X Games x Google Cloud
The first AI judge in action sports history.
At X Games Aspen 2025, Google Cloud and X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom — a former Olympic freestyle skier — debuted the first AI judging system ever used in a major action sports competition. The system, built on Google Cloud Vertex AI and large language models, was trained on thousands of hours of halfpipe footage and judging criteria. During the Snowboard SuperPipe event, it ran in parallel with human judges: it watched practice sessions and predicted the top three finishers, commentated individual runs with historical athlete context, and measured airtime, trick difficulty, and execution quality. Critically, the AI scores did not affect official results — this was an explicit pilot designed to evaluate the system before any competitive deployment. The initiative was developed in weeks after X Games owner Sergey Brin workshopped the idea with Bloom in December 2024. Following the Aspen debut, the project spun out into The Owl AI, a standalone startup led by former Google Cloud Head of AI Josh Gwyther, backed by S32 (Bill Maris), Menlo Ventures, and Susa Ventures. Status: pilot at X Games Aspen 2025; commercialisation via The Owl AI ongoing.
Por qué importa
Judged sports — snowboarding, skateboarding, gymnastics, diving — are structurally vulnerable to AI disruption because their scoring is inherently subjective and opaque. X Games chose the right entry point: running the system in parallel without affecting outcomes removes athlete and federation resistance while generating real validation data. The creation of The Owl AI as a spin-off is the most telling signal — Bloom and Brin are not building a tool for X Games, they are building a category. The open question is governance: who certifies an AI judge, and who is liable when it contradicts human scorers in a medal round?
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