USC Just Hired a Director of AI for Its Football Program. Your Employer Has Probably Been Doing This for Years.
USC just made history by hiring the first Director of AI in college football — but the architecture they're building already exists across warehouses, offices, and industries everywhere. The real question isn't whether AI will evaluate workers. It's who owns the data, and who captures the value.
The USC Trojans announced this week they've hired the first Director of AI in college football history. Conor McQuiston will build predictive models from athlete performance data to find competitive advantages in game planning, scouting and player evaluation. The models are built on data the athletes generate. The models belong to the program but any rights of ownership for the athletes have not been publicly explained.
I predict this focus on AI will spread quickly throughout college football. And we will then see schools sell this data to video game companies, gambling outfits and other buyers on the market. Right now, this will be portrayed by many as an "innovation" story: "Lincoln Riley is staying ahead of the curve!" "This is the next frontier after NIL!" etc. That framing isn't wrong but every efficiency story has a cost to it, and the cost story rarely makes the press release.
This announcement offers a glimpse into a future that is already here. Amazon's Productivity Tracker scores warehouse workers in real time, and the score can trigger termination without human review. White-collar employees are now on keyboards where every stroke is monitored. In many sectors of this economy, your performance is already tracked by dashboards you may never see and evaluated by systems you do not control.
The architecture is already here. What's new is the USC job title and the press release, which means it's now visible enough to argue about. This is the value of sports – it makes the invisible visible to the rest of us.
The real question is no longer whether AI will evaluate workers. That question has been answered, loudly, across industry after industry. A more important question is about ownership. Who owns the data that trains that model? Who owns the model that can then be sold to different companies to use for profit? Who captures the value when workers train the systems that eventually evaluate them?
Pro athletes will fight about these issues in the next collective bargaining cycle. They have unions, lawyers and enough economic leverage to put it on the table. But most college athletes lack any real, organized layer of protection against this.
Like most workers, they will simply inherit this emerging system, without meaningful disclosure and without ownership. And this is only the beginning.