Behshad Behzadi left Google for front row seat at Sportradar
Behshad Behzadi had a fantastic job.
With Google, he co-founded the company’s Google Assistant, Google Lens, Google Smart Display, and the Next Gen Assistant — products that are used by over a billion people worldwide. It was a job that combined cutting-edge research and prestige, everything a tech-savvy person could want.
Except for sports.
Last year, Behzadi left Google to become Sportradar’s Chief Product, Technology, and AI Officer. He admits there was a bit of frustration involved, watching Google grow from 10,000 to more than 200,000 workers. Behzahdi was spending more time on “alignment” than he wanted.
But perhaps the main reason was Sportradar’s role as one of the gaming industry’s providers of sports data.
“I’m a crazy sports fan myself,” Behzadi said during an interview with Complete iGaming. “I love football (soccer), I love tennis. I love watching many different sporting events.”
“And you have the most comprehensive sports data in the world, supported far better than any other company,” Behzadi added, acknowledging Sportradar’s ability to provide with the NBA, the NHL, MLB, UEFA Champions League and the ATP Tour.
Behzadi, who lives in Switzerland where Sportradar is located, has been busy applying what he learned at Google to Sportradar’s processes. His last task at Google was working on Google Cloud and generative artificial intelligence, helping other companies build Gen AI applications to save costs, or generate new types of experiences, conversational or not.
With Sportradar, Behzadi is doing the same thing with a group of former Google employees who seek to refine the way data is used in sports betting.
“There is a core group of AI experts here,” he says. “We’re pushing data very fast already in the one year that I’ve been here in terms of how we can make sure internal operations are more efficient, in terms of finding formulations, in terms of coding with AI. To make report generations, so all of the internal types work.
There’s also the external-facing aspect of Behzadi’s work with Sportradar, creating content at scale and conversational interfaces that allow information to be translated into any language or format for purposes such as pre-match reports.
At the SBC Summit Americas in May, Behzadi was part of a sports betting panel that discussed, in part, whether bettors or operators have the advantage using AI. He feels that both sides can benefit from the use of the technology. Players will have better and smarter chances at winning wagers by taking advantage of statistics generated by AI.
“But that means there will be more interaction, more play,” Behzadi said. “Sportsbooks, through partners like ours, will have access to an aggregation of everything happening in the world in the last couple of minutes or hours. And there’s information that is not publicly available. … Over time, going back to my Google days, people learn a little bit about how Google’s algorithms work. But of course, there’s a lot that they don’t know. And Google algorithms are also improving.
“It’s both better for the players and users, but I certainly still feel that the bookmakers’ business is not at risk at all. They still have access to things that people want.”
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