Monumental Sports & Entertainment owns not only the NBA’s Washington Wizards, NHL’s Washington Capitals and WNBA’s Washington Mystics, but also Washington D.C.’s Capital One Arena and other major sports facilities in the area, and broadcast and streaming networks for the teams. It makes up a sizable portion of the fan and fun business in the nation’s capital.

“We’re a fully integrated organization,” MSE President and Vice Chairman Zach Leonsis told me in his office next to Capital One Arena this summer.

Major upgrades to enhance the experience have been ongoing. Leonsis told me more than $35 million was invested in the broadcast and streaming network after MSE acquired it in 2022. And Capital One Arena is undergoing a more than $1 billion comprehensive renovation to add both technology and fan-centric upgrades.

I talked to Zach Leonsis about how the sports media landscape has changed, and how MSE has been able to take advantage of its position for messaging and interaction. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

Even before the recent flood of discussions about whether AI is on course to destroy humanity, it was becoming clear that among ordinary people, AI has a trust problem. Forbes senior contributor John Koetsier notes a survey from Visa shows only 23% of U.S. consumers are ready to let agents make purchases on their behalf.

Koetsier talked to Visa Group President Oliver Jenkyn about how to improve user confidence in AI agents and purchases. After all, the survey showed that if Visa’s name is involved in the agentic transaction, 61% of consumers would trust it. Jenkyn told him in the case of Visa, it has a lot to do with trust built over time, but technology and governance can help, too. Payment mechanisms need to be secure, agent behavior should be personalized to the user, and the user should maintain complete control over where agents can shop, how much they can spend, and when they need to get human permission.

Social networking giant Meta released Muse, its new personal AI agent, earlier this month. But Muse hit app stores at a difficult time for trust. It launched before the conversation about AI safety, but weeks after Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement to end sweeping litigation brought by 29 states over claims that its social media sites were designed to addict children.

Muse, writes Forbes contributor Gabriel Alin Zainescu, lives in........

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