This fall, the Los Angeles Clippers will welcome guests to their new home: the Intuit Dome. Team owner Steve Ballmer joins AT&T CEO John Stankey to discuss how tech can amplify the live, in-game experience. Screens, cameras, and mobile devices are an integral part of their vision, whether it’s replays or fan-cams or real-time data. Ballmer and Stankey are an engaging buddy act as they trade ideas about innovation, community, and forecasting what fans will want next.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

What will make the Intuit Dome different?

Steve Ballmer: What we tried to do was to set out to build the most exciting, intense fan experience in the world. You want people to feel emotion, and you’re getting emotional with a lot of people. So we built a tighter bowl. We built things that are steeper.

We do have a very large scoreboard so we can tell you more. It can be more of a heads-up activity, even though we recognize that people will want to use the second screen, which is why we’ve run power so you can charge your phone at literally any one of our 17,700 plus seats. We have cameras in the building and microphones in the building so that we can tell who’s the most enthusiastic fan, who’s making the most noise, and make sure we’re rewarding people for those activities. We got a lot of input on top of that from the architects, but it had to also come from the technology that underpins, and AT&T’s been our core partner on that.

John Stankey: When you have somebody like Steve who has the kind of energy that he has and the kind of desire to change things, let him paint and do what he wants to do creatively as he takes us forward. 

We’ve taken some of the most robust fiber infrastructure in Los Angeles that AT&T has and we’ve connected it to his new home. And in his new home, we put seven and a half miles of fiber in. And that fiber is going to be connected to some of the best technology that’s available today to connect customers that walk into his facility to the internet into services that are going to make their experience wonderful. 

Where are you both on the hype versus enthusiasm meter on AI? 

JS: I don’t think it’s a hype. It’s as significant as the founding of the internet as we entered the 2000s. We were saying, “Oh, this internet’s all hyped up” and we’ve got the internet bubble that burst and all these valuations were out of whack. You can’t sit here today and say that the internet was overhyped. And I think AI in 10 years will do the same thing for us. 

SB: I think it’s one of these things where in the short-term, people first you get impressed. Then, you say, “ah, it doesn’t do everything I wanted it to do.” So in the long run, I think things are actually under hyped and then in the short run, they may be overhyped.

How much of the connectivity in the arena is about betting? FanDuel, DraftKings, you know, attendees interested in specifics beyond sort of the final score. 

SB: We did not build our arena assuming gambling was the way of interaction. Because it may or may not be legal at any given point.

Does it bug you, Steve, that with wagering that like fandom isn’t always about winning and losing, but about specific moments or players or stats? Is that evolution, do you feel like that’s a good thing for the sport? 

SB: It is what it is. If you come to our building, I don’t need to worry. Most of the people who come to our building will either clearly be our fans, or unfortunately, we occasionally get some of the other team’s fans in the building. If really you’re all about wagering, you probably shouldn’t come into the arena and watch. It’s defocusing. It’s distracting. 

There’s been a lot of very positive talk in LA about how the Clippers are investing in the community. When you think about building community as a business, how important is it for the Clippers? And I’m curious too, then, John, is it any less important for AT&T? 

SB: I didn’t grow up in a place where you had two teams in the same sport. That’s an unusual thing. In Seattle, everybody’s for the Seahawks. They may be cracking on them, they’re mad at the way they’re playing, but everybody’s emotionally invested. Different in Los Angeles. And so we have to build our community in a community that has largely grown up with the other team being the leading team that’s won the championships. So we’re building our community. Our community is a little more hardcore and we call it, you know, “streetlights over spotlights.” 

JS: What we think about is pretty straightforward. We’re in the business of connecting people to the internet. And the reality of our society right now is not everybody can get on the internet in a scaled way. And that means they sometimes can’t apply for a job, or they can’t get the medical advice they need. LA is a big part of our market. 

But we’ve got some more work to do and that’s why we’ve been doing some things like targeting a more affordable internet access for those people who can’t afford to pay the full boat, working actively to try to build literacy capabilities or learning centers around the Los Angeles area. You know, our connectivity for what we do with the Clippers and the Intuit Dome is just one part of what we do for the broader city each and every day. And until we get everybody connected to the internet, our work isn’t done.

There is so much going on in our world today. Steve, do you think it’s harder being a CEO now than when you were? 

SB: Look, it’s been 10 years. I’m not going to count the Clippers. I think of myself as an executive chairman. I don’t really run things day to day. So I don’t have the job that John does. Now, do I believe it’s a tougher job in some ways? It’s a different job. It’s a different job. 

We used to joke in Microsoft: Everybody got a private office. That was a real attraction point for us during the 80s and 90s. And people say these things are generational. I think a lot of things are more reflective of the diversity of the workforce. Extroverts, guess what? They’re happy not working in their own office. Introverts? They want to work in their own office. 

Now, do I think I would be effective in this environment? Probably not with the same style and approaches that I used during the bulk of my career. So, I respect the kind of work that John and Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft now, do. Being a CEO is a hard job. I do know that, and I know they haven’t gotten any easier. And every time I see John, I am reminded nothing got any easier about being a CEO. 

JS: I think it doesn’t matter whether you’re a CEO. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a schoolteacher. Things have changed. And we have to accept that things are going to change. And if you don’t accept that that’s the reality and your job is to figure out how to adjust to the new environment you’re in, then life is going to be really, really hard because the rate and pace of change is not going to slow down. You have to come in with a positive attitude that you can make a difference and attack those issues. And if you do that, you’ll do just fine. We’ll look back and someday we’ll talk about this as having been the good old days. But right now, it feels like it’s a bit of a challenge.