The Winter X Games will have an entirely new participant when the sports event slides into action later this week: an artificially intelligent judge.
During the X Games Aspen 2025, an experimental Google Cloud-based AI technology will be used to analyze and judge competitors in the snowboard superpipe events. The AI judge’s scoring won’t have an impact on the outcome, but will be evaluated for actual use in upcoming X Games events.
‘Our goal is … that maybe this could be a tool that sits next to judges, so you have four judges and then this (as an actual) judge, or it could be a piece of technology that judges could interact with, just to make sure they saw the trick appropriately,’ Jeremy Bloom told USA TODAY.
The AI judge, which analyzes live video of the snowboarders’ runs, can more accurately capture ‘the landings and the grabs and all those types of things,’ and could be used by the human judges to ‘give them superpowers,’ said Bloom, who became the X Games CEO in December 2024.
AI has a growing play in sports
AI judging has been experimented with in some sports already. Artificial intelligence software tracked all the gymnastics contestants at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, the MIT Technology Review reported. The AI judging system didn’t replace human judges, but those judges could use it to resolve an inquiry.
Major League Baseball is experimenting with robot umpires calling strikes and balls, possibly in 2026. Some soccer leagues including Serie A and La Liga use an semi-automated offside technology and the Premier League had planned to begin using it during this season but postponed its deployment in September 2024, ESPN reported.
AI refereeing makes sense when the technology is ready, says Bloom, a champion freestyle and moguls skier and two-time Olympian. He also played football at the University of Colorado and made it to the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
‘Some referees get it wrong and sometimes the impacts are really high,’ he said. ‘I always come back to the athletes, because I know how much they care, and I know much they prepare, and I know how much they deserve objectivity across subjective sports.’
An artificially intelligent judge has ‘amazing precision’
After his sports career, Bloom founded B2B tech marketing firm Integrate, which was acquired by private equity firm Audax.
When Bloom took over as CEO of the X Games in December 2024, he called a friend with more than passing knowledge in AI: Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin stepped down as president of parent company Alphabet in 2019, but remains on its board.
Both have an active interest in action sports and Brin asked Bloom, ‘What do you think we could do together?’ and floated the idea of building ‘the world’s first AI judge that can use every cutting edge piece of technology that possibly exists on the bleeding edge to bring more objectivity to these subjective sports, you know, like X Games.’
The AI judges uses Google’s Vertex AI development platform, which is also used by England’s Football Association to help its national teams evaluate future players, while international fitness company Technogym uses it for its AI-driven virtual trainer, Technogym Coach.
A collection of high-definition cameras will capture the snowboarders’ runs and the video will be analyzed by the AI software – its ‘judging framework’ model trained on countless hours of snowboarding data, Bloom said.
‘It’s going to watch every millisecond of a run, and be able to judge things like economy of motion, which is important to superpipe snowboarding … (and) the execution of that back flip,’ he said. ‘It can see if a rider drags their hand, which is a point deduction. It knows what a good landing looks like and what an okay landing looks like. And it knows with amazing precision.’
The technology will be part of the broadcasts Thursday night for the men’s Snowboarding Superpipe final and Saturday for the women’s snowboarding Superpipe final. The X Games will be broadcast on ABC, ESPN and on Roku streaming devices.
When the AI analysis of a snowboarding run is shown during the broadcast, the AI software can also be a commentator and describe the action in the language of the contestant.
‘What the viewer will see, I think, is a glimpse into the future, a real technological glimpse into the future of where this can go,’ Bloom said.
Look for more use of AI judging during the X Games Sacramento in August and in 2026 when X Games launches an 8-team global league.
“When we acquired X Games, our goal was to reimagine unique fan experiences and increase access to the world’s premiere athletes,” said Jeff Moorad, CEO of X Games parent company MSP Sports Capital, in a statement. MSP acquired the X Games in October 2022 with ESPN retaining a minority share. “The X Games partnership with Google is a great example of how we intend to use technology to enhance that experience.”
Follow Mike Snider on Threads, Bluesky and X: mikegsnider &@mikegsnider.bsky.social &@mikesnider.
What’s everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day