Southampton FC is among the teams that have trialed or adopted the product.getty images
“How are you feeling today?”
That was the question longtime performance coach Gary McCoy would ask his players each day, listening to the answers but also reading body language for subtle cues.
McCoy had success blending those daily check-ins with objective monitoring data from a series of tracking technologies, overseeing what’s likely the only injury-free professional baseball season with Taiwan’s Chinatrust Brothers in 2019.
In his latest venture, however, McCoy is the CEO of the previously stealth startup Peak AI that asks that same question, or a similar variation, and then leverages psycholinguistics and natural language processing to gain objective data for cognitive load — the amount of information that working memory can hold at one time — and emotional welfare.
Put simply, Peak AI seeks to identify traits and states — that is, to understand a user’s ingrained personality traits, which are largely invariable, and his or her daily state of mind, as influenced by physical and mental stresses.
“Psychology leads physiology,” McCoy said, outlining his assessment model that begins with psychological-emotional well-being before addressing physical systems, technical ability and then tactical use of the athlete. “It starts there, but I never had anything to measure it.”
For ongoing monitoring, users upload a video recording of about 30 seconds, and then Peak AI analyzes both the word choice and manner of speaking to determine one’s frame of mind. For more static attributes, such as a person’s need for group affiliation or attitude toward risk, any audio sample will work, even publicly available interviews. The AI is able to account for varying languages and accents, as well as identify attempts to trick it, such as reading a script.
McCoy, who lives in Arizona, eight time zones away from Chief Innovation Officer Walter Farfan, completed daily assessments through London-based Peak AI. One day, after saying what he thought was the usual response, McCoy received a call from a worried Farfan asking what was wrong. McCoy hadn’t said anything about it, but the intonation and timbre of his words triggered an alert. Turns out McCoy’s dog of 19 years had died the day before.
Mental wellness is the overarching mission, Farfan said, who was invited to give a talk on the subject at Buckingham Palace. Some early applications in the sports realm include individualized coaching, helping athletes reach their potential by appealing to their intrinsic motivation, rearranging clubhouse locker assignments to improve team culture, and scouting prospects to evaluate if they are a roster fit. It’s then easy to extrapolate its use from performance to other business operations, such as the mental health and culture of executive teams.
Peak AI completed seed funding rounds in July and now has a staff of six full-time employees and about a dozen contractors. The company charges $99 per month per athlete for the product. The plan is a limited rollout this year, followed by a broad deployment to teams in 2024.
Among the pro teams to have trialed or adopted the product from Peak AI include EFL Championship and Premier League sides Southampton and Brentford, Ligue 1 power Paris Saint-Germain, Formula One teams Red Bull and Aston Martin, and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, who are the first to do so in North America.
After an assessment, Farfan said, “I’m going to speak to you about utilizing what you have internally, what you’re born with, what you’ve inherited — these unbelievable skill sets within your personality — to bring the best out of you, rather than trying to make something you’re not. And I can’t change your personality. But if I knew [what it was], I can use verbalization to say, ‘Well, I now see how you see the world.’”
Personality is roughly 70% inherited and 30% shaped by experience, Farfan estimated. And metadata analyses of large cohorts are helping unlock characteristics that underpin certain achievements, which could range from hitting home runs in baseball to excelling as an outdoor athlete in the cold climates of Scandinavia.
“We allow our clients to port in different youth players — and whatever they deem success looks like — and that builds a dataset for them to go and build a lens to shine on a group of youngsters to see which one of you 100 people have this specific trait,” he said.
Farfan and his longtime business partner, CTO Mike Blaster, have been collaborating for a decade on the study and automated analysis of language. They applied those techniques to sentiment analysis of social media posts and the development of marketing campaigns. They launched Trace Data Science in 2017 to parse ingrained human behavior from milder interests and to map cognitive load. The company worked out of Google’s London office from 2018 to 2020 as part of an incubator program.
Peak AI is a rebrand to reflect a change in mission. Farfan said external validation work is ongoing at the University of Georgia and Portsmouth University. Some prior studies have indicated the system’s ability to predict intrinsic motivation, cognitive load and personality traits at rates of 90% or higher.
McCoy said this sensitive personal information will be protected with military-grade security and be in accordance with HIPAA and all similar international medical privacy laws. A seasoned sports tech executive, McCoy was an early employee at Catapult whose signature GPS devices tracked stress on the body, at Whoop whose wearables assessed the body’s response to and recovery from that stress, and at Zone7, whose AI algorithms sought to predict injury risk.
The one piece missing was cognitive evaluation, especially not something that could be administered with so little friction. One persistent conundrum, McCoy said, was that “physically in an athlete, exhaustion and boredom present the same way. How do you know what to do?”
“We think sports psychologists will be the ones who have now a very accurate and effective tool, but they can prioritize, ‘OK, I need to attend to this person,’” he said.
“We’re teaching them how to be chameleons and how to interact with [every player]. It’s team culture. You hear that word all the time in sports clubs, right? But no one’s got a measurement tool for it. This, I think, will be the first measurement tool for culture.”
