“From a Stadium Perspective AI will be Pretty Ubiquitous”

As an applied futurist, Tom Cheesewright deals with topics relating to future societies. In an interview with stadiaworld, he talks about the stadium of the future – from energy storage to stadium robots.

stadiaworld: Before taking a look into the future, I would like to take a look at the past. In your opinion, what were the important milestones in stadium operations over the past 25 years that would perhaps have been described as “future technology” 100 years ago?

Tom Cheesewright
Tom Cheesewright Image: privat
Cheeswright: I’m probably not best placed to answer that beyond a very top line view. I’m not a stadium futurist or from the sports and events industry. Rather, my expertise is in the process that helps you look to the future. That does require some level of research into the past, but really, it’s about understanding present pressures and future possibilities, and where the two intersect. But a couple of things do stand out, even from that perspective. First, that the stadium as an asset has to be worked harder now than it was a hundred years ago. So, lots of the change in that time has been about extracting more value from it: multi-use, concessions, tighter ticketing control. All these things rely on an array of technologies that would have looked more like science fiction 100 years ago: semi-artificial pitches, movable pitches, contactless payments, ticket scanners – even the microwaves used to heat your pie. Second is safety. From our understanding of crowd dynamics, to digital radio, to CCTV, there have been huge advances in our ability to create safe environments for a much more diverse crowd than you might have seen at a stadium a hundred years ago. And while so much of it looks mundane to us now, a hundred years ago these technologies were incredibly futuristic.