Jack Williams, iTero, and the Structural Inequality Esports Is Quietly Ignoring

Summer 2026 — if the interview's own marker of "14 years after Gamescom 2026" is accurate — Jack Williams sat down to talk about two things most Vietnamese esports viewers have never heard of: an analytics platform called iTero, and an EMEA organisation called GIANTX. There were no highlight reels in that conversation. No leaderboards. No match dissected frame by frame. Just one question, turned over in different ways: when an AI-built tool can shift the outcome of a professional match, who is allowed to use it, how much, and under what conditions.

I reread the notes from that conversation on a Shanghai morning. What I realised — after eleven years watching this industry — was not about how strong AI has become. It was that esports is about to repeat an old football mistake: letting a commercial tool quietly become part of structural inequality, and reacting only when it is far too late.

Football has argued about coaching technology for two decades. Prozone, then StatsBomb, then Hawk-Eye, then machine-learning platforms tracking every player's running volume. Every major club has its own analytics department, staffed with sports scientists paid like coaches. The question there was never "is data allowed". It was "can you share data with rivals" and "can you use data mid-match". FIFA, UEFA and national federations have written rules for each case.

Esports came later. Over fifteen years, the major titles — Dota 2, League of Legends, CS2, Valorant — all developed clear rules on what coaches may do during a match. In Dota 2, coaches could once speak during draft but were barred once the match began. In League of Legends, Riot Games specifies how many minutes a coach may remain in the match room across a BO3 or BO5.

Those rules did not emerge from ethical theory. They emerged because someone cheated and someone noticed. That is the logic of almost every esports reform: not ahead of the curve, but behind it.

When the tool is an AI model that can process thousands of matches in seconds, the old boundary stops holding. A coach cannot sit in the match room — but a model running on a server in Singapore, operated by a third-party vendor, reading data from a match that ended three minutes ago, sits where on the legal-illegal axis? Nobody answers clearly, including the tournament operators.

That is the context Jack Williams walked into. It is also why the conversation matters far more than its surface suggests — despite only two section headings being disclosed, on exclusive work with GIANTX and on the likelihood of being copied.

Two headings, one structural thread

First heading: "working with GIANTX exclusively and the likelihood of being copied." Second: "AI-assisted cheating in esports." Between them sits a large gap — a competitive-fairness gap that nobody in the interview has an incentive to fill.

Start with the first. Exclusivity. A tech platform partnering exclusively with one esports organisation. On the surface, a business story: a B2B startup landing its first client, accepting a weak position to get data.

But placed in the specific league context, the story changes colour. GIANTX — if it is indeed the EMEA organisation formed from the merger of Excel Esports and Giants Gaming, competing in the LEC — operates inside a franchised league. Members hold permanent slots. No relegation. No natural mechanism to erode structural disadvantage.

In an open circuit — Dota Pro Circuit, CS2 open qualifiers — an exclusive advantage eventually flattens. Weak rivals drop out, strong rivals buy or build their own tools. The market self-corrects over a few seasons.

A closed system has no such mechanism. If GIANTX holds exclusive access to a better AI analytics tool, their edge is not stripped away. It compounds. Season after season, each one better than the last, because the model learns from their own data. Meanwhile, an LEC rival without that access can only wait.

A methodological note is needed here. I do not know the specific terms of the GIANTX-iTero deal. No public data indicates whether it is absolute exclusivity, seasonal exclusivity, or merely priority access. If anyone in the industry reading this has more specific information, I would very much like to know. But in whatever form, this is an advantage structure, not a neutral transaction.

The second heading — "AI-assisted cheating" — looks on its surface like an integrity issue. Is someone using AI to read a match in real time and signal their team?

The answer to half the question is: yes, that is happening. And it is clearly banned in every major title. Matches take place in isolated environments. What AI can do inside that window — reading state, recommending items, suggesting rotations — sits squarely inside the prohibition.

But the interesting window is not in-game. It is between-game. The gap between game one and game two of a BO3 or BO5. There, everyone is allowed to analyse. Nobody is banned from using tools. But the speed of analysis changes the fate of the series.

If AI can process game one in ten minutes and hand a coach a counter-draft plan before game two, that is a tempo advantage a human analyst simply cannot match. In esports, tempo is everything.

The gap nobody wants to fill

This is where the gap between the two headings becomes visible. If in-game cheating were common knowledge, rules would exist. If commercial exclusivity were common knowledge, contracts would exist. But if one company can sell the same product to multiple teams at different access tiers — exclusive to one team, a basic package to another — the central question is no longer "is it legal". The question is: may that inequality exist systematically?

No league operator is eager to answer that. Saying "no" means infringing their own teams' commercial rights. Saying "yes" means publicly admitting the league does not guarantee structural fairness. Silence is the easiest choice. And silence is what we see.

There is one more variable: patch cadence.

Not every title rewards the same kind of AI. Dota 2 — Valve patches slowly, each major version shifts the whole game, with long stable stretches in between. In that environment, a model trained on historical data retains value for a long time. You can "solve" the meta and keep that solution for weeks, sometimes months.

League of Legends is the opposite. Riot Games patches every two weeks, sometimes with large changes in a small patch. There, AI's value shifts from "solving the meta" to "detecting the meta shift faster than rivals". That is a tempo advantage, not a knowledge advantage.

A company selling the same AI product across both ecosystems — Dota 2 and League of Legends — with one marketing message is almost certainly telling half the truth. Because the tool's real value inverts between the two. In Dota 2, you pay for historical depth. In League of Legends, you pay for speed of shift detection.

That is precisely where the esports meta is really moving — not the champion meta, but the coaching-tool meta. The esports meta is not invented by anyone — it reveals itself when someone bothers to do the maths.

A model trained on 10,000 professional matches does not give you a better answer than a good coach. It gives you the same answer, 100 times faster, at a scale you could not review by hand. The best system does not create superstars, it creates perfect roles — turning an average coach into one who looks better than he is. That is the weakness of this entire industry: it does not raise the average human capacity. It only flattens the gap between those with the tool and those without.

Where I might be wrong

If I had to argue against myself, I would say this: perhaps I am drawing a bigger risk than reality. Perhaps iTero is a small platform, a startup, and the GIANTX deal is merely a marketing arrangement both sides will cancel after one season when a bigger client arrives. Perhaps the "AI cheating" story is a symbolic worry rather than an active problem. Perhaps leagues already have internal plans the public does not know about.

Those are reasonable counterarguments. And I do not yet have enough evidence to dismiss them. I do not have iTero's financials. I do not know the contract's duration. I do not know whether GIANTX actually uses the tool in official matches or only in scrims.

But one thing I know for certain from eleven years watching: if a tool becomes useful, it becomes universal — unless there is an explicit barrier. Without an explicit barrier, the tool travels two directions at once: part becomes standard for every team, the rest becomes an edge for whoever has earliest access. The line between those parts is not drawn by the league. It is drawn by commercial contracts. Which means competitive fairness is being priced in cash. Do not ask how good the player is, ask how the system protects him.

In one line: the issue is not whether AI is legal, but who is pricing and distributing it.

A verifiable prediction

If I had to make a verifiable prediction: within 18 months, at least one of the three major esports titles — Dota 2, League of Legends, or CS2 — will publish specific rules on using AI tools in the between-match window. Those rules will not ban outright, because an outright ban is technically unworkable. They will restrict: who may use it, which data may be accessed, and within what window.

But those rules will only be published after a public incident — a forfeited match, a fined team, a leaked identity. That is how every modern sports rule is born. Not through foresight, but through belated reaction.

And when that moment arrives, iTero — big or small, right or wrong — will be named as one of those names that asked the question before everyone else.