Many Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are often seen as solutions in search of problems. More specifically, AI technology can produce extremely impressive outputs without always clear business use cases that drive revenue.
Digital twins are an interesting example of this issue. IBM defines digital twins as “virtual representations of a physical object or system that use real-time data to accurately reflect their real-world counterpart’s behavior, performance, and conditions.”
In simpler terms, a digital twin is a digital clone or copy of something that exists in real life. Digital twins enable companies or organizations to test ideas, concepts, or changes before implementing them.
A common example is creating a digital twin of a specific location to assess potential impacts of severe weather. Public officials, scientists, and insurance companies can model how global warming, hurricanes, snowstorms, tornadoes, or floods might affect a city, county, or state by creating a digital copy of that area and testing the potential impacts of these events.
Digital twins are increasingly being used to create virtual copies of real people. Entertainment companies are exploring ways to use digital twins of actors in creative projects. Investors are leveraging digital twins to conduct more meetings with company founders—essentially allowing leadership to have initial due diligence conversations with investor digital twins.
I have previously explored privacy, legal, and ethical considerations in leveraging AI to develop this type of content. While these issues are extremely important, there are also significant business challenges to using human digital twins outside of sports.
In entertainment and investor use cases, the challenge is that the primary value creator for actors and investors is typically their individual, real-life presence. Actors historically provide value by actively participating in creative content, while investors, particularly venture capitalists, create value through personal networks that lead to lower failure rates and better returns.
These challenges, however, are not nearly as applicable in sports. One of the most sought-after partnership and fan engagement opportunities with players, coaches, and management. Yet, they have serious constraints on their time because their primary focus is on winning games or competitions.
This is where digital twins can have a multi-million-dollar impact on the sports industry. Digital twins can maximize partnership and fan engagement opportunities with players, coaches, and management. Fans and partners are more likely to engage with digital twins because these interactions do not interfere with the individual’s primary role – athletic performance.
For example, companies such as Satisfi Labs have built AI agent platforms to enhance fan experiences at games. Creating AI agents that leverage digital twin technology allows fans to interact directly with their favorite player, coach, or team executive, substantially augmenting the experience.
These digital twins could include partnership integrations with new or existing sponsors. For instance, a digital twin of a player could feature the team’s current uniform, including any on-uniform branding. The digital twin experience itself could also serve as a novel activation opportunity, such as logo exposure on a digital twin or branded content within an agent or chat environment.
There are hurdles to creating these partnership and fan engagement opportunities. The primary one is arguably that digital twins would require the consent and participation of all relevant parties, including individuals themselves, players’ unions (where applicable), athlete agents, and agencies.
This hurdle can likely be overcome because the financial interests of all parties are aligned. Sports properties, rightsholders, players, coaches, and management can all generate additional revenue without negatively impacting their primary value driver—on-field performance.
Digital twins represent another example where sports can provide tangible benefits for AI. AI addresses the time limitations of players, coaches, and management, while partnerships and fan engagement offer a direct and compelling commercial use case for this technology.
Check us out at Vokol. We enable sports marketers to scale conversational audio content for marketing communications and online user experiences to drive fan engagement. Our “digital twin” use case is through voice cloning. Think about your favorite player narrating a pre-game preview sent directly to your phone via SMS… exciting times!
Dorian Pieracci