At the X Games: Worlds First Action Sports League Blasts into the Future panel at South by Southwest 2025, X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom sat down with University of Texas and basketball writer Kirk Goldsberry for a discussion about Owl AI judging and the impacts he hopes it will have on the future of the sports industry. The Daily Dot sat down with Bloom and Goldsberry after the panel to discuss their takeaways.
Daily Dot: How impactful do you think this can be for the sports world and what’s your vision going forward?
Jeremy Bloom: The vision is to never have human error again in sports. It’s a big vision, but that’s the goal. And that really is the northern star for the Owl above everything else, because we want objectivity in our sports, we want fairness, we want equality across all athletes in whatever sport you’re looking at. And we want the game to be determined by the athletes on the field, and not by referees and a bad call.
DD: For people who aren’t here at SXSW, can you briefly explain how Owl works in the context of X Games?
JB: We programmed it in snowboarding for Aspen X Games, which was about two months ago. A six-week project. We programmed it with a lot of content from snowboarding so it could learn the movements and the tricks and the names. Then we uploaded the judging criteria and framework. This is the degree of difficulty of this trick. And this is the degree of difficulty of that trick. So it became not just a content expert of the sport, but then it became an expert on the judging framework. The tapestry of how these sports are judged, both from a degree of difficulty perspective, but also from a style perspective.
It was an iterative process. It didn’t nail it the first week. So further built it out, giving it different prompts, and changing the code, and giving Gemini different super powers that it needed, and Vortex—their large language model—different things. It was pretty amazing. Within six weeks, from the judging perspective, it had our full confidence to be able to judge that sport. It agreed with almost every human score. It was very close to human scores. There were a couple of outliers that would’ve changed, but it wouldn’t have changed first, second, and third.
It’ll get better, and we have Salt Lake City X Games coming up in 109 days, and we plan to use it across those sports as well. We’ll see how much it advances during that time, and see how we want it to show up.
DD: You talked about training the program with data from the sport. Does it take that data and start to make its own assumptions?
JB: We talked a little bit about this on the panel, but it’s become an incredible coach. If you’re an athlete, you can upload your training video to the Owl and say, ‘What do I need to do better?’ On a Saturday, you’re training on the half pipe, and you took 10 training videos. On your iPhone, on your coach’s iPhone, whatever. You take that video, you upload it to the Owl, and you can ask it anything. You can say a general question like, ‘What would you score my first training run and why?’ And, ‘What did you think about my trick package? If I wanted to score a 90, not an 80, what would I have to throw? Should I do that grab or another grab?’
As I put my former athlete hat on, these are all the questions I would talk to my human coach about. I was lucky I had the best coaches in the world—but a lot of athletes don’t. And so for me, if I could’ve had this thing on my phone, going to bed at night, asking it questions. It’s such an engaging [tool] for athletes, especially those who live in countries that don’t have access to the best coaches in the world.
DD: Does this have implications across sports?
Kirk Goldsberry: In 2025, as Jeremy said, AI is disrupting almost every industry in every way. When you’re talking about officiating any sport, AI has now entered the chat. I think pro basketball is going to look at goaltending, out of bounds calls. Baseball is going to look at balls and strikes, safe or out. NFL is going to look at catch or not catch. It’s everywhere. The trick is in the execution, which is what I think Jeremy was emphasizing in the talk. I think it’s almost a meta official in the way that it can catch mistakes. Before we fire all the officials, one of the things I’ve learned from the project is this is a good way to officiate the officials. I think this is a tremendous add to every sport.
And then the coaching aspect too. Just putting in one more basketball application. I wish I had this to fix my three-point shot. Or my free throw. I think understanding the mechanics, the movement, why I missed that shot, why I didn’t dunk the ball. I think there’s so many applications. But officiating the officials, I think, is a really ubiquitous one across sports.
DD: Do you think this can improve the speed at which officials are able to make calls?
JB: These calls where we have to stop the game, disrupt the flow for the athletes, disrupt the momentum that matters so much in sports. All these hidden things that determine outcomes that we don’t even know. You can create less friction in the system. You can create a more objective judging system. [So] brands of these leagues aren’t threatened by corruption like they are now. They are under threat by referee corruption. Whether it’s happening or not doesn’t matter. The public perception believes it. And I think that that impacts the purity of the sport.
DD: Have you heard from athletes about this? Is there excitement or perhaps some anxiety?
JB: Of course. How are we being judged? That’s what these athletes live and die by. That’s how they win. So they know the human judges. They know the current framework, whether they have confidence in it or not, debatable, but they know how it’s going to work. This is a new idea.
DD: Can this impact the relationship between athletes and officials?
KG: It already is in soccer. If you look at the technology and how they’re calling offsides in soccer now. They give the human a chance to call it on the field, and then they confirm it. So that has actually reduced the tension between the athlete and the official, because there is this impartial process that comes through. It’s like, no, actually you were offside. Here is the video evidence. Or, no. In this case, you weren’t offside. This was a mistake by the official. I think that kind of accountability only strengthens the trust between the athletes and the league’s regulatory apparatus and the officiating systems.
JB: We see it in tennis, too. Is the ball in or out? And the ref calls it, but you can contest it. And you go to the technology, the AI, where you see the video. Fan starts clapping. Then, all of a sudden, it’s out by that much. It was the right call or the wrong call.
DD: Where do you see this going in the next five years?
JB: In five years, I think it’s across every league. I think this moves fast. I think what used to take years takes months now, and I think in five years, you see AI use cases across every single sport. Now, whether referees go away or not? I don’t want to even opine on that, but you see some checks and balances.
