Periodically, SBJ Tech will feature a content series called Leadership Look-In, where C-suiters in sports tech offer thoughts on their companies, experiences and personnel management. Want to be considered for a future installment? Email me at [email protected].
Josh Gwyther has spent the second half of 2025 in a startup sprint as CEO of Owl AI. The officiating tech firm emerged in June as a creation of X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom with an $11 million seed round. Earlier this month, the company announced a deal with Major League Pickleball, joining the X Games as early clients (with plenty more interest).
Gwyther took over leadership at Owl after nearly 10 years at Google, where he oversaw engineering and AI efforts with the tech giant. He spoke to SBJ recently about Owl AI’s quick progress, the learning process in the CEO role and the dramatic growth being experienced around AI in every sector.
On growing and innovating in this industry: “Live television and sports require us to build systems and constructs around the AI. So, one of the things that we’ve built over the last five months is an RTS [real-time streaming ingestion platform]. During the first time with the X Games, we were doing a lot of things that was a demonstration of the technology.
“We didn’t have the broadcast systems in place that we wanted to for [the Major League Pickleball deal]. And so that was the first thing, outside of the AI, that we were really focusing on. In a live sports environment, there is no time to do file transfers. So we stood up an entire RTS system on Google Cloud so that we can ingest the same RTS speeds that the truck is putting out to the production studios.”
On developing the creativity along with the AI: “The bigger thing that we’re working on with pickleball, too, is how do we make it entertaining for the fans? There’s the visualization of the [officiating] decision being made that’s a big part of what we’re still in development on. Because ultimately, the AI makes the decision in a fraction of a second … but how do we want to show those frames to the audience? Do we want to have graphical overlays to show trajectory? That’s the stuff we’re working on right now — the artistic interpretation of the decision versus the engineering.”
On Owl’s software focus: “It’s a story that’s been played out over time so many times: hardware versus software. And it’s nothing against any individual company or method. If everything requires specialized hardware, it limits the amount of usability, and it maximizes costs and limits the amount of availability. … The plan has always been since we created Owl, as soon as we started working with the pro leagues, we immediately saw applications for the nonprofessional. And if you start using specialized hardware and specialized sensors, it immediately limits the accessibility of the technology.”
On learning the CEO role on the fly: “For me personally, I’m probably one of the oldest tech CEOs. When I meet all these tech startups, and I meet different CEOs and founders, they are a lot younger than I am. But I’ve been doing this for a long time, and honestly, it’s kind of funny. I played football for years, and I think football is an incredible sport in understanding leadership and building teams. I think that’s always been my strength over the decades of building teams across tech is looking at the holistic and making sure you hire for all the gaps and the strengths, and the weaknesses. Everybody leans on each other, so collectively you have this really great team. And I think that’s definitely helped with this. And I think, again, it shows really. Anytime we talk to a league or investor, they’re like, ‘Wow, this is an incredible team.’”