San Francisco 49ers president touts AI as key to scouting

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, the last pick in the 2022 National Football League draft, has become synonymous with flaws in NFL player evaluation. The team’s president, Al Guido, hopes his organization can lean on artificial intelligence to improve talent assessment, both for football and for soccer.

Purdy, who led the 49ers to the Super Bowl last year, fell to the 262 overall pick, in part because scouting metrics failed to identify some of the traits that have made him a successful quarterback.

Scouting is even more difficult for soccer, Guido told CNBC Sport in an interview from Radio Row in New Orleans ahead of Super Bowl 59. (The 49ers’ ownership group owns Leeds, the English football club.) That’s because soccer is a global sport, played in dozens of leagues with various levels of competition.

“You could grow up anywhere and actually get on an English Premier League team,” Guido said. “So what are you thinking about from an advanced statistics perspective, to your scouting department, to how you us AI for all the different metrics that go into defining what a good player looks like?”

Marrying traditional scouting with “the science,” both for soccer and the NFL, has become a core tenet of the 49ers’ evaluation process, said Guido.

Purdy is up for a contract extension this off-season. Guido declined to offer a timeline for a new deal, though he did say, “I’m sure it’ll get itself worked out.”