Liverpool FC uses artificial intelligence to create content on social media

• Liverpool FC asked staff to sort through its vast stock of footage to make social media videos.
• It now uses an AI tool developed by Wasabi Technologies to help speed up content production.
• This article is part of “CXO AI Playbook“ — direct discussions from business leaders on how they are testing and using AI.

For the “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider takes a look at mini-case studies on AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and tech DNA. We asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they’re trying to solve with AI, who makes those decisions internally, and their vision for the use of AI in the future.

Liverpool Football Club is a major member of the English Premier League, the most popular football league in the world. The club’s social media following is huge – boasting nearly 46 million followers on Instagram alone.

Case Study: What problem did Liverpool Football Club try to solve?

“We have a ton of content that we create and record every day,” Drew Crisp, senior vice president of digital at Liverpool Football Club, told Business Insider. The company has footage of every game the team plays, every interview its players do, and more parts of the club’s rich history. Crisp said it has terabytes worth of data.

With so many images, finding information can be difficult. Historically, the club’s digital team – which produces content for social media – has used legacy storage formats such as hard drives. It also relied on tagging content with data such as player names and “people’s memories,” Crisp said.

“Someone somewhere is going to remember, ‘Wait, we shot this content here, let’s look at that bit in the archive,'” added Crisp.

He said the time spent discovering that content was better spent editing and producing it. So the club sought the help of AI.

Staff and key partners

The company partnered with Wasabi Technologies, which makes an AI-based program for cloud data storage and searches, to help the digital team uncover archive clips that might otherwise have been overlooked.

AI in action

The AI-powered system is used in two ways. One is to upload and archive to the cloud every piece of footage associated with the club, including live match streams and post-match interviews.

“We could put our entire archive in it,” Crisp said. “That meant we have easy access to it, it’s effective, it’s cheap, and you can access it anywhere.”

The system also allows editors to pull relevant content from that archive to create content for the team’s social media channels. “We’re using their AI tagging capabilities to do a lot of the editing and tagging — and therefore search — capability,” Crisp said. For example, a video editor working for the club could query the system for footage of every counterattack that led to a goal by striker Darwin Núñez and pull the relevant moments from its database.

Similarly, the system is designed to detect when the names of corporate sponsors appear in in-stadium adverts, meaning the club can prioritize clips with specific brands.

Did it work and how did they know?

Crisp said the AI ​​system helped the club’s editors become more efficient in accessing content.

The club is less certain of the quantifiable results of archiving so far. “I don’t think we’ve yet established how effective and how useful this has become,” he said. “The proof will be there in the next six months as we do more.”

What’s next?

Liverpool Football Club is testing other capabilities of the Wasabi system. He wants to see if he can link the club’s video databases to Wasabi to improve the tagging of existing data.

Crisp also wants to test expanding access to the system. “One of the things I’d like to be able to do in the future is put this in the hands of the fans,” he said. “If you wanted to merge a bit of content and choose whether you wanted to see Ian Rush’s goals versus Darwin’s, you could do that,” he said.

He added that “the ability to give fans the right to choose what they want to see” would be “incredible”.