Fans Aghast as New York Jets Say They’re Switching to AI
When it comes to excuses from the front office, Jets fans have heard it all. The beleaguered New York franchise continues to hold the longest playoff drought of all major-league men’s sports teams, a situation which has been blamed on everything from management and coaching to players and locker room culture. Fans have likewise heard all the promises of hare-brained schemes sold as the team’s salvation, from the short-lived Sam Darnold rebuild to the infamous Aaron Rodgers gamble.
Now, the organization has hatched a new plot to snap their historic dry spell: going all-in on AI.
New reporting by the Sports Business Journal revealed the Jets front office has been making a concerted push to embrace AI in their day-to-day work. According to Iwao Fusillo, the Jets’ recently appointed chief data and analytics officer, roughly 91 percent of front office staffers are now daily users of Microsoft Copilot.
“I call that level one, or horizon one, which is adoption,” Fusillo told Sports Business. “Do we have large business gains from that level one? Not really. But have we changed the culture of the entire front office? Yes. To think AI-first.”
During department-level AI workshops led by the digital consulting firm Next League, Sports Business reports staffers “generated” a whopping 60 ideas about where to deploy AI throughout the front office, and “probably double that” for the football side.
Of course, the real question is whether any of those ideas were good. Writ large, it remains a mystery how simply adopting AI is supposed change the depressing reality of life in the Jets organization.
The AI initiative and Fusillo’s appointment are the brainchild of Jets owner Woody Johnson, great-grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, founder of the eponymous Johnson & Johnson. Often described as easily influenced by agreeable toadies and public sentiment, the Jets mogul evidently isn’t aware that the infamously sycophantic tech will probably just tell him whatever he wants to hear. Johnson’s long-suffering fanbase, however, lacks that particular feature.
“Jets finally acknowledging they need to outsource for intelligence as there is none in the building itself,” one Redditor quipped. “We’re going 0-17,” a fan wrote on X-formerly-Twitter.
“Lol I asked ChatGPT [to] ‘make the Jets a Superbowl contender’ and the short of it was literally just get rid of any and everybody from the Jets,” one New York Giants fan shared in a Reddit post. “Some of its top recommendations were to change the coaching staff completely and somehow get a top 10 offense by year two.”
More on AI in sports: NBA Commissioner Announces Plans to Let AI Take Over for Lazy Referees
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