Liverpool FC's AI system sifts through decades of footage to bring the action to fans' phones quickly

• Liverpool FC required staff to sort through its vast volume of footage to make social-media videos.
• Now it uses an AI tool developed by Wasabi Technologies to help speed up content production.

For "CXO AI Playbook," Business Insider takes a look at mini case studies about AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We've asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they're trying to solve with AI, who's making these decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future.

Liverpool Football Club is a leading member of the English Premier League, the most popular soccer league in the world. The club's following on social media is huge — it boasts nearly 46 million followers on Instagram alone.

Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?

"We've got a whole heap of content that we create and record every single day," Drew Crisp, a 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 conduct, and more parts of the club's rich history. Crisp said it had terabytes' worth of data.

With so much footage, finding information can be tricky. Historically, the club's digital team — which produces content for social media — has used old storage formats like hard drives. It also relied on tagging content with data like player names and on "people's memories," Crisp said.

"Somebody somewhere will remember, 'Hang on, we filmed this bit of content here, let's go look in that bit of the archive,'" Crisp added.

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

Key staff and partners

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

AI in action

The AI-powered system is used in two ways. One is to upload and archive in the cloud every bit of footage associated with the club, including livestreams of matches and postgame interviews.

"We could put our entire archive in it," Crisp said. "That meant we got easy access to it, it's efficient, it's low cost, and you can access it anywhere."

The system also allows editors to extract relevant content from that archive to create content for the team's social-media channels. "We're using their AI labeling capabilities to do a lot of the editing and tagging — and therefore searching — capability," Crisp said. For instance, a video editor working for the club could query the system for footage of every counterattack that resulted in a goal by striker Darwin Núñez, and it would pull out the relevant moments from its database.

Similarly, the system is designed to detect when corporate sponsors' names appear in advertising in the stadium, meaning the club can prioritize clips featuring specific brands.

Did it work, and how did leaders know?

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

The club is less certain about the quantifiable results of archiving so far. "I don't think we've yet worked out how more efficient and how helpful this has become," he said. "The proof will be there in the next six months as we do more of it."

What's next?

Liverpool Football Club is testing further capabilities of the Wasabi system. It wants to see if it can link the club's databases with video clips to Wasabi to improve the tagging of existing data.

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

He added that "an ability to give fans the right to choose what they'd like to see" would be "incredible."

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