Think The Super Bowl, but year round, with magic, power-ups, and hundres of thousands of players.

When was the last time you played a video game? An online multiplayer game to be more specific. Last week, five minutes ago, or never? Well, no matter where you fall on the spectrum of video game fandom I guarantee your engagement in the newest addition to commercial sports will increase in the next decade due to AI.

As is stands today, there is one major game-changing franchise in e-sports, the Overwatch league. This new league is different because it is structured similarly to more traditional contact sports leagues. With the incentives and buy-in being a safe bet for companies looking to invest in the future of sports.

So we have the games, the leagues, and the sponsors, where are the fans? Fandom of E-Sports has dramatically increased over the last five years, game streaming services like Twitch have garnered international headlines over their growing membership and coverage of popular games. In 2018 E-Sports is expected to total 380 million viewers while the NFL’s Superbowl had 112 million viewers in 2017, for just one game. The most significant hurdle to jump for E-Sports today is gaining more regular viewers. How is that going to happen? Well, to start you have to get people to care about what they are going to watch, traditional leagues help solve this problem by being location based. You may not care about football, but chances are you are going to cheer for your home team when the situation arises.

To gain sustained viewers, fans, you have to get the content in front of them or get them involved. In the next decade, AI will change what we see in our digital worlds because AI systems will be trained and get better at recognizing who will interact with E-Sports, who will spend money on the games, and who will keep coming back. Just like Instagram’s content algorithms, designed to make sure you always see something new, an E-Sports AI would have to do much more work. Scanning your activity and interests in real life and online to determine what kind of games or leagues you would align with. For instance, one person might love strategy games while another person only loves strategy games if one team is playing them. And yet another person loves them, but only on a particular map. This level of nuance is too great for most modern algorithms but is ideally suited for a new AI system.

Currently, a lot of ad dollars are being spent to promote E-Sports. Online videos, banners, even cereal box covers are being bought to develop what is very quickly becoming a giant E-Sports industry. With a notable shift towards automation and the introduction of mass AI, new cognitive systems will promptly start utilizing those ad dollars differently. Maybe even using less of them, to get the right content in front of the next fan.

Don’t care about E-Sports? AI is about to change your mind. was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.