SBJ Tech: Oscar Sort makes recycling a winnable game for fans, venues

If you need a visual of the startup hustle, consider Hassan Murad’s recent travel itinerary. The CEO of sustainability tech company Intuitive AI spoke to me from his Vancouver home after eight weeks on the road.

He bounced from the conference scene in Las Vegas -- hitting both Ai4 in mid-August and the 2024 National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) Show in early October -- to the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego a couple of weeks ago. Mixed in between those were two partnership announcements -- with PepsiCo and the Trail Blazers’ Moda Center -- as well as multiple client meetings in New York City. Such is the life when your flagship product -- in this case, Oscar -- could help varying industries that produce massive foot traffic and, as a result, trash.

Intuitive’s Oscar Sort station, which features a camera and display partnered with waste bins, uses AI to recognize various materials and objects to help people correctly dispose of their items. The product makes sense (and has thrived in) places such as hospitals, airports and college campuses. But sports venues provide another opening to address yet another garbage issue. As a reference point, in 2021, my colleague Bret McCormick highlighted that a single game at the Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium produces 35 tons of waste.

Besides the sorting help, the display lets Oscar Sort communicate -- give praise when the person follows the suggested protocol and get a little grouchy if an item hits the wrong receptacle -- and offers chances for branded activations and gamified experiences.

“We’ve tested all different demographics, and recycling increases to about 91% to 96%,” Murad said. “So it’s like alright, it’s changing the game. People are listening. People will do anything for a reward.”

So far, Intuitive has placed Oscar Sorts in four sports venues -- the Bruins’ and Celtics’ TD Garden, the Avalanches’ and Nuggets’ Ball Arena, the Canadiens’ Bell Centre and the Trail Blazers’ home venue.

TD Garden became its entrance to sports in February 2023, Murad said. He remembers initial client questions that Oscar Sort would be shifting from its typical corporate setup to an environment featuring the occasional frustrated fan fueled with liquid courage -- would an angry attendee punch a screen? Will those fans stop to actually interact with a smart waste system? Those worries were eased immediately.

“There was a specific concern that Bruins fans -- ‘You have not experienced Bruins fans.’” Murad said. “... The best fans to engage with actually were Bruins fans,” adding that they often could be more engaged and even prompt others to interact with Oscar, too.

Sustainability is mission-based in its essence, but Murad and co-founder Vivek Vyas saw the need for a solution firsthand while growing up in Pakistan and India, respectively. Helping to prompt the waste sorting upfront, Murad shared that Oscar Sort eliminates the timely alternative on the back end -- going through trash bags, item by item, to ensure proper shorting. The tech also comes with the benefit of a platform that shows key information for logistics planning. Oscar helps to monitor bins and how full they are, meaning trash bags are used efficiently, and also tracks the most frequent waste items. That insight can lead to cost-saving solutions, like the creation of a reusable cup program or the need for more bin options.

Throwing away trash is a forgettable, everyday action. Outside of the important primary mission, bins become another point of engagement for sports teams (and by proxy their corporate sponsors) to connect to gain more first-party information about their fans. Those partner activations become a quick connection to more purchases in the venue and beyond.

“Now I am getting impressions,” Murad said. “And those impressions we also convert by giving strategic QR codes that turn into sales. What does a stadium want? More concession dollars. And sponsors want their time with fans.” 

Day Two of SBJ Dealmakers on Wednesday in Washington D.C. featured two tech-centric panels that highlighted valuable points about women’s sports, investment opportunities and the boost tech can bring in creating a fan base and fostering connections to customers. Here were some of the most enlightening points made by those panelists  a group including StatusPro President Andrew Hawkins, OpenSponsorship CEO Ishveen Jolly, Dynasty Equity investor Arun Manikundalam and Bay FC COO Jen Millet.

Manikundalam on navigating investment opportunities in both established and new teams/leagues:

“We’ve made two investments at Dynasty in both ends of that spectrum: Liverpool on the very large-scale team side, and TMRW Sports on the newer properties side. ... One of the things that gets [us] excited is they both know how to use technology to their advantage. Liverpool -- hundreds of millions of fans, and part of that is having a good content creation wheel, using technology to do that, putting things out on YouTube and social, creating fans all around the globe. And TMRW Sports, not just with the fan base, but actually in the way they’ve designed their game, using simulators, using technology, creating shorter forms of what was previously and what is longer-form content, enabling new fans, younger fans, that want to engage with shorter form content, tailoring audiences in that way.”

Hawkins on finding the right person with technical skills to make a vision turn to reality:

“Some of those early hires, from a technical-capabilities perspective, are the people that we can explain these things in detail of how we see the vision, which is always No. 1. ... For us, it wasn’t about ‘this person had the most experience at this big-time tech company’ or ‘this person went to that school.’ It was the person who could hear what we're saying, speak the language we're speaking -- they almost act as being bilingual. Like, ‘Oh, this is what you mean. Let me figure it out this way.’”

Jolly on responding to the needs of customers:

“We started off as a tech company, having been a part of an agency and that landscape. And about three years ago, we really analyzed our customer base, what their needs were, all of that. ... When we surveyed our customers, they were like, ‘We don’t want more tech. What we want is a human on the other side of the phone. We want strategy. We want help.’ And so we sat down and sat there and went ‘OK, we need to add an agency on top of our tech business,’ and that’s what we did. It’s definitely not what I thought we would’ve done 10 years ago, but it’s exactly what the customer needs.”

Millet on the impact that tech can have on the growth of women's sports:

“For women’s sports in general, there is a massive audience there, but discoverability is difficult. So we talk about being in the Bay Area and how important a partner like Google could be in terms of how do we improve the discoverability of, the overall awareness of, our tune in, the storytelling of our player? We make it hard for people -- you really have to go and seek this out. It’s getting easier and easier for people to consume women’s sports. It’s being served up more to them, but there’s still some layers there. It’s not at parity with what you see in men’s sports and the coverage it gets and how quickly the algorithms can respond when you’re looking for something.”

• My colleague Joe Lemire breaks down “The Simpsons” -themed alt-cast coming for the Dec. 9 matchup of the Bengals and Cowboys on ESPN+ and Disney+, building off last year’s Toy Story Funday Football success.

• Cosm continues gaining access to sports broadcasts, Rob Schaefer reports, this time signing a deal with the NFL to show prime-time games in its L.A. and Dallas venues.

• For this week’s magazine, SBJ's Alex Silverman highlights the success that NHL advertisers are finding with the league’s innovative digitally enhanced dasherboard technology.

• Silverman also covered MLS’s new deal with NFT-based game platform Sweet.

• Schaefer also goes in-depth on World Rugby’s use of Prevent Biometrics mouth guards to create a dataset to understand head impact in the sport.