The next season of women’s football is about to kick off and Arsenal Women is setting itself up for a successful run.
Having actually invested in its women’s club, Arsenal Women is currently one of the most successful women’s football teams and successfully retains its fan base each year. This 2024/2025 season, the team is set to host a record 11 matches at its home ground, Emirates Stadium, with fans already excited about how the team will perform.
As part of this, a lesser-known aspect of Arsenal Women’s journey perhaps is its partnership with a leading technology company. ABBYY, specialising in intelligent automation, is the official AI partner for Arsenal Women. First partnering in October 2023, ABBYY and Arsenal work together to leverage AI to streamline tasks, improve fan experience and set up local community projects focused on technology and AI education.
The partnership also aims to support the sustainable growth of Arsenal Women and women’s football more broadly.
As this exciting new football season gets underway, AI Magazine speaks with ABBYY CEO Ulf Persson and Head of AI Strategy Maxime Vermeir about its partnership with Arsenal Women and how the company continues to embrace a new era of AI.
Arsenal Women: Championing women’s football with AI
Whilst AI has been around for decades, the world finds itself at a crucial moment where we actually have large levels of computing power to better leverage the technology. Amongst this, ABBYY finds itself at a pivotal moment in digital transformation. As consumer expectation has evolved, the company has moved more into the forefront within the sporting world, developing AI technology with the goal of improving fan experience.
ABBYY has found a significant growth opportunity within its alliance with Arsenal Women, as company CEO Ulf Persson explains.
“We felt that women's football was spot on for us. It's a growing sport. It's something that's really forward-looking, it's exploding, it's happening, it's fun. It's a little bit different,” he explains.
“Modern football clubs are no longer just football clubs, they are an enterprise. Therefore, they have to be effective in their internal automation processes and consider how to improve fan engagement. For football clubs nowadays, it’s no longer just about game day interaction - clubs now interact with their fan bases on a daily basis, so they want to leverage modern technology to do that better.”
Maxime Vermeir adds: “It's been a great journey partnering with Arsenal and thinking of the ways we can use our capabilities that we have to provide guidance and education in the community about what AI is, how it works and where it is going.
“For example, previously, we have been able to work with other organisations to bring in ABBYY technology to take care of administrative tasks so that teams could spend extra time within the community.”
Championing women is a clear priority for ABBYY and it seeks to reflect this within its culture.
“It's always been important to have a large percentage of women within our organisation,” Ulf highlights. “We want to be a place where an employee has the opportunity to grow and, frankly, that ties very well into the culture at Arsenal Women.
“We really want to be an equal opportunity employer and I think that is how we are seen as well, I think both internally and externally. It's just who we are as a company.”
Keeping AI equitable in today’s world
When it comes to eliminating bias within its AI models, Ulf says: “We’re very careful that ABBYY’s models are built in an ethically correct way and without bias. It's very important for us to be able to say that our models are auditable, creditable and the origins of the data can be traced.”
More broadly, as AI has boomed in popularity, it has started to be applied in situations where it is not needed - particularly within business contexts, as Maxime explains.
“Everybody tried to solve a multitude of problems with one singular technology, when sometimes it was the wrong technology for the problem,” he says. “For business cases, you want something deterministic.”
Those at ABBYY are keen to develop AI with a purpose-first mindset in order to avoid these types of problems with its customers.
“We wanted to make it very clear that yes, we're using AI and it will help you solve your problem - and we've got both the experience and the innovation to prove it,” Maxime adds. “There's so many different policies that ABBYY already has in place and we continue to strive to do better.”
The company is even working with an independent AI auditor, ForHumanity, to meet AI compliance requirements. As part of this alliance, ABBYY will also assist financial services organisations to meet new AI use regulations.
“We want to confirm that we’re using AI well,” Maxime says.
When AI Magazine asked Maxime what kind of advice he would offer businesses who want to invest in AI, but are unsure where to start, he said: “It's all about having the proper data.
“My first recommendation to any business that wants to start on that journey is to start with purpose-built AI specifically to uncover all of the information inside your business documents.”
Embracing AI at ABBYY
As far as football is concerned, it is set to be another exciting year for ABBYY.
As Arsenal Women’s official intelligent automation partner, both organisations are working to leverage the power of AI to deliver outstanding experiences to Arsenal supporters around the world.
ABBYY and Arsenal Women will continue to collaborate via sports, social and education programmes focused on technology education and career development. As part of this, they are also partnering on a global campaign, Game Changers, to demonstrate what is possible when you redefine the future through innovation and collaboration.
As a result, ABBYY has repositioned itself from a technology-focused organisation to adopt a more customer-centric culture.
“AI is not a solution, it's a tool or a set of technologies that can help a user do things differently,” Ulf comments. “What ABBYY has seen in the last 18 months or so is really a sea change in the perception of the necessity, capability and actuality of AI as a tool for everyone.
“We are very mindful of the fact that our customers ultimately want results. In order for this change to be helpful and purposeful, what we are trying to do as a company is to use purpose-built AI in a way where it augments the outcome for the customer. It needs to be better for the customer without costing them.”
ABBYY is also eager to make its products easier and faster-to-market and is harnessing AI to offer more complex use cases for its customers.
“We're taking all of these technologies, we're seeing what's happening in the market, we're seeing the research - and we're putting it into our platform and our products in a way that it's really going to make change for our customers,” Maxime explains. “With the combination of new technologies that have come to fruition, we will get to a point where they can start to become useful - meaning that customers can do things that were previously not doable.”
Moving forward, those at ABBYY are excited to see how its partnership with Arsenal Women will evolve. Ulf is particularly excited for the team to play more games this upcoming season and hopes they will qualify for the UEFA Women's Champions League again.
He adds: “We seek to deepen our partnership with Arsenal Women to see how we can implement some of our technology and solutions to be helpful in more meaningful ways.”
To read the full story in the magazine click HERE
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