Sportradar CEO says companies ignoring AI are “not competitive”
Carsten Koerl also suggests winners in the AI field will be firms with the most expansive datasets as supplier’s chief AI officer adds product to his remit
Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl has claimed the company has a “big edge” in the AI arena thanks to its existing data capabilities, as he aired his iron-clad commitment to AI.
Speaking to EGR last week, the CEO reaffirmed his previous stance on the power of AI, insisting that if companies are failing to use the tech, they are not being competitive.
Koerl’s comments come after Sportradar’s chief AI and technology officer, Behshad Behzadi, was also named chief product officer at the start of the year.
Behzadi was appointed as chief AI and technology officer in May 2024, having arrived from Google where he served as vice-president of engineering.
Koerl explained that AI is now being pushed across all facets of the New York-listed business, including its marketing tech division which was recently bolstered by the $30m acquisition of several XLMedia assets.
The traditional XLMedia affiliate assets are set to be blended with Sportradar’s existing tech, including its programmatic ad:s arm.
On expanding its affiliation division, Koerl said: “This is about retention and acquisition. It is the critical element with those services, and by using big data and by applying AI, we can optimise the return for our clients. This is how it is measured.
“We can say this because it produces a better return on our clients’ marketing spend, and that’s in a market that has very clear and transparent metrics.
“So, you see that performance on a monthly basis, the marketing spend, the access to the audience and how we deliver that return on investment. Even so, I think we are only at the very beginning of this optimisation process and our ad:s product is demonstrating this.”
The CEO went on to highlight AI gains such as using large language models to deliver AI-generated commentaries and results round ups, which can also be turned into video content.
Koerl also pointed out that around 50% of the company’s 450,000 “first-level support questions” can be answered via AI and chatbots.
And while Koerl said that AI will be the bedrock of the industry in the years to come, he argued that companies with the most expansive in-house and third-party data sets will emerge on top.
This reiterated comments he’d made in May last year, when Koerl even went as far as to say those companies that fail to embrace AI will be “out of the market in three years”.
Speaking to EGR, he elaborated: “Technology is available for everybody nowadays, so everybody can compete here and that’s totally possible. But what diversifies you is how you use technology and on what kind of original dataset you have for it.
“We believe we definitely have a big edge here. We are already sitting on the biggest quantity of data from a sports perspective. And now we are augmenting that by collecting more and more information about sports fans and their behaviours.
“Then, on top of this, we are sitting on the biggest liquidity pool measured by the number of betting tickets and turnover in the world.
“I am seeing opportunities the technology provides for us. Everybody has basically access to this technology, and if you’re not applying it, you’re not competitive. It’s very, very simple.
“This means everybody is forced to use it, and I think that’s a good thing. But there is a differentiator, and that is: what can you uniquely do out of the new technology, and where can you uniquely use the data you possess, to create something which is outstanding in solving a problem?”