Jake's Road Report is Gemini Sports founder Jake Schuster’s weekly update from professional football's frontlines. Jake travels globally, meeting club executives to share candid insights on AI's role in football. These raw, actionable thoughts are delivered weekly, with meeting details kept confidential and specific intel omitted.

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“I want to be able to drag and drop scenarios and see the financial implications, the squad impact”. 

This longtime General Manager/Director of Football was gesturing with his hands, painting a picture in the air of how he wanted to understand why a transfer move might make sense.

"So you want the Minority Report," I said.

His eyes lit up and he pounded his desk. "YES!"

Here's a mid-40’s executive getting excited about a 20+-year-old noir sci-fi film, and it perfectly encapsulates where our industry is heading. Frankly, this has always been my vision. Deep down, whether they realize it or not, every sporting director I’ve met with seems to want that same hyper-intuitive, gesture-based interface Tom Cruise used to manipulate holographic data in 2002.

Here's what so many folks get wrong: they think chat interfaces are the endgame. Chat isn't the product! It's just the first iteration. It’s like the training wheels of AI interaction. The real revolution will be super dynamic user experiences that feel as natural as having a conversation with your most trusted scout–just 50X faster.

The future of squad planning won't be about scrolling through endless dashboards or typing queries into chat boxes. It’ll be about intuitive interfaces where you and your whole team can literally pull apart a player's performance data, or a number of comparative prospects in 3-D, compare tactical fits across multiple scenarios and visualize transfer impact in real-time. You want to see the data move, breathe and respond to your questions as naturally as pointing at a whiteboard. 

The clubs that embrace this shift toward dynamic, AI-driven user experiences will have a massive competitive advantage in the transfer market. The ones still thinking that Tableau or R-Shiny dashboards are best practice will get left behind. They’re making decisions with yesterday's tools in tomorrow's game.

The more I think about it, the more inspired I get by the idea of that Minority Report-syle user experience, and the more excited I get by the realization that we can bring it to life sooner than I ever imagined possible.