As part of the launch of its AI-powered Yahoo Scout product this week, Yahoo Sports will deploy an “Ask Kevin O’Connor” experience inside the popular analyst’s annual NBA Draft guide.
The chatbot was trained on O’Connor’s written work, podcast transcripts, hand-selected statistics, and scouting notes, and allows users to interact with the content through prompts that the bot, in turn, answers in O’Connor’s voice and from his perspective.
“Ultimately, everyone in their own world is using ChatGPT for cooking recipes, or they’re talking to Grok in the car, or they’re using Claude for their projects,” O’Connor told Awful Announcing. “People are using (large language models) for this and that, so I think it’s really a seamless user experience for people, something that they’re used to doing. I’m excited for where (Scout) is today and even more excited for where it’s going to be months and years from now.”
Each response is slightly different than the last, and the model will also learn from users’ questions and whether they thumbs-up or thumbs-down the answers it sends.
For now, the chat function is embedded within the draft guide web page, meaning users must navigate to the guide before they can interact with the AI features. O’Connor sees the experience as a complement to his usual coverage of the NBA and the draft, rather than a replacement for any of the articles or episodes he might typically put out.
“With the draft guide, there are people who might frequent the website, and they don’t listen to the podcast, or they don’t read 3,000-word articles,” O’Connor explained, “but they might type into the chat, questions, if you’re a Warriors fan, further investigating” the player he slots in for Golden State in his mock draft.
Yahoo also rolled out its Scout product within its finance vertical, which will provide users with financial information and projections.
In the future, Yahoo could deploy Scout within its Sports or Fantasy mobile apps or in other projects, drawing on its roster of reporters and commentators, said Eric Feng, SVP and general manager of Yahoo Research Group. The company is also exploring how to monetize the product.
“There’s a lot of loyal, passionate Yahoo users that we want to create new and innovative experiences for,” Feng told Awful Announcing, noting that the company counts 700 million users per month, reaching about 90 percent of the U.S.
“We are just at the beginning and early innings of how to monetize AI chat experiences, and we are experimenting a lot on our side, and we will continue to. So whether that comes in the form of maybe there’s an advertising model, maybe there’s a subscription model … you could envision there are things we place in there and things that we make open to everyone. I think those are the experiments we will be conducting over the next couple of quarters.”
While AI has been used with sports personalities to mimic their eccentric personalities or hot takes in the past, Yahoo Sports is imagining what it might look like to deploy a chatbot as a companion to some of its most popular, engaging written content.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.