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Tristan Thompson is well-recognized for his career in the NBA, having played for teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Boston Celtics, and the Los Angeles Lakers, to name a few. He was even part of the team that earned an NBA championship in 2016. But while Thompson’s basketball reputation precedes him, off the court, he’s focusing on his various entrepreneurial ventures.
When asked by Yahoo Finance’s Financial Freestyle podcast host Ross Mac if he would invest his final dollar in artificial intelligence or the blockchain, Thompson picked the industry that’s already projected to be worth $3.6 trillion by 2034.
“You see what Mark Zuckerberg’s paying for all these AI gurus? So I might go AI,” he said (see the full episode above; listen below).
Thompson has already made AI one of his entrepreneurial ventures with the launch of TracyAI, an artificial intelligence that’s meant to offer real-time NBA analysis and predictive insights.
“Imagine a sports analyst or commentator on steroids,” he explained to Mac. “What I mean by that is having all the high-level analytics that you cannot get from NBA.com and ESPN … the analytics are coming from the professional teams. We have certain data and access to certain companies that only professional sports teams have access to. And I was able to pull that data with my resources and put it into the AI agent.”
Thompson saw the venture as “low-hanging fruit,” as it was one of the few areas he hadn’t yet noticed artificial intelligence being worked into. Though AI is slowly finding its way into the sports industry, TracyAI offers basketball fans access to statistics and projections they may not have had through the typical channels, creating a unique fan experience.
Though Thompson admitted AI has created some of its own controversies, it’s a venture where he’s ready to invest some of his financial resources to capitalize on the industry’s projected rapid growth.
“For me, it’s like, if [AI is] covering so many sectors, how come it hasn’t got into sports?” Thompson said. “This is an opportunity where I can be a visionary and a pioneer … I’ve always had this grind, build-up mentality, so it just migrated easily into Web3. If you look at Daryl Morey, he said he used AI agents to curate his Sixers roster … that just shows you that’s the first domino effect into something great.”
