By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
Any tennis fans out there? Hollar!! If you enjoy watching tennis, you’ve probably been glued to your TV over the past week and a half US Open in Flushing, NY. It’s the last grand slam of the season – and my personal favorite (it’s one of my favorite trips in life – a few days hopping courts and drinking Honey Deuce). I digress.
One thing you’d immediately notice is that the line judges are gone. Yep. There is no one for these young players to yell at (a la McEnroe for us oldies). AI has taken over. You might be surprised to know the US Open has run without a single one since 2022, and before that roughly 400 line umpires worked the early rounds every year. Hawk-Eye calls every ball now, faster and more accurately than people ever did, and almost nobody misses them. A tennis tradition, a uniform, an entire category of work, erased in about three summers.
But the ball kids are still out there.
Some of them are 14 years old. They tried out for the job in August heat against hundreds of other people. (And before someone tells me a robot could chase a ball, sure, eventually. Build one that knows a player wants two balls and not three, right now, without being asked.)
Look at what that job actually is. You’re reading a player before he signals, knowing which one takes the towel after every single point and which one wants you frozen against the back wall, staying invisible until a ball ends up somewhere nobody planned for and then moving fast. A crew member told CBS New York that the best ball people are the ones nobody notices.
AI could handle a good chunk of the operation around them like how many balls per side, when to swap in new ones and which ball kid a player takes from most often. But it can’t know where to sprint in the middle of the chaos and make calls with incomplete information.
You might ask where are you going with this, Amber? Consider your department has a pile of line judge work sitting in it right now. Binary calls with a right answer such as alert triage, first-pass exception review, video scrubbing, incident report cleanup, and matching cases across store numbers. That work is getting automated whether you build a plan for it or not, and I’d rather you build the plan.
When AI takes the sorting and the scrubbing off your plate, what’s left is your thinking, and that’s the part the organization is actually paying for. AI can’t do store visits, walk the halls to meet people, sit in meetings asking the ‘smart’ questions, or take a top performing team member out to lunch. So, the challenge is to revamp, rethink, re-strategize and truly use AI to push us to BE SMARTER and learn more – it’s never been easier!
The ball kid keeps the job by thinking a half second ahead of a match that won’t hold still, reading it and adjusting before anybody asks for it. Be irreplaceable the same way. Be the ball kid.
