More Details About TKO COO Mark Shapiro’s Comments on WWE Using AI for Analytics Related To Storylines

As previously reported, TKO COO Mark Shapiro drew some attention during his comments during a company town hall meeting about WWE using AI in analytics for its storylines. Shapiro indicated that WWE President Nick Khan and Chief Creative Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque were using AI to determine how and where Superstars are “resonating” with fans.

Obviously, the comments, which were initially reported on by POST Wrestling’s Brandon Thurston, drew a lot of attention, and there appears to have been some misconstruing of Shapiro’s comments, with many fans taking Shapiro’s comments as meaning WWE was using AI to generate its on-air storylines.

As noted, Shapiro said during the meeting, “Nick Khan and Triple H are using AI for storylines with the WWE. What’s resonating? What superstars are resonating? In what pockets of the country are they resonating?”

He added, “That helps us with, obviously, our content, our editorial, our creative, our mapping, our touring, and of course, maximizing revenue and getting our product out to the fans most in need of it.”

Earlier today, Brandon Thurston offered further clarification via social media, with the full transcript of Shapiro’s comments from the town hall. Below is a fully detailed transcript of Mark Shapiro and TKO CFO Andrew Shcleimer’s comments regarding AI (h/t Fightful for the transcription):

Mark Shapiro: “I would like to ask you, we’ve had 17 questions on Al, which tells you people are desperate for it, they’re thirsty for it, they’re dealing with bad tech, no offense to anybody on here, but just outdated tech, if you will. And when are we going to move into the 21st century? What are we doing across the business to make us more efficient, help us improve our profitability line, and just be a leader in the space for these businesses that we run.”

Andrew Schleimer: “[TKO EVP & CIO] Mel [Hildebrandt], I think you’re doing a great job. So it’s not a reflection at all on you and your effort and your team’s efforts. But look, simply put, Mark and team, AI is everywhere. That’s the bottom line. It’s exploding all around us. You can’t open a publication, an application, I have CNBC on in the background, and says Musk versus Altman, I mean, it’s just simply everywhere. Business disruption, the efficiency. AI is entering our lives as fast as it possibly can. And we as a company, we’re not sitting around and watching from the sidelines. We’re leaning in. Look, we’ve done some tests. We’ve run some pilots across WWE and UFC. We’ve done some stuff around data and analytics and insights to learn a little bit more about our customers and consumers. We’ve done minor things to enhance the broadcast, but candidly, we haven’t really leaned in yet as a company. And AI has not been an enterprise-wide effort or solution candidly, because we kind of dipped our toe in. As an example, I’ll just give you a couple of things that we’re doing across front of house and back of house. For WWE, we did a pilot with Netflix, and we created a Netflix viewership agent that aggregates Netflix data from a data repository called Snowflake.

“So our teams can compare performance over time, viewership data, viewership metric engagement through our NXT PLEs perform better than our standard NXT programming. And these are tasks historically that would take up to 90 minutes thumbing through spreadsheets across different Excel files that now, on a simple query, take under one minute of time. So it’s all about leveraging tools and agents to make our business more efficient and really give time back to folks across the workplace to do things that are a little bit more exciting. But again, as I said, the effort here now has to be system and enterprise wide. So, not to be too long-winded, we are going to be back to you in the next couple of weeks and months with a program and a plan. We’ve made some key hires where every business, every shared service, whether it be legal, accounting, finance, HR, every employee across the company should be, will be leveraging or have the opportunity to leverage AI, excuse me. We are rolling out a platform for all of our employees with connectivity to everything that we already use, whether it be e-mail, whether it be Workday, whether it be SharePoint and Drive, all of our core systems and processes, such that we’re going to enhance the amount of time that you have to give the time back to you.

“Each of you can now focus on judgment, creativity, relationships, and strategy, other than mundane tasks. So to effectuate this, again, as I said, we’ve made a couple of key hires. We’re going to be rolling out agents and trainings, and as Ari [Emanuel] likes to say, hackathons to really drive experimentation, such that people can get more creative and adopt and embrace Al. So my ask, and I think the ask of the folks around the table is pretty simple, lean in, get the reps, use the tools, pay attention, use the training, and find the friction in your day-to-day processes in your business can be used to make things more efficient.”

Mark Shapiro: “Great. Thank you, Andrew. Let me add to that. Look, this is a major priority for our company. I have no qualms with the way we’ve done anything so far. We’ve got a great leadership team. Andrew mentioned Mel Hildebrandt. We’ve got [TKO Chief People Officer] Melissa Miller working on this. We’ve got [TKO Chief Strategy Officer] Mark Zhu working on this. We’ve got [TKO CAO & Senior Counsel] Seth Krauss working on this. And when I say those individuals, they’re entire teams. We want to get it right. We’re experimenting with a lot. We’re doing a lot of research. We’re using Silver Lake, who’s the majority shareholder of our company, their portfolio of tech investments to socialize and/or inform us every step of the way. We’re already adding folks to the team, we’re still building the team, and we’re going to be spending real money on tech. So to Andrew’s point, this will help you from an efficiency standpoint, and ultimately, this will make our business better, leaner, more creative, more productive. You will be charged with really being innovative. Don’t just say, hey, we want it, we need it, or what is it? You’re going to have to experiment, and you shouldn’t be waiting to experiment with AI and how it can help you in your day- to-day tasks.

“You should be using ChatGPT. You should be using Claude. Just go across the board, all kinds of different platforms, even Google Gemini, that you could be getting on to help you with your day-to-day. We do that in earnings. But our entire team under [TKO Chief Communications Officer] Maura McGreevy and [TKO SVP Head of Investor Relations] Seth Zaslow, they use AI to inform us on the research that’s out there, the questions our investors are asking, and of course, the answers we should be giving if in fact we can stand behind those answers. We’re using AI for fighter rankings and what [UFC COO] Lawrence [Epstein] is planning to do at UFC with Dana White and the team. Seth, excuse me, Nick Khan and Triple H are using AI for storylines with the WWE. What’s resonating? What superstars are resonating? In what pockets of the country are they resonating? That helps us with our, obviously, our content, our editorial, our creative, our mapping, our tool ring, and of course, maximizing revenue and getting our product out to the fans most in need of it. So, really love what we’re doing here and more to come very, very quickly.”

These are the full transcribed comments about AI from Monday's TKO internal town hall via audio we obtained of the all-staff meeting.

The AI subject was included but not the lead item of our report which was harvested by engagement accounts.

Our article:https://t.co/r0yWKcvsfA pic.twitter.com/teVxKLAc62

— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) April 30, 2026

WWE Aired a Vignette on This Week’s NXT That Utilized AI-Generated Content

Obviously, AI and its implementation by various corporations and entertainment companies are hot topics at the moment. It should also be noted that WWE also faced significant backlash this week for a vignette that aired on this week’s edition of NXT TV recapping the feud between Zaria and Sol Ruca.

The video appeared to be created using AI-generated content, with fans critiquing the unnatural textures, awkward facial details, and weird transitions. The image of Sol Ruca in the video didn’t even resemble the real-life WWE wrestler.

It appears the AI issue, in WWE and elsewhere, will be an ongoing one for the foreseeable future.