BOULDER, Colo. — Athletes and fans see it all the time: No matter the sport, referees, umpires and judges sometimes just make the wrong call.
Now, a Loveland native who became an elite dual-sport athlete is working to make artificial intelligence the solution.
Jeremy Bloom was an Olympic skier in 2002 and 2006, as well as an All-American CU Buffs football player before going pro in the NFL.
Bloom is now CEO of the X Games and has been involved in the business world. His latest venture came when he founded Owl AI, a start-up that uses AI to call sports like a human referee or judge would, with the goal of eliminating human error or bias. He calls it “taking a software approach to an age-old problem of fairness and objectivity in these sports.”
“I know how hard these athletes work. I know how much they care,” Bloom told Denver7. “They focus all their dreams on this one big moment. And they deserve objectivity… We make mistakes. We're human. That's what makes us human. But sometimes those human mistakes, in a split second moment, change the outcome of history in that sport forever, and that athlete who deserved to win, didn’t.”
Bloom says the technology is meant to give human referees and judges “superpowers,” not to replace them entirely.
He said that will help encourage more people to take on those tough, often thankless jobs that now face increasing pressure from rabid fanbases and the now-massive sports betting industry.
“These AI models… You first start with the judging criteria in the framework, like: ‘This trick is this degree of difficulty. This is a great landing. This is an okay landing. This is a poor landing,’” Bloom explained. “And you work with it, just like a human, and you program it without the biases.”
Denver7 asked Bloom if the AI is missing an intangible human element that is necessary when judging certain sports.
“Is there a human element to figure skating, to gymnastics, to some of these sports? Sure,” he said. “And that's why we're like, 'You know, no one's saying like, ‘Replace the humans.’' Keep the best elements of the humans.”
Bloom said the technology — which he said only requires camera quality available on most iPhones — is already being used to help judges at the X Games, and Owl AI has now partnered with the Super Motorcross World Championship and Major League Pickleball.
Owl AI recently re-judged the Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle event from the 2026 Olympics, which ended with NBC’s snowboarding analyst Todd Richards blasting “the worst judging I’ve ever seen at an event ever.”
The AI — measuring time spent on rails down to the millisecond, along with degree of trick difficulty, style and landing quality — agreed with Richards, that the silver medal winner should have won gold instead.
“This is not to take away from who won the gold medal at all,” Bloom said. “She deserves it because she won on that day. But at the same time, if we're going to change and evolve, we sort of have to lean into these uncomfortable situations where, yeah, you're sort of using technology and objectivity in a subjective world to say: ‘Not sure that that was the right outcome.’ And I think part of it is, is opening up that transparency. When you start to use AI in judging, we envision a world where fans can interact with the judge.”
When asked if AI has a place in refereeing every sport, Bloom responded that “the pipeline is really big.”
“We've yet to meet with a governing body or a rights holder in sports that says, ‘Hey, this isn't a problem.’ Like, it's universally known and true: This is a problem.”
