Podcast

The Evolution of Fandom - Episode 2: The Rise of Voice & Proactive Fan Engagement

The way fans connect with sports is changing fast. Passive viewing is giving way to personalized, always-on engagement powered by data, AI, and new content formats.
 
In Episode 2 of The Evolution of Fandom, Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) explores how sports organizations are using AI-driven audio and real-time data to create deeper, more valuable fan relationships, while unlocking new monetization opportunities across digital channels.
 

What you'll learn:

  • How AI is transforming fan engagement

    Understand how personalization engines and generative technologies enable scalable, one-to-one fan experiences.

     

  • Why audio is an emerging power channel

    Explore why voice-driven experiences are delivering stronger engagement, recall, and action than traditional formats.

     

  • How to monetize beyond the broadcast

    Learn how organizations are converting engagement into revenue through tickets, merchandise, subscriptions, and sponsorships.

     

  • How to balance scale with authenticity

    Discover how leading brands maintain trust, accuracy, and brand safety while leveraging AI.

 

Please note that the views and opinions expressed by the individuals herein are their own and do not reflect any official policy or position of Comcast. These views and opinions are provided for illustrative purposes only, and Comcast makes no warranties, whether expressed, implied or statutory, regarding or relating to the accuracy of such statements.

 

Prefer to read? Here’s the full discussion:

 

Hi, I'm Kyle Eichman, Sports Market Director here at Comcast Technology Solutions. Welcome back to "The Evolution of Fandom." Today we're diving into how voice and AI are making fan engagement more proactive, more personal, and a lot more seamless. Joining me today is Mark Antal from Vokol. He'll be sharing what's next for personalized fan engagement. 

 

Thanks for having me on, Kyle, and thanks to the Comcast Sports360 team for putting this together. Vokol is a AI audio platform tailor-made for sports enterprises, and our mission is to make personalized sports talk the next multi-billion dollar media category. sports is such a personal product, and the relationship between a fan and a team is so close to the fan identity. It just only seems right that in the age of AI where content supply is not a constraint that there's an ability to create content that is, personalized to every single fan. And so that's what we're here to do, focus on audio because sports at the end of the day is a conversational product.  

 

Yeah, that's great. And, we'll start off. So as most folks know, when you set up a podcast, you spend a lot of time in conversations before talking about tidbits here and bits and pieces there. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting that is the kind of the kickoff point for this whole thing is, when you look at sports organizations, they have built massive audiences across social streaming and third-party destinations, but one of the things that we talked about was, reach is not the same as relationship. So now I think you've got a lot of teams when they look at fan experience and how you engage fans and what you do, they're looking for ways to turn things from attention into something that's more direct and more personal and more valuable. And to that end, I wanted to bounce back to the comment you made that was sports teams or organizations do a lot on rented real estate versus owning the fan relationship. 

 

Can you start us off by explaining, what you meant by that and why that's such an important thing to focus on when you look at the evolution of fandom? 

 

Yeah, I think, any brand, whether it's in sports or outside of sports, they really focus on mind share. how much attention does their brand get versus their competitor's brands? And, any airport you go into, any bar you go into, there's somebody wearing a ball cap from their favorite team. And more often than not, I ask those people, "Hey, have you ever been to that team's website to consume content?" And almost exclusively, the answer is no, 'cause generally people go to, the big media companies to consume mass media and they go to the social media platforms to get the closest thing to personalization. And that model has worked for, the past 15 years since social media became popularized. And what's made it successful is a giant user base that creates user-generated content and then a great matchmaking algorithm, but it's not truly personalized.  

 

There's no content that's built for you on these social media platforms. And so, our thesis is that if we build a platform that sports enterprises can plug into their app, to their website, that allows a fan to say what they're interested in, or to use the team's data on that individual fan, which players' jerseys have they purchased, as an example, which games have they attended, to create truly personalized content that's hyper relevant in that moment, that that personalization will be a gravitational force that draws fans off of third-party platforms where, you're not capturing first-party data. You're limited to the analytics that these third-party platforms share. And you're sharing the monetization with those third-party platforms. So we want to use personalization as a draw to bring traffic to the brand's sites and apps so that their engagement can be as powerful as the attention that these brands own within any fan's, any fan's, mindset.

 

Yeah. that's great. personalization, I think when you look at teams and where they're going, that's key. And given where we are in the evolution of technology and things you can use, I think you're spot on. And one of the other things, so talking about third-party platforms, you talked about personalization on what I'll call team-owned assets. So if you look at teams and what they do on third-party platforms, if most of the engagement happens there, what do you think they're giving up versus having it happen on team-owned assets, let's say? 

 

I think the biggest thing is click-through rate, right? Every social platform is designed to keep you scrolling within that app. So what we've done is our applet that embeds in team sites and apps has a call to action button natively within the audio player. So every audio drives, covers the topic that the fan is interested in to create a great media experience for that fan, but it also has a call to action either for a brand sponsor of the team or the league or the partner or something that drives revenue internally, like buying a jersey or buying a ticket. And, in social media posts, it's always, oh, check link in bio, right? There's like four or five clicks to actually go from, oh, I'm interested in that, to actually doing it.  

 

We always talk about eliminating the distance between interest and action. And so by having content that lives natively in a team's owned channels, they have the power to just choose that, no, we don't want you to scroll to the next thing. We want you to go spend $112 on a jersey. And what we've found over the past three months is about 20% of folks that have listened to our audio have clicked the call to action button, whether it's ticket sales, jersey sales, or a sponsor activation.  

 

So, again, going back to our conversations, and we spend a lot of time talking about people view AI as, a workflow, what's the right word, workflow monetization tool or something that allows you to become more efficient or effective. And you kept coming back to the point that Vokol is not just a workflow tool. It is a fan experience driver. And it's really unique the way you look at the business and where you fit in and it goes back to fan experience and everything versus, just being a tool. And I think when you look in pro sports and frankly outside of pro sports, AI I think is looked at in a much narrower vein than maybe what you're talking about. So can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say Vokol is a fan experience driver and not just a workflow tool? 

 

Yeah, fundamentally as a B2B business, you either need to help your clients reduce their spend or make more money. And theoretically, there's an unlimited amount of additional money that could be made, but in any cost category, you could only reduce the spend down to zero. So, we're, trying to build a venture scale business here. So the unlimited upside of creating a new media category that drives new sponsor revenue, that's where we wanted to put our focus. I also think a lot of people in the AI space view AI as like this cure all. It's this magic wand that can make anything happen and it'll eliminate all of these jobs.  

 

But at its essence, LLMs are just, predictive engines or pattern matching would be a better way to think about it. So we need there to be human creators coming up with new ideas to plug stuff into the platform. I view Vokol as a microphone, right, that allows you to reach more people in a new way. Before there were microphones, there was people standing on soapboxes screaming, and a microphone allowed them to get their message out further. We are a tool that allows you to get that message out in a more curated fashion. So it's fan engagement in terms of focusing on the short form content, getting the user what they want very quickly, so respecting their time and creating something that really resonates because it focuses on the storylines that resonate with them, most specifically.  

 

And it's not possible to do it without creators leading the charge in terms of, creating coverage of all of these sports because, AI is only as good as the data that goes into it. And so we view ourselves as a tool for creators to drive fan engagements and create a new medium through which sponsors can reach an audience.  

 

I like that and I'm going to talk about the AI versus creator type mentality, because, again, it's something else you brought up yesterday when we were talking about, right? It's like people shouldn't look at AI as a competitor or a replacement for creators. And you mentioned that several times in the last soundbite you were talking about. Is there anything else that you want to mention on the AI versus creator mindset that teams or people have and how Vokol is different and kind of embraces both of those? Because I think it's a really interesting push-pull kind of a thing, right? And it really doesn't, it's not just in pro sports or collegiate sports or sports in general. 

 

The whole creator versus AI seems to be a thing. So anything else you want to expand on that? I know you've got a really good grasp of it, so. 

 

We talked about it yesterday. I think the analogy that really resonates with me is this idea of a bullseye or a target, right? At the center of the bullseye, there's this really dense focus area. That's what human creators excel at. Then there's these concentric rings that go out and out and out and the concentration of fan engagement is more spread out. And the actual surface area of the outer rings of a target is greater than that of the center of the bullseye.  

 

And I think that's where AI can be really powerful, where you can't stand up a human team to create content for the, I think it was like 193 million viewers of the first week of football last season. you just can't create personalized content on that scale using humans, but you can take authentic human writing proprietary data from the game, from, any sports apps, user base and curate that into a narrative that's on brand and that's personalized to the user.  

 

I think you set the table really well there to kind of bounce into this next question, right? So in all the conversations you and I have had and looking at the business and talking about how does this product fit into the sports ecosystem and everything, you've been very clear that you don't pretend that AI is human, and you say that over and over again, and it kind of goes back to the creator versus AI kind of thing. But why do you think in this space in general is it important that companies talk about AI pretending that they're human, that that's not really the clear path to go there, for lack of a better word? 

 

I think there's a couple of pillars. I think number one is data information and voice rights. So, you have to have the right to talk about stuff legally. And I think that, we don't clone anyone's voices, for example, without their permission, without them being in on the deal, versus there's a lot of platforms out there that, do deepfakes. It all comes down to authenticity, right, and brand credibility. And ultimately my belief and what we've heard from the folks that have engaged with our audio is authenticity, it's not only about is it created by a person.  

 

It's about does it resonate with the listener, right? Authenticity is about the person on the receiving end just as much as it is the mechanism on the creation end. And if we create content using voices that sound lifelike, but we're not pretending are real people, that uses data that's accurate, that pronounces the athletes' names authentically the way that they pronounce them. So I think you can imagine, your favorite athlete, their name getting butchered by, an off the shelf AI tool. But, authenticity is about creating something that resonates and I think the layer underneath that is trust. And I think trust begins with transparency.  

 

So yeah, we've had some folks that have asked us if we could help them with deepfakes. We've said, I think you're better off going in a different direction. at the end of the day, we want to deepen the relationship between fans and the sports brands that they love, not alienate it.  

 

Yeah, I think that's great. Again, we talked a lot about how pretending AI is human can damage trust and it goes back to brand authenticity and mispronunciation and all those. So, going a little bit farther down that, how should teams think about disclosure and brand safety when it comes to deploying an AI platform like Vokol? 

 

I think number one, either transparency opt-in. Like say personalized content in app. Get someone to opt in to, A, share their data, B, say they want to receive personalized AI-created content, right? if you give the user the ability to opt in and you're transparent about what they're opting into, you'll be engaging with folks that are, there for what you're delivering. As far as like authenticity to the brand, we spend about a month onboarding new clients. And one of the things we do in that process is we train our system on their brand guidelines. 

 

So I worked with, a pro team. They had like a  200-page PDF of the dos and don'ts for content that everyone on their editorial staff has to follow. So we ingested that. We trained the model specifically for them to follow those guidelines. And we ran tests to make sure that, yeah, we're actually adhering to the specific terminology rules that they have. Across the board, we've trained the system not to criticize the client, right?  

 

You would never want a pro team to create content that is criticizing the pro team. So it's a very, like using an engineering term, it's a very forward-deployed model or very, very white glove technical onboarding process that I lead in order to make sure that before you hit go and distribute content, that our client is comfortable with the, that the content is following the same guidelines that their human creators follow.  

 

Yeah, the white glove treatment, I think that's great. And you look at teams and leagues across the globe and brand in this space is everything. And looking at a robust tool or platform that brings the brand guidelines to the forefront that you don't have to worry about and you're able to curate brand, what is it, brand guideline-driven content super quick is one of the things I find most intriguing about the whole positioning with Vokol and what you all do in the space. And great job outlining how that works and onboarding everybody because again, brand is a thing everybody's focused on and the last thing you want to do is damage any of it by trying new mediums or new delivery points, so. 

 

Yeah, and there's also, I think there's two other elements before we move on there. I think number one, sponsors care about their language just as much as the sports brand, right? So if a sponsor's paying, to have an audio promote a call to action for their brand, they want to make sure that that language is used very specifically. And so, we've designed a system, again, for any sponsor to train our agents to write using the approved language and word choice. The other element is fact checking, right? last night there was a huge trade.  

 

I'm sure when this airs, there will have been another big free agent signing, right? Players change rosters, injury statuses change in real-time. The hard part of what we've built has been everything that happens before the audio gets generated. So every transcript that our agents write, we run through a fact checking system that we've designed that checks to make sure that based on all of the information provided by the client and credible information in the public domain that everything we're saying checks out so that no one's putting their foot in their mouth, right? When you're creating personalized content for millions of people per day, you're not going to have a team of people listening and reviewing it. So we've built AI to review the performance of our AI and report back on and identify issues, bring them out of distribution before the fan hears it, and report back to us so we can improve the system and then, have all that data to be transparent with clients about how their content is performing from a credibility standpoint and a accuracy standpoint.  

 

Great, yeah. That's perfect. And you mentioned the magic word, sponsor. Again, you said it several times. So again, why should or how should sports organizations view voice as a monetizable, sponsorable inventory versus just a new content format? 

 

There's tons of data that show how powerful audio is as a medium. Like the return on ad spend for on-demand audio, so like podcasts, is like five times greater than linear television. And I think it's like 30 to 50% higher than paid search and paid social. The CPMs that sponsors pay for pre-roll ad reads on podcasts are like $20 and higher in the sports world versus display ads are like 1 to $2 CPM. So I think it's proven that as a mass media product, audio is more valuable on a per impression basis than text. Our belief is that when you personalize that audio, it'll become even more valuable. 

 

There was a study done by one of the big four consulting firms that showed that marketing teams that are in the top quartile of executing personalization strategies generate 25% more revenue in their marketing campaigns than the media and marketer in terms of using CRMs to create personalized content. Ultimately at the end of the day, we look at our click-through rates on the call to actions on our embeddable and we're seeing 20% click-through rate consistently week over week. And that compares, our clients tell us anywhere from a half a point in email marketing to 2, 3% in app or on display. So way more people are resonating with the message that's being spoken than the message that is being written or, put into an image that's, slapped, on a screen. I think the last point that I'll make there, and this is like more meta, I think that predictive marketing is not going to be a thing in five years. Like up until now, the best that we could do is look at past behavior and predict what someone wants to do in any given moment. 

 

I think that everything is going to transform to responsive. Empower the listener to say or the user, the viewer, whatever medium it is, empower the user to say what they want and then generate it in real-time or serve it up in real-time. I think that empowerment, that's really what personalization is, is allowing someone to choose how their time gets spent. I think bringing that full circle, like attention is the only universal currency, so like, why would sponsors care about it? You can have your phone in your pocket while you're listening. That means that every moment of the day is a potential surface area to get your brand in front of a relevant consumer.  

 

So we view audio as just a much broader surface area of engagement and, sports is where we're focused because you talk to any sports fan, it's something that's on their mind all day long, right? it's a core pillar of people's identity and, a lot of people structure their day around it.  

 

I like you talked about surfaces, fan surfaces and things like that. We spend a lot of time, obviously given the fact that we're in streaming and DTC, OTT, all of those broadcast things. But what I like about what you're saying is if you think about Vokol generating a pregame or a game preview, then that fan can consume that content when they want to over and over again. I'm thinking things like driving into work in the morning and I know there's a big game for my favorite football team, right? And instead of going to the app and looking at a screen and reading all of the content that pertains to that game that night, I can just queue up my personalized podcast or personalized pregame overview, whatever you want to call it, and listen to it in the car and send it to my friends, and then on the way home, I listen to it again. So you've kind of tapped into something I think is really important as you're giving fans a bigger opportunity to consume that personalized content when and where outside the standard screen mentality. 

 

So, second question is, I'm sure everybody listening to this podcast now is going, "Well, how could I use this? What's an example of a audio moment or something I can do through Vokol?" And I could run through a list just based on all the conversations you and I have had with, internally and with prospects and everything. But can you give us and give the folks listening just a literal rundown of some of the audio moments that you are seeing being very successful in the sports space? 

 

Yeah, I think I'll highlight maybe two or three that are deeply meaningful to me. The first one, I actually wasn't an advocate for doing this. And I trusted my team to make the right decision, and the metrics was obvious. I was wrong. It's Know Before You Go. the way that I was thinking about it was there's way more people watching the television screen than there are sitting in the stadium.  

 

So like, why wouldn't we go to where the largest audience is? But their argument was people that buy tickets and show up, foot traffic, that's the most engaged population. So we've done Know Before You Gos for multiple pro teams across multiple leagues, and the listen-through rates are like over 90% in terms of people that start the audio that make it to the end, which is incredibly powerful. And that compares to like an open rate of like below 30% for the Know Before You Go emails and a click-through rate on the call to actions in those emails of like a half a percent to a percent. So we're finding-  

 

Hold, hold on. I'm going to jump in 'cause I want you to say that again. I don't want people to gloss over that. Say those stats comparing the audio Know Before You Go to the standard Know Before You Go email that every team in every league is guilty of sending out. 

 

Yeah, so our research shows that people scan emails for like 13 seconds. The average listen time for our Know Before You Go content is like 90 seconds. So a much longer touchpoint with the user that is either promoting a in-stadium activation, a sponsor that's in the stadium, right, so a new touch point for that sponsor to connect to that audience and a new way for the team to monetize their fans spending time thinking about their brand. And, the signals that we look for are, do fans like it, and are we creating B2B value? And so the signal that I care most about for do fans like it is listen-through rate. If they start it, do they listen to the whole thing?  

 

And for Know Before You Go, like our average is around 70%, which is on par with human-based podcasts. The Know Before You Go medium or use case was over 90% over the past few months. So super strong signal that the fans enjoy this format. And then the click-through rate, call to actions, well over 20% for Know Before You Go. So that's something I'm really proud of and especially proud because it's an area that, as I said, I wasn't expecting to be that compelling and, my team convinced me and the clients are super happy and I couldn't be happier. Another one that the way the company started was I'm a fantasy football commissioner and I spent like three hours a week writing previews and recaps in a newsletter for my buddies.  

 

And I was like, "Hey, I'm doing all this stuff with AI. I should be able to automate this." So I automated the analysis, automated the writing, and then, I'm an audio guy. Like I actually have like a, I have like a neurodivergence. I can't close my eyes and see the house I grew up in or like see my mom's face, but like if I hear the first note of a song, I can like pick out what song it is. Like there's something in my brain that just appreciates audio.  

 

Yeah. Yeah. 

 

And so there was a breakthrough with these audio models that led to, and this is like October of 2024, that led to just a much higher quality text to speech output. It was conversational. There were interruptions. There was (gasps) gasps of disbelief and all the things that make a conversation sound normal.  

 

Right. 

 

So I plugged in my newsletter and generated a podcast for my fantasy football league and I sent it out and my league just went berserk. And so that's a use case that I'm really excited about bringing to market is working with fantasy providers across whether it's football, basketball, baseball, you name it. So many people care about their fantasy roster more than any individual team. So if we can make them the subject of sports coverage, think about how much engagement that would drive as a new medium that sponsors would be able to, use as a new avenue to connect with fans.  

 

Yeah, I think everybody's always looking for new categories and new ways to bring sponsors into the fold. And I just think this whole thing is phenomenal and creates a... The reach numbers, the open rates, the listen rates, and some of the other metrics and KPIs you've been talking about just quite frankly blow my mind when I look at more traditional ways of communicating and you see the lift and what you're getting there and the engagement. I think it's one of the things that, for everybody to listen to the podcast, you really, really need to start looking at this as a new category and leveraging it because fans, clearly based on the metrics and everything we talk about, fans love this, and it's a great new thing to bring out. So one of the last things we're going to talk about is we were talking yesterday about the in-game window and, you're like, "Fans in the building, this is the key moment of engagement. They're knee deep in the event or whatever's going on." And that's probably the last place that you want to interject. 

 

And you were very explicit on that, that the way we built the tool and the platform, we're designed to, I guess I would use the word maybe shoulder up to the live game experience. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what your philosophy is on how Vokol works within and outside of the actual in-game window? 

 

So going back to that bullseye analogy, the game is the center of the bullseye, right? And we don't want to touch that. That is the core product that, is sacred. But most of fan engagement actually doesn't happen between the whistles, right? it's when I wake up in the morning and I want to hear or listen or read about what happened in the game I missed last night. It's when I'm turning on the TV and I quickly want to know who's starting this game?  

 

What's the lineup? And, who are we playing and how are they doing? It's wanting to share it with my friends. Did you see X, Y, and Z? So we want to give people a reason to turn on the television, to buy a ticket, or to buy a jersey, right, to show their fanship by connecting them to the storylines that are most compelling to them. I'll give you an example.  

 

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and there's a player on the team there who had a devastating knee injury. And that's how my playing career ended. So when he came back and he was on the field, I didn't care what else was on. Like I bought a subscription service to watch out of market games because I wanted to live vicariously through a storyline that had a connection to me.  

 

Sure. 

 

So like it gave me a reason to turn on the television. And that's the type of... Earlier I talked about on third-party platforms, engagement that happens on third-party platforms doesn't give you that first-party data. There are signals in what people engage with that can tell you what drives their interest, right? I followed this person on social. I engaged disproportionately with content that covered their recovery than other things.  

 

Those signals can then become a data point to allow us to create content to put in front of you content that your past behavior says that you would find compelling, and more importantly, through a prompt window, you can ask for it. You can say, "Hey, what's going on with this player? How's his knee doing? and what's the over/under on his rushing total?" The stories that we love gives people a reason to tune in, a reason to buy a jersey, a reason to place a bet. It's a story-driven product, and we believe that there is more time, more surface area to deliver those stories not during the game. And really, fans want to watch, right? 

 

That's, you know.... 

 

Yeah. 

 

And so, that's not an area that we are trying to disrupt at all, the in-game experience.  

 

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, right, when you talk about... Sports is, I always tell everybody, sports is a bunch of live moments stitched together. And when you stitch those moments together, you create this big story, right? And fans are in the middle of that story. So the last thing you want to do is hit them over the head with other conflicting content, and so lining that up. So thinking about Vokol, thinking about your platform capabilities, what happens in game, in your mind, if you were to envision what should happen immediately after the game ends from a Vokol perspective, paint that picture for everybody. 

 

What is your vision for post-game in the world of Vokol? 

 

So my background isn't in sports. This is my first time working in sports. It's been a dream of mine. And one thing that I was surprised to hear when I started talking to content creators and marketers at teams and leagues is it can take some of them up to two days to get a game recap email out. So we're talking with a client right now about ingesting their data feed from the game during the game, play by play data, and using that to create a recap that goes out two minutes later to anyone who missed the game. So if you can cut that, like stories have a shelf life, and if you can go from distributing your story two days after the game ends to two minutes after the game ends, again, it all comes back to attention.  

 

Every brand in the world is competing for a 24-hour day across the seven billion of us on this planet. And if you can get your story out two days earlier, it creates a, again, just more surface area to drive engagement, to capture attention, and to generate value either for your business directly or through sponsorship.  

 

Yeah. that's great. I like the whole post-game recap thing because if you look at when... I live here in Denver and I go to a lot of sporting events across all the major leagues and everything. And one of the things I do, once I leave the venue, when I get in my car, I turn on the local radio and you get your, quote, unquote, recap that way through whoever the local radio talent is. And it doesn't necessarily focus in to a lot of specifics maybe that I would like to curate myself. 

 

So I see your post-game audio delivery as something that could be very habit forming. Fans leave the building and when they get in their car, they turn on the post-game overview that's audio generated in their vehicle on the way home. 

 

I'll give you a personal example for me. Like nothing's ever going to replace for me my favorite sports podcaster. Love listening to them. It's a ton of fun. I've got a 10 month old son, so like I don't have an hour every day anymore.  

 

Right. 

 

But if I can listen to a three minutes to get the thing, the storylines that I care most about, it's habit forming as a derivative of being an enrichment to my life, right? I think a lot of social media is habit forming in a negative way. But our goal is not to keep someone in a loop. Our goal is to get someone, here's the information that you want, it's high value, and to have them come back day after day because those three minutes are the most relevant three minutes of their media consumption. And, sports is a loyalty-based industry, right? I'm loyal to the football team in Cleveland despite decades of challenges.  

 

And so if you can deepen the engagement that compounds over time, every data point fuels, to the first party data I'm talking about to create a deeper understanding of who this person is, what they care about, what sponsor messaging resonates, and over time, it's a snowball effect of how deeply personalized both the content and the sponsor messaging can become.  

 

Yeah. Yeah. and you start thinking about entry points and places this technology can play. And we spend a lot of time talking about folks that are in venue live, right? But I think post-game overviews and other content like that that's delivered, I'll call it near real-time, right? Because your ability to turn things around and get it out there within one or two minutes is just crazy to me, but valuable, right? 

 

I think a lot of these content generators work within a streaming app as well. If I'm watching a sporting event on my streaming app and I'm not in venue, I would still want to get a post-game overview or things like that via the app or delivered via SMS or whatever it is. So it's nice, people should look at it and say, "This is nice shoulder content to in-venue watching as well as out of venue." It's not limited to one or the other. I think it crosses all of the boundaries. Again, creates a new fan surface, right? So great stuff. 

 

So obviously I think you and I could talk about this for hours on end, right, because it's like you just keep going down rabbit holes and start talking about different things, but getting close to wrap up. So one of the things I always like to do is kind of at the end of these, there's a couple of takeaways or next best steps or something that we give folks that listen to the podcast to take away. So that's my question to you. If you are speaking to everybody that's listening to the podcast and you've gone through your platform and we've talked about use cases and value and all those things, what are a couple of pieces of advice or takeaways that the crowd should run back to the office and think about? 

 

I think that the most important concept when it comes to AI adoption for any enterprise where brand credibility and accuracy matters is be careful with what you use the big general AI platforms for. the trade that happened last night, if you go in and have a, it's one of the most popular, AI chatbots and ask it a question, it doesn't yet know that that happened. a lot of them were trained in May of 2026 or August of 2023, and they're very deeply grounded in what the truth was then. Working with a vertical AI company like us, we focus only on the sports vertical, and working with a modality focused company like us, we focus only on audio, means that we are relentlessly focused on making sure that you're getting the most accurate, highest quality version of that medium for that industry possible. So you can go around and you can get something cheap and you might have a bad experience.  

 

Right. 

 

You know. And I think it's one of the challenges that we face in a lot of conversations is a bad apple souring, the whole orchard, where someone had a bad experience using a platform that wasn't designed for sports. And what we really believe is that a singular focus on the sports vertical and the audio modality will deliver a product that brands in the sports industry can trust and that fans will love engaging with. And anything short of that where you're not relentlessly focused on that intersection of vertical and modality, introduces a lot of risk to brands. 

 

I think or I hope that we've given folks some great ideas. I really think when you look at the title of the podcast series, right, "Evolution of Fandom," this audio delivery AI sits right in the middle. What a great second episode to talk about a new tool or platform or capability that, quite frankly, everybody out there should be looking at. And if you're not, you're going to get left behind. I think this is going to explode over the next, gosh, call it 12, 24, 36 months, whatever it may be. So, with that, I'm going to wrap and I'm going to thank you so much for joining. 

 

It was very insightful and it was great. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. 

 

Oh, thanks for having me on here. I had a lot of fun.  

 

Thanks for listening to "The Evolution of Fandom." If you have any thoughts about what you've heard, we'd love to hear from you. Visit comcasttechnologysolutions.com/fandom to get in touch, learn more, or subscribe to the series.