SBJ Tech: NASCAR revs up AI for championship weekend

NASCAR will crown its 2024 series champions this weekend at Phoenix Raceway, and the AI boost from the NASCAR Tracks app will upgrade the race experiences for those in attendance.

Patrick Carroll, NASCAR’s managing director/technology, shared his excitement about the trio of AI innovations his team created throughout the season:

• Generative AI lap updates and periodic race summaries

• The Leader camera, an AI-powered viewing experience

• Another camera view called Most Popular, which takes in race context and fan interest.

The real-time lap notes and race summaries will be available for all three finales: the Cup Series, Xfinity Series and Craftsman Truck Series. The Track App Live Video, which houses the two AI-enhanced views, will be used for Cup and Xfinity. The Cup Series experience will also include a Championship 4 Multiview view for fans to watch in the Tracks app.

“We have such a large amount of data,” Carroll said. "And we've just historically struggled to find ways to present that to fans in ways that could make it so that they're able to digest it and learn from it and really get closer to the sport.”

No longer.

This year’s Chicago Street Race served as a trial for these innovations, Carroll said, with the AI cameras joining the Track App Live Video experience. The Gen AI updates were tested on the backend and were soft-launched for the playoffs.

Track App Live Video enables fans to use the Tracks app as a hub to follow from the in-car views of racers or another camera around the track. The AI-powered views effectively become automated digital production engines. The Leader cam ingests different data points such as driver average speed, lap times and position changes.

Through those, the camera uses a predictive passing model that can take viewers to a new race angle for a quick move on the outside or when two drivers trade paint for the lead. The Most Popular camera accounts for information from fan engagement data, compelling storylines (such as the Championship 4 drivers) and recognizes the random events (like large-scale wrecks) that warrant a quick pivot to a particular turn at the raceway.

The journey with generative AI race updates started earlier this year. Following the Daytona 500, Carroll said NASCAR began leaning into the effort for meaningful, on-the-spot content to keep fans engaged. NASCAR created this feature with a combination of AWS Bedrock (Gen AI), S3 (storage) and CloudFront (content delivery). Those initial attempts in Chicago revolved around lap updates. Phoenix will show more snapshot views with clearer groupings of driver updates and subheads to break out information into different trends.

"We're taking telemetry data, we're taking optical data, we're taking leaderboard data, and we're fine tuning the model and saying, ‘all right, predict not only what we think is going to happen in the next few laps based on the trends, but give me a good summary of what has happened up to now and why so-and-so is in X position,’” Carroll said.

Input from the editorial and social teams during the Gen AI content review process became instrumental to the experience, Carroll added. That back-and-forth has yielded a writing style that now has a tone more reflective of stock car racing.

The learnings in 2024 will set up more AI enhancements next season, Carroll said. NASCAR hopes to build more personalized features for the Tracks app, like feeding info to fans on their favorite drivers as part of their individual race updates.

“With AI and advanced user segments, we can now directly determine if this is going to be a useful push for somebody or not,” Carroll said. “Going into 2025, there is a road map item to say, ‘How do we push people to these new features in the Tracks app, knowing that they are there and they’re interested in that piece of content?’”

The Blues debuted a new feature in its Bluenatics fan engagement platform when the NHL season opened last month: AI-generated daily quizzes created by engagement developer Daysies that live in the team app.

Infusing the daily challenges -- featuring six games such as trivia, true-or-false and four word-based puzzles -- has provided another sticky element to the Bluenatics program. And the Blues say they’ve been an absolute hit.

Pilot testing during the preseason yielded 1,500-plus users, who completed an average of four games. Matt Gardner, Blues VP/innovation and technology, said fans have often strung together long journeys in the team’s platform. That’s a compelling argument for the games when you consider that Bluenatics has more than 150,000 registered users and adds approximately 1,000 new users per week during the season. The longer a fan is invested, the easier it becomes to build out a profile to customize their experience.

“One of the great things about Bluenatics that we’ve found over the years is that on average, when somebody lands on the platform, they end up doing three-to-four activities,” Gardner said. “So we can lure them in with Daysies and enter-to-win [contests], then they end up doing a poll or complete a survey, which are great things for us to be able to collect that impact different parts of our business.”

Daysies is a company created by brothers Tom and Rick Pernikoff, the cofounders of loyalty platform Tunespeak. The St. Louis-based fan loyalty platform is a fixture in the music industry. The hometown connection -- Tunespeak’s offices are just a few minutes away from the Blues’ HQ -- fostered the eventual creation of Bluenatics in 2019. Bluenatics remains Tunespeak’s lone sports connection.

The Daysies venture came out of constant brainstorming to turn engagement into an everyday activity. “The immediate thought was this was a perfect use of AI,” Tom Pernikoff said. “Because without AI, it really wouldn’t be possible unless we had thousands of people making games.”

The AI (in this instance, ChatGPT) doesn’t do everything in the game generation. Rick Pernikoff added that it provides unique content, which he feels thrives in sports with its swaths of historical data. The games can also lean into the upcoming themes of a season, such as creating content geared toward the Dec. 31 Winter Classic between the Blues and Blackhawks at Wrigley Field. The AI is paired with a human staff that monitors the content before it goes live.

Gardner said the franchise is still evaluating the possibilities for Daysies quizzes when it comes to future sponsorship involvement, but it’s noticeable how the games prompt interactions throughout a sweeping 16-to-65 age range.

“First off, this is a great continuation of the efforts that we’ve collectively put together through this partnership to continue to explore new ways of engaging with our fan base,” Gardner said. “We've had a lot of success over the years within our Bluenatics ecosystem of just continuing to evolve and find new ways for our fan base to engage with our product.”

Tunespeak CEO and Daysies co-founder Tom Pernikoff’s perspective on professional sports through his five-year relationship with the Blues were just too good to leave out. Here’s what he’s noticed about the industry after accumulating most of his business in the music space.

“You maybe get one tour a year from your favorite band, or one tour every couple years -- maybe one release every year, every couple years. So there’s really all this buildup to get these products, whether it’s the tour or the new music out in the market. Whereas sports -- what we’ve learned with the Blues' fan base -- it is this dedicated, captive audience that just wants more. With the games and the highlights and the broadcasting, they’re just constantly inundated with greats amount of content.”

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