Conversational AI platform MeetKai has become the official AI partner of the Los Angeles Chargers to develop new in-stadium and at-home fan experiences, including a digital locker room tour accessed through the team’s website and app. The deal kicked off Sunday with MeetKai’s logo displayed on video boards inside SoFi Stadium.
The Chargers are the first U.S. sports team to partner with MeetKai, whose AI chatbot has more than 50 million users worldwide mostly in Europe and Asia. MeetKai was co-founded in 2018 by James Kaplan and Weili Dai, the billionaire co-founder of semiconductor giant Marvell Technology. MeetKai describes itself as a “metaverse” company and its website shows its chatbot answering questions across food, entertainment, news, and more.
“What we're trying to accomplish more broadly, is that we built all this tech around AI to have it be able to have a conversation with people,” Kaplan told SportTechie. “And the next step of that is to put them into 3D spaces where those conversations are a lot more immersive than either a little chat bubble on a webpage, or hidden voice on your phone.”
MeetKai’s website showcases its animated chatbot integrated into an Oculus virtual reality headset for guided fitness classes and VR tours of museums. Other companies creating AI chatbots for teams and leagues in the sports industry include GameOn and Satisfi Labs.
“It's a lot more interesting if you can do things like searching for [NFL] plays by a description of what happened in them, and then being able to see them in a 3D context,” Kaplan said about MeetKai’s potential activations with the Chargers. “Being able to search to say things like, can you show me clips of every play that's had an interception in the first quarter in the last season? What we're trying to do is partly for the fans, but also largely the team itself. Members of the training staff are one of the bigger intended users, for them to pull up this type of information and this type of content.”
