative we're working on. So, There's no negative, and that's not me trying to spin the situation. It's sincerely being objectively aware of what's going on. And letting our culture, our community, and the participants in the industry, letting them know, like, we're going as fast as we can, given the resources we have, and the bandwidth that we have to work with. But, yeah, the future will get better because of everybody's willingness to participate, and that's what makes us a very valuable and exciting initiative. Hayete
Feedback, both positive and negative, are powerful, helpful guidance. Responding to the community's concerns and staying thoughtful about framing can help overcome any reluctance or uneasiness surrounding this new tech. Brandon and his team's approach has led to broad participation, interest, and enthusiasm across the board's sports industry. One way to help bring skeptics on board, get the beta testing going. Testing is the only way to learn and hone new technology and make it smarter. Lucky for USA serving. Just as there were many use cases for the data analytics, there are many different metrics for success. With new technology, we must engage proactively with people and learn from their thoughts, from their critiques, and the strategy of the rollout it's important to listen to everybody, including the naysayers. Assuming good intents on people's behalf. Understand what their concerns are. And always keep in mind the principles you have as you're rolling out those AI systems to ensure that you do right by the people. Brandon
It's always best to be simple and have few. However, success is relative to the different character or profile or group of people. So some athletes wanna get stronger. And you can see that through performance. Some athletes are injured, and you can see recovery through performance. Some judges can't tell the difference from a point of view and or they might have been distracted in the replays valuable, that this athlete connect? Did they miss? Are they off balance? And AI is an an an objective judge? It's not roping in subjectivity. There's an asterisk on that, which we call style. You know? So what who's got better style? Versus what's a cookie cutter, you know, technical proficiency. So that's where the magic's a bit controversial? Like, yeah. That was a great technique, but the style was weak. Yeah. He completed the trick, or she landed the maneuver. But the style, she looked better doing it even though technically it was off a little bit. So that's where the dance is happening right now in regards to what success looks like. Great technique, poor style. Right? That's where we have to figure out how to create a more intuitive, quote, unquote, smarter AI so we can help decipher the difference or the nuances between technique and style, because that's tremendously important in our culture. Hayete
Brandon is optimistic that technology can capture that level of nuance. Brandon
Over time, yes. I think it needs more input to understand and to be able to decipher what's good and bad, even though it's subjective, I believe AI can get more intelligent and more intuitive and understand the difference between technically proficient and not subtracting from, technically proficient and stylish. I think that's the function of time. Which can happen quickly if you feed the right content. There's also subjectivity in that because what I think is stylish or good style versus somebody else's opinion, that's where the discrepancy can happen. But over time, I believe that AI can summarize, you know, and reduce to Yeah. That is good style given the way it's been judged historically. So it does require input, just like anything. Garbage in, garbage out, quality in, quality out. So that's where the, you know, subjectivity, criticisms, critiques, recommendations, that's where we have to get more aligned because the machine will pick up technically proficient. We just need to also figure out how to teach it to recognize style if that's a thing, but that's the work. Hayete
And, of course, we say it and we keep saying it. AI needs good data, or else it will not work. AI can't help with something as uniquely human as tile, but it can with technique. So it's about learning where it can and can't help with. This is where judges come into play. Brendan is very attuned that for AI to give accurate recommendation, you have to feed it good data. Having clean data is critical for AI. Or else? It truly is, as Brennan says, garbage in, garbage out. We, I will gonna have to learn and build skills. To understand and to know when to leverage AI in the first place. For example, evaluating a surfer's individual style is perhaps A task better left to a human artistic judgment, anyway, for now. Brandon
Right now, our mission is to continue to feed this machine So it has more content and more context to make more accurate conclusions and suggestions and recommendations. That's crucial. And we need to continue to feed it so it gets smarter. The other side of that is as we feed it and it gets smarter, the privilege of working with Microsoft and Avenue. As a partner is, like, we have a stable cloud to capture all the content. Because the last thing you wanna do is lose it all. There's a lot of work and time in capturing it And then there's even additional time in tagging it and making sure it's responsibly, accurately, cataloged. So to be able to fragile system is futile. So to have strong partners is critical. Which is why it's such a valuable and unique opportunity to do this in partnership. But more or less phase one is quality input. Because without quality input, we're gonna have poor quality output. So our focus as it stands right now is quality input, quality athletes, cooperative partners, controlled environments, and non controlled environments, So we have an accurate reflection of the environment, quality content with accurate context and a stable system so we can truly rely upon the machine we're developing. Hayete
This is a great point by Brandon, and it often gets lost when we're discussing machine learning. The higher the integrity of the data we feed it, the smarter, more accurate, and ultimately more helpful and reliable, it will be in assisting us. This is another element of AI aptitude, checking the output of AI and making sure it's accurate, but also checking for bias. Being thoughtful about what you fit into the AI model will help reduce bias in the output. Brandon
It's a tool. Right? It's not the judge and the jury, it's a tool. And you still have to use your own, again, instincts and intuitiveness to make your own judgment call. So discernment is still very, very, very, very important. However, to have powerful tools is a unique opportunity. And there's a way to take advantage of it without becoming reliant on it and using it as a crutch, but it's a great tool. It's a great enhancement. It's a great optimizer. It's a fantastic tool, and we have to treat it as such and then respect it and make sure we put, again, quality content in, quality context, accurate content, that's all tremendously important, or it's not gonna be of any value. So we're really grateful to have cooperative, flexible partners who listen and not just project their agenda, but really allow our culture and our community to spearhead this initiative. Hayete
This is another great illustration of the importance of data. Brenda sees great potential for this AI to assist sports sports and becoming more accessible to more people. The cascade effect of investing in technology, and by extension, investing in the community is astounding? Brandon
Content is so important in our community and our culture because as we still as as we tell stories, and put content out there. More people have a better understanding of what it is, how it works, who's involved, what it means, that it's not just a sport, but it's a culture. Right? And it's culture over everything. It's not who's on the podium. It's truly about the community. That's critical. That's pivotal. That's most important. That's the mantra. Board sports and the culture and the lifestyle that comes through it, we believe life's better through board sports. That's our opinion. Part two is infrastructure. You have to have infrastructure which provides access for people to have more opportunity to participate. So a tremendous technology that's been deployed internationally are the surf pool technology. Historically, to have the opportunity to experience surfing, it's been simply coastline experiences, live by the beach, You have to have quality surf. It's fickle. It's busy. It's crowded. It's territorial. It's dramatic. There's a lot in having the privilege to be able to catch waves and have a good experience, you know, as a surfer. But the technology that a lot of the guys are building now they are making surf pulls where it's literally the opportunity to ride ways in a box in an inland environment. Right? You can be in Ethiopia, you can be in Missouri. You can be in Chicago. You can be in Southern California. You can be in Brazil. You can be in Japan. Like, you can be in Barcelona, and this tech is now available. And because the infrastructure is available, more people have access to participate And when you discover it, you search for content, and then the machine starts. And that's a really interesting opportunity. They say that surf skate and snowboarding combined gets more engagement than all of the other Olympic sports in a collection, fascinating. Because of the community, the culture, and the lifestyle that people aspire to be part of, the surf culture, skateboarding has an impact on music, art, fashion, culture. So surfskate Snow, it's a pretty powerful vehicle. And as we introduce more opportunity and access, it's gonna be very, very dynamic socioeconomically speaking. The cash flow, the real estate, the pathways, parents supporting their children to pursue a path in skateboarding because now it can take you all the way to the Olympics on a podium. It can take you to college. You can be an architect. You can be landscape planning. You can build a brand. You can run a website. You can do social media. Like, there's so much in the ecosystem of lifestyle sports. So for us, it's all about awareness, exposure, and infrastructure because awareness creates curiosity infrastructure allows access, and then you're a it's mockers. So to be able to offer a technology, like, this AI movement that we're working on to empower, enhance, reconcile all of the new participants, it's gonna get really, really interesting. Hayete
I love hearing this. And I hope others are thinking this big as they consider investment in their communities. There are so many downstream effects from gathering and analyzing huge data assets that even two or three years ago, we weren't able to imagine. It's just such a huge opportunity. The way Brendan and his team are using Azure AI to increase access to serving for more people is yet another example of the empowering and democratizing potential of AI. Brandon
And what I think is also more interesting for focusing this AI tech on the board sport culture, you have an athlete who's on a board on a wave, three different variables. If we can capture it and do a great job deploying AI against a three variable platform, to be able to transfer that to just one variable where it's a gymnastics initiative, where it's one athlete on a stable base or a tennis player, ball racket, and the athlete or baseball, like, or golf, or bobsledding or Java or weight lifting or fencing across the Olympic disciplines. If we can do it well, on the most volatile variable, discipline being a wave in the middle of the ocean that you can't predict on a surfboard in a person where every single time is different, if we can focus and concentrate our tech and it captures that accurately. Imagine what else is possible. So we're grateful from a board sports perspective, sir, skate, Snow, that Microsoft has chosen to invest in this community because I believe they understand that if we can get it right here, it'll trickle down a lot more effectively, efficiently, and a lower cost base. Hayete
We are just scratching the surface with this technology's capability. I'm eager to see how it could be deployed across other sports and beyond sports entirely, but I wondered why surfing specifically was the sport branded wanted to start with. Bouncing on a board in the ocean, it seems like one of the most complicated and unpredictable sports in the world. And I can attest. I've tried. And I failed miserably. Brandon
SURF is the best tool to explore it on first because of the variables. Right? The ocean is fickle, and it's not always available. And then you have an athlete on a board. Skate is a little different because you're in concrete or ramp, and it's stabilized, and it's just the person in the board. And the board and skateboarding flips and moves around. You flip the board around. Snowboarding is, respectfully, less complicated, style is still tremendously important, but it's less complicated because the field of play stabilized. A slope style course or park course, it's snow jumps and rails. A half pipe is a fixed feature. The athlete spins, but the board stays at their feet. You know? So the trickiest environment is surf. The second trickiest environment is skate because the board moves and athlete moves, and respectfully the less tricky sport is snowboarding, subjectivity and style that's the nuance that we have to ensure we pay deep attention to and not get ahead of ourselves by saying we figured it out. We haven't yet. The most important across all three of style. So we do have to assemble all three disciplines together. Circskate Snow. And then Snow also speaks to the freestyle skier, but SARSgate Snow is the environment we have to understand at the most nuanced level because then we can trickle it down. And not a lot of people talk about style as much in curling as they do in skateboarding. Not saying style is not important in boxing or badminton. Or, you know, bowling, but it's just more focused and highlighted in the board sports. So, again, as we get it better, not right, but as we get it better, there's no perfect, but as we get it better in board sports, we believe it'll be able to more effectively efficiently deploy across the other discipline support. Hayete
With the twenty twenty four summer Olympics, fast approaching, Is this motion capture tech going to be part of the mainstream conversation? Will it help athletes prepare better and will it ultimately make an impact on who wins the medals? It's a possibility. Just think about the recent Americas Cup example. And how the AI bot technology helped the selling team win. We need to look at how we can take advantage of this tech because it's here and it will be used. Brandon
My point of view about tech is once it's organically expected in an ecosystem, it's succeeded. So talking about AI and sport is not like, what is it? It might be, like, what if? It's part of the conversation. So it's part of the conversation prepares, which is ten months from now, and it's definitely part of the conversation for LA twenty eight. So it's not about are we talking about AI and motion cap tech for the Olympics. It's okay. What's the next level of this? How do we deploy it? Where do we place it? How do we position it? How do we expand upon it. It's not, are we gonna use it? So I think that the team has done a good job because it's already part of the conversation organically. There's no trying to force fit it into the conversation of the equation. It's already calculated in, and now it's trying to figure out where to place it, when to use it, how to use it, who uses it, what's public facing, what's kept with the coaches, what's kept with the athletes, what's kept away from the athletes, It's accepted AI's here. You know? And as this tech gets smarter and more intuitive, it's gonna become a much larger pillar of the culture. So it's exciting to be part of this initiative. Hayete
Brandon is asking all the right questions to get people to think on how we should use AI in a responsible way. We need multiple stakeholders in sports involved to answer the key questions of how we deploy AI in a fair, inclusive, and transparent way. That it helps all athletes who compete. With great power comes great responsibility, and Brendan's pragmatic holistic approach to integrating this tech into board sports will serve him well as he meets with different stakeholders. It's about being responsible with this technology. How do we make sure we don't make models that have biases? We at Microsoft feel a deep responsibility to make sure that our technology is used for good. And we've developed standards and AI principle to actually guide our development process. So I do resonate with what Brendan is doing. Skaling this AI technology will be about change management. A wide array of stakeholders will need to come together and navigate implementation and its impact, surfers, coaches, sports regulators, sporting equipment manufacturers, and more. You can anticipate disruption and displacement, and then empower people to adapt to this new sports landscape. Brandon
I hope and I believe that the work we're doing is gonna be, you know, part of the leadership. I think we're pioneering new space and grounds. I think that the athletes we have involved must be acknowledged and appreciated. And it's not just for record. It's not just your Olympic athlete. We are capturing people who've never done it. Because that's very, very important to document to understand. Okay. They've never done this before. What's it look like a week later? What's it look like a year later? What's an hour look like? And to be able to use a tool to say, hey. Never done this before. You just tried it. Let's fix this or try that. And then transformational progress happens in an exponential amount of time. You know? Like, it's it's it's fascinating what happens when you have powerful tools. So to be able to utilize tech, with people who've never done it and or athletes who are crossing over to new disciplines. This is the future, and it's gonna come faster because of things like this. You know, time's still gonna elapse over the course of time, but the ability to improve, recover, fix, educate, inspire, advance, That's the power of this tool. And in my opinion, it's got no compromise on the integrity of the sport or the ethics of it. At all. It's a tool that we use at our own discernment and at our own discretion. And it's not a drug enhancement, it's purely a feedback mechanism. And it's a tool that, in my opinion, it would be silly not to adopt it. Again, I'm a reflection of a bigger community. It's not a me thing. So, I want everybody to understand that. Like, we were fortunate to have great partners, and a really committed team and the byproduct of the efforts have been transformative for the sport period. And so we're really proud of the work that the Microsoft teams put in. The USA Circuit teams put in. The US Olympic committees committed to. And, Yeah. The athletes, the judges, the coaches, and the parents are proud beneficiaries of this effort. It's exciting. And, like, this is all possible because of everybody participates. And and and as we mentioned, we will bring more people in to be directly involved in this project as we move forward. Hayete
This is an incredible story of AI inaction. We don't think about surfing when we think about AI. But it just shows the possibilities and the benefits of AI. How it can reach every corner in society, benefits all around. Had leads gets better, coaches get more precise on their advice, and doctors can prevent sports injuries from happening. Barry of adoption is low as well. All AI needs is an uploaded video of an athlete surfing, and it can generate insights to help them. This case is the ultimate example of a disruption that is coming no matter what. So how is the supporting world going to handle the use of AI increase athletes performance. Will it embrace and regulate it or ban it and lose all the benefit that AI can bring to help with expanding access to the sport? I hope they embrace it. Brother implication is the notion that AI can help athletes become more efficient in their training and recover faster. It can do the same for workers in helping them be more efficient at work, and create time for them to recover and recharge. This may be a story about surfing, but it has lesson in how AI can help all of us. In the sports we play, as well in our professional and personal lives. This is a great example of AI and service of people. Thank you for listening to Pivotal. I'd love to hear your story in your pivotal moment, so don't hesitate to follow me and share on LinkedIn. Audence information is also available in the show notes. Our show is produced by large media. That's L ARJ Media. Special thanks to Lynn Yang and our partners at We Communications. 
