Prior to the start of its 30th season, MLS quietly launched an updated version of its flagship app featuring advanced AI functionality to improve interactivity and personalization.
The starring new feature is Sidekick, a beta feature that enables more sophisticated interactivity. Sidekick uses an agentic large language model -- a new generative AI technique in which the system has agency to act more autonomously based on data inputs and user behavior.
For example, the MLS app might learn that a user checks scores at a certain time or day and preload those details before it’s opened. Sidekick can answer multimodal questions, meaning it can summon answers in text or highlights via video. Microsoft and OpenAI were partners on the project.
“What it’s doing is it’s actually taking your behavior, your conversation with our bot, everything we know about you, putting content in front of you, and then taking that back and saying, ‘Is it working? Are you engaging with the content?’ And if you’re not, it’ll recommend a different piece of content,” said MLS CTO John Nicastro, who also appeared on stage at SBJ Tech Week earlier this month.
“That’s the difference between old school personalization and what we’re doing with this,” he added, “and if we can do that at scale and we could start being hyper-relevant for the segment of one, that’s the nirvana of this.”
If a fan’s comments in the chatbot suggest frustration after a loss, Sidekick might even summon clips of great goals scored by the user’s favorite team.
“It was a very playful way to start thinking about, maybe we can let the LLM learn about that context in time. That’s what’s also agentic about it, is it tries to grab intent and context and say, ‘Hey, I’m sensing a tone of sadness. So how do we go about putting some past highlight that you were emotionally happy with?’
While Sidekick and the use of AI are the most attention-grabbing addition, the revamped MLS app also includes a number of other features to streamline the user experience:
- An integration with Ticketmaster so fans can buy tickets within the same app.
- A new match hub with lineups and stats.
- The ability for iPhone users to track live scores and updates on the lock screen of their smartphones.
Making the MLS app experience as useful and accessible as possible helps the league stay connected -- securing valuable fan data that fuels personalization.
“We saw it as a strategic element of our growth plan, and bringing people into the app and making sure that we had that first-party direct relationship with the app was really important for us to ensure that we had a direct-to-consumer relationship,” Nicastro said.
Some of the early interactions with the chatbot have been across “a wide breadth of conversation,” he added, such as questions about league rules and tournament formats, player stats and historical data. Eventually, Nicastro added, the goal would be to permit e-commerce or MLS Season Pass subscription purchasing all within Sidekick.
