One Click Away - a Live Special from the Football Business Summit in Prague, featuring Kjetil Sørtun and discussing next-generation ticketing solutions

One Click Away. That was the title of the show when Carl-Erik Moberg welcomed Kjetil Sørtun on stage at epet Arena in Prague on June 5, 2024, for a Live Special of TicketingPodcast.com, discussing next-generation ticketing solutions.

The event took place at the Football Business Summit, gathering football industry executives from all over Europe for a full day of learning and networking. This year’s focus was innovation, a theme that resonates deeply in this podcast episode, brought to you in its entirety as it happened in Prague.

Kjetil Sørtun, CTO at TicketCo, not only manages TicketCo’s platform and developer teams but also leads the company’s innovation project, “Massiv.” The goal of this project is to create a next-generation ticketing solution where everything a ticketing manager needs is just one click away.

This Live Special episode of TicketingPodcast.com explores Kjetil's journey from transforming Norway's banking sector with mobile-only, self-service solutions to tackling the challenges of fragmentation and lack of standards in ticketing. Discover how data-driven decision-making and innovative AI technologies will soon streamline processes for ticketing managers, making their roles more efficient and impactful.

The ambitious "Massiv" project, inspired by the rugged Norwegian terrain, aims to revolutionise the ticketing landscape with a mobile-only digital assistant. Kjetil shares insights on how customer feedback and significant support from the Norwegian government are shaping this transformative initiative. He highlights the digital assistant’s capabilities in providing real-time recommendations and simplifying daily tasks, ultimately freeing up valuable time for more critical activities.

Join us for an insightful conversation that promises to reshape the future of ticketing, one digital innovation at a time.

TicketingPodcast.com is powered and sponsored by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

The Football Business Summit gathers industry experts from all over Europe for insightful discussions. In June this year, the conference took place at Appet Arena in Prague. During the event, we recorded a live special of TicketingPodcastcom featuring Kjetil Søren, CTO at Tickico, discussing next-generation ticketing. Here it is in its full length Enjoy.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Welcome to the Epit Arena in Prague. It's been a great experience so far, and we normally sit at home in Norway when we do these recordings. We've had thousands of people in ticketing following the podcast now, and we've done I think we're close to 50, 60 episodes now with global guests, and, in fact, we're hosting a dinner in London tomorrow for some of our guests, so that'll be fun. This is a special one, though, because we're live, as said, from Prague. With me today is Kjetil Sörtun, cto of TicketCo, and what we're going to talk about today is we're touching on AI and we are touching on a digital assistant where everything is going to be one click away. And we also talked about the heroes of the industry, the ticketing managers, and they truly are heroes. So, kjetil, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Speaker 3: 1:30

Thank you, carl. My name is Kjetil Assad, I am from Norway, live in Bergen for adult kids, and if you are a parent in Norway, you always have to be volunteers in sports. You can either organize it or you can be a trainer. So I decided to be a trainer. So I trained a football team for 20 years. I started my education in economics, but I discovered that it was better to talk to machines than people, so I switched to IT and continued there. I've done that for 20 years now, starting to code, still coding, but mainly now at a more high level, designing system and as a CTO of different companies.

Speaker 2: 2:04

I mean the first time I met you. You were known in Norway for reshaping the banking industry. Can you tell us a little bit about that, because that's a very traditional industry?

Speaker 3: 2:14

It is. I was working in a bank called Sparbank I Vest, which has a very innovative culture for doing innovation, so we were discussing how we can actually improve banking. Banking is very traditional, so when banking went online 20 years ago, what it did was actually to have power on their existing processes. They didn't change it, they just put it online. So it was not improving the way they work in the bank. So what we did was to take a step back and ask ourselves if we want to create a new bank in 2020, how should we build it? So we made a couple. If we want to create a new bank in 2020, how should we build it?

Speaker 3: 2:46

So we made a couple of decisions. We talked to a lot of customers and we ended up with making a mobile only bank and we decided everything should be self-served and a mortgage is not the mortgage. A mortgage is a product that you need to shape and find the right customer for. So in the beginning it was very hard because everyone was fighting not for the change. Customer didn't want it. We were afraid it was a wrong approach, but we sticked with it and at the end, it was actually changing the whole bank industry in Norway, but it took a couple of years before the rest of the industry discovered that this was the best solution going forward not just turning power on to a traditional way of thinking, but to rethink the way you do business.

Speaker 2: 3:27

And I guess today now people in Norway, they can actually apply for a loan in one click for their apartment or house.

Speaker 3: 3:35

You need a little bit more than one click, but everything is collected from official registries so you even calculate the value of your property directly. So you get an approval disapproval immediately when you're doing it online. So you don't have to put in any of the data yourself.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Everything is collected from registries around it and then you came in from the banking industry very traditional and you came over to the ticketing industry. I mean, what was your first impression of that?

Speaker 3: 4:04

uh, it's a different industry. I think I understand the basics. Everything has the same foundation Business is business, but people are different. The way you do business is different. The way you think, the way things are organized is different, so it's required to relearn a lot of things that were like this in the bank and in the ticketing industry is a new way of seeing the same problem.

Speaker 2: 4:24

Any particular challenges you see in the industry or when you started.

Speaker 3: 4:29

Yeah, I think one of the things was that I was expecting a bit fragmentation. I was expecting a lot of bespoke solutions, but it even was more than I was expecting People as very traditional, very people driven in a sense case by by case, a lot of people were working to fix things. Little data, at least in ticketing. People were not doing a lot of decision based on data. It's more gut feeling, the way we see it, the way our fans like it. Our fans is not like that. They need it this way. So it was more like every club has their own opinion of how things are working.

Speaker 2: 5:06

Which means you have to custom build things, I suppose. But in terms of problems, I mean, what's the problems? What challenges?

Speaker 3: 5:17

do you face when you have to do custom development all the time? Lack of standards, lack of data means that you can't change things fast. You need to continue doing the same. You are just turning everything around and start over again with the same knowledge because you not get the organization to learn. You, as a person, learn because you do the failures when you do an event, but the organization doesn't learn, so it does. Changing as an organization I think that was the biggest things when you're doing that kind of solutions.

Speaker 2: 5:45

I mean coming from banking and you go into ticketing. I think that was the biggest things when you're doing that kind of solutions.

Speaker 3: 5:49

I mean coming from banking and you go into ticketing would you say that ticketing was maybe a little bit under-innovated when you came in. Yeah, I think it is. Banks was also under-innovated in the beginning, but the regulators demanded innovation, in a sense, by opening up, saying that you need to share data, you need to be able to do this kind of things on your own data. It will come to the ticketing as well, but it takes more time because it's more profit driven, value driven, than regulator driven, in a sense what's your solution?

Speaker 2: 6:17

then chat, and to the challenges. What's the secret recipe?

Speaker 3: 6:21

uh, hope that we're one, but uh, what we were thinking more in the direction of?

Speaker 3: 6:25

If we could take a step back today and rethink ticketing, would we do it the way we do it? And we See that data is driving all kinds of business today. So we took a step back and say what if you have an assistant that could see the same thing that you do, which is really smart, can do everything you can do and is doing it in real time and whatever he's seeing, he's giving you a nudge or recommendation, what you, as a decision maker, should do. So we decided to look in the direction of making a digital ticketing assistant, to look in the direction of making a digital ticketing assistant that's helped ticketing manager do the best job giving them recommendations, helping them understand the data, looking at the changes in the system, looking at the changes in the fans, and try to make that to something you can act on instead of you try to do that all the time. So the system or the machine should do it for you. That was the approach we took.

Speaker 2: 7:19

But I mean ticketing managers and clubs. Is this something they want? Have they asked for it?

Speaker 3: 7:25

Not directly, I don't think even bank customers ask for a new bank. They were just asking for cheaper mortgage, better products. But when they saw what we could do by changing the way we think, how easy it was for them to switch bank, how easy it was for them to get a lower interest rate on a mortgage and they didn't have to do anything themselves, then they saw it was the same product, but a different wrapping, a different way of thinking. So they started to look at that direction.

Speaker 2: 7:54

So this project, you've chosen to call it Massiv, and that maybe because it's a massive job, or there might be another reason why the word Massiv.

Speaker 3: 8:05

I love the mountains in Norway, especially in the winter. There's a lot of places you can go, there's a lot of cabins in the mountains and you can do day trips between the cabins, and one of the hardest trips you can do is actually called Massiv in Norwegian. It takes 20 to 40 days to go and you go from cabin to cabin in the southern part of Norway and you go through four different mountain areas, which is Breheimen, jotunheimen, I'm sure you've heard of, and you have Skavheimen and Adangavida, and they are completely different. The mountains area are different. Some of them are very flat, some of them very up and down.

Speaker 3: 8:41

So every stage is different and we think changing the ticketing industry is not one task. It's a lot of small tasks going over a long time where you have to take different challenges for each cabin or milestone to try to achieve the next goal and you need to understand how you got there and how you should go from here. So we think it's a very long journey. You can't fix everything by just doing one small project. You need to do the first one, stop and learn, select the next one, stop and learn until you are where you should be, which is a langarveda in Norway.

Speaker 2: 9:17

I guess there's two massive problems with doing things like this. One is to start developing things that the customers or the clubs doesn't need right now. Right, because one team is working on maybe backlog or a product that the customers need, but then there's also the funding of that kind of innovation. But then there's also the funding of that kind of innovation. Why not spend the money where you see the benefits straight away? Why spend money on something that might be far away? But this project is actually funded by the Norwegian government and they're throwing millions into the project. Why are they doing that?

Speaker 3: 9:55

I guess you have to ask them. I think one of the reasons are that they want to bring Norwegian technology out in the world. They want us to build a sustainable business. They want industries like ticketing or event industries and football to achieve more. They want sustainability. They want tickets to be something you can trust. You should follow the basic rules so they see an opportunity of making better products built in Norway for international market.

Speaker 2: 10:24

But how do you get inputs to build the products? I mean, how do you know what the digital assistant is supposed to help you with?

Speaker 3: 10:31

We need to ask our customers, we need to ask people that are working in the industry. We have some ideas and direction we want to go, but they are just ideas until we get feedback from ticketing manager, from the clubs. Is this really something that is working? Can we use it? Is this approach? Is this the next cabin? Can we go in this direction? Will that help you?

Speaker 3: 10:51

So the project we are doing together with Innovation Norway is a partnership program. The project we are doing together with Innovation Norway is a partnership program. So for every hour we put in, they expect us to have a customer or a commercial partner that is doing effort as well. So we can't do it alone. So we do it step by step, by having an idea that we think is the right direction. We ask our customers what you do think. Some of the ideas they got thumbs up, some ideas are thumbs down, and then we make the solution if it's a thumbs up, and they try it, and then we get feedback from real customers. It's never right the first time, so you need to do it over again until you are at the cabin or at the milestone, and then you decide what is the next approach, what's the next thing to do. So it's driven by our customers. They provide knowledge to ours and their customers to help us improve how we build the system.

Speaker 2: 11:41

Sounds great. So some examples then, kjetil, I mean, we all want to have more time, right, we want to free up time. I spoke to a ticketing manager here the other day. He got up five in the morning 5 am every morning when there was a match day, because the to-do list is just so incredibly long. What kind of tasks are the digital ticketing managers going to help us with?

Speaker 3: 12:04

We are currently looking in three directions. The one thing we are pretty sure of is that you should have it with you all the time, so it needs to be on the phone. So we have decided to do a mobile-only approach and that means that the assistant is with you 24-7. You can choose to take it away, but it should be something that you have close to you. It's an assistant and the first approach we are doing is that it builds recommendations so it reads the same data that you access to. If someone checks in at the arena, it knows it the same time you do and it can analyze on that data immediately. So if there are something you, as a ticketing manager, should do, you will get recommendations and you can accept or deny. It's up to you. It doesn't make decisions for you, it only makes recommendations.

Speaker 3: 12:50

The other thing is that every recommendation is a one-click. So if it suggests that you should open this section for sale, you have a one click. So if it suggests that you should open this section for sale, you have one click. To do that. You don't have to go into the admin solution and find the section and click on it. You do it directly from the recommendation and all the data in the platform. It tried to make a summary of it. It tried to highlight what you need to know so you can focus on the most important stuff. Instead of reading every part of the solution, you get the three or four or five highlights for the day. This is where you're ahead of budget. This is where you should focus today. This is a problem. This is something is good. So, instead of you doing that traditional analyze of the data, it's doing it for you and you can read the summary in a sense.

Speaker 2: 13:35

What's the biggest challenge? I mean, there is a reason you're getting support from the Norwegian government, right, this is because it might never happen. And it might happen, but what's the risks?

Speaker 3: 13:46

It's a huge project and the risk is getting smaller for each cabin in a sense. But any system you can divide into three layers is what you know, what you do and what you see, and data is something that's very important to collect. We need to fetch rich data, good data, data over time. To be able to do predictions, you need to have something to compare to. So getting good data is definitely a challenge, challenging the way we do stuff, the way the business processes are built up.

Speaker 3: 14:16

To get the ticketing manager to rethink what they do, to change the behavior require time and discussions and meetings and understanding of why they do it this way. And even the customers are hard to change because nobody wants to be changed. We saw that in the bank. Every time we changed the color of a button, support got a lot of calls. It was just a small change, but it was still different. So you need to stick with the change, you need to believe it's right and you need to change people slowly. You can't change people fast. You need to do it step by step and you need to have the grit to stay with it, because unless you just go back to where you started and you need to start from there again next time.

Speaker 2: 14:57

Well, I think it sounds like it can be a promising future for ticketing managers. But you reshaped the banking industry right. That is an impressive task in itself. How do you compare this to the banking industry? This is the event industry. This is a lot more sound than in a bank and maybe they're still very traditional.

Speaker 3: 15:20

I don't have to wear a suit every day, so that's a difference. I think the bank industry is more mature. The systems are more finished, in a sense. So you are doing innovation on top of something that is very stable. When you're working with a lot of different clubs, they have different systems, different integrations, different way of doing stuff it's harder to build one system. You have to do all that integration with a lot of different clubs. They have different systems, different integrations, different ways of doing stuff. It's harder to build one system. You have to do all that integration with different data and since they all have different business processes, they all have different data. So that makes it a little bit more challenging to start with. But I think it's not harder or easier, it's just different. Innovation takes time and you need to understand where you are and take step by step in the direction you think is right.

Speaker 2: 16:04

I think it's great Kjetil, and we have a couple of traditions on this podcast, and one of them is to try and sum up the three key takeaways from the conversation. I don't know where to start Kjetil on this one, but if you would sum up the conversation in three takeaways on building the new digital ticketing assistant, what would that be?

Speaker 3: 16:24

For the first, I think it's important that we use modern technology to solve problems. We have a huge, vast of tools that we should take into the way of working, and training to understand how they work takes time. You can't just add AI to a process and it's better. You need to understand how to do that, you need to understand how it will affect you and you need to look at the data to understand that. So I think we should let technology do what technology is best at and we as people can do what we are best at. So we need to understand how technology can help us, and I think it's very important that you own the data, you understand the data, you collect data and you try to make it as clean as possible. Then you can compare and then you can make it to predict what is the best thing to do.

Speaker 2: 17:15

Sounds good. So, Kjetil, if people want to follow the developments of the digital assistant, I mean, how do they reach out to you?

Speaker 3: 17:23

People here can talk to me today if they want, or on LinkedIn, and I can follow TicketGo for see what we publish.

Speaker 2: 17:29

Sounds great, and you're here for until tomorrow, right? And I heard there was a quiz later on as well, with free drinks, so that's always good as well. Thank you everyone for participating here live today, and also thank you to our listeners. It's been great to having you, kjetil. I mean I'll be following the process. It's an exciting project. Thank you again. This is the ticketingpodcastcom, the podcast for people in the ticketing industry. Feel free to give us an advice or a tip if you have anyone who would like to join the podcast, and also thank you to TicketCo for sponsoring the podcast. Again, thank you to Football, or FBIN, as I say, for inviting us here today, and I wish you all a wonderful day in Prague or wherever you are. Thank you.