Neural · Sports & entertainment
Most of the night's revenue arrives in a few short windows.
A venue's economics are decided in a handful of spikes. Concourse traffic, kitchen depth, staffing and stock all move at once, across systems that don't reconcile until the next morning. By the time the report lands, the crowd has gone home and nothing can be done about it.
Read this first. Neural is the agent architecture we run inside our own company. It has not yet been deployed inside a venue operator, and you would be the first. Every capability below is labelled for exactly where it stands, and the labels separate what runs at CKS from what is in client beta from what is only designed.
Contents
- 01Where it goes wrongThree places, in the order they cost you
- 02One night, one concourseThe whole loop, start to finish
- 03The workforceFive workflows and exactly where each one stands
- 04What we've actually doneStated precisely, including what we haven't
- 05DeploymentThe questions your IT group will ask first
- 06How it startsOne workflow, sixty days, read-only
[01]Where it goes wrong
Three places it costs you.
The spike is the whole business
A stand that stalls during the break it was staffed for doesn't recover later. There is no later. The revenue walks past the queue and out of the building, and it shows up as a soft number in a report a week on.
Every venue runs a different stack
Point of sale, loyalty, kitchen management, access control, and a different combination in each building. The systems each hold part of the picture and none of them holds the operator's question, which is simply whether tonight is going well.
Reconciliation happens after it matters
Comps, voids, loyalty redemptions and vendor splits all land the following morning. The exceptions worth investigating are buried in a volume of transactions nobody can read by hand between events.
[02]One night, one concourse
What it looks like during an event.
Written in the present tense for readability. This is a designed sequence, not an account of something that has happened at a customer.
- 17:40
Doors. The agent layer already flagged two stands understocked against tonight's forecast, based on this fixture's history rather than an average.
- 19:12
Order-to-collect time at one stand crosses the threshold it set during the last comparable event. Kitchen queue depth confirms it isn't a POS artefact.
- 19:13
It reaches the operations lead on shift, with the two stands nearby that have headroom.
- 19:20
Runners move. The exception is closed during the event rather than explained after it.
- ·
Overnight, it reconciles POS, loyalty and comps across systems and leaves the exceptions ranked for the morning.
It surfaces the exception. The operations lead decides what to do about it.
[03]The workforce
Five workflows, and where each one actually stands.
Every one has the same shape: a trigger, agent work, a human checkpoint, an artifact. The status under each name is the honest part, and it names where a workflow has actually run rather than how finished it feels.
Pre-event readiness
Trigger
The day of an event, against the fixture and the forecast.
Agent actions
Compares planned stock and staffing to what comparable events actually consumed, by stand rather than by building.
Human checkpoint
The operations lead adjusts or overrides before doors.
Output
A short list of stands likely to run short, with the comparison behind it.
Live throughput watch
Trigger
Continuously, during the event.
Agent actions
Tracks order-to-collect times and kitchen queue depth per stand, and separates a genuine stall from a POS reporting artefact.
Human checkpoint
The lead on shift decides whether to move people. Nothing is dispatched automatically.
Output
An alert with the nearby stands that have headroom.
Overnight reconciliation
Trigger
After close, every event.
Agent actions
Reconciles point of sale, loyalty redemptions, comps and voids across the systems that hold them, and ranks what looks anomalous.
Human checkpoint
Finance reviews the exceptions rather than the whole ledger.
Output
A ranked exception list, ready before the morning meeting.
Executive brief
Trigger
Every morning, before anyone is at a desk.
Agent actions
Reads across the systems that hold your operation and writes what changed, what slipped, and what needs a decision today.
Human checkpoint
You reply in the thread; the work routes from there.
Output
One brief, in the order you'd have asked for it.
Vendor settlement prep
Trigger
On the settlement cycle.
Agent actions
Assembles the per-vendor split from event data and names the lines that will be disputed before the vendor finds them.
Human checkpoint
Finance approves before anything is sent.
Output
A settlement pack with its disputes flagged in advance.
[04]Standing
What we've actually done.
Stated precisely, because in this category precision is the differentiator.
We built ordering for this industry
A mobile and kiosk ordering suite deployed across 100+ major stadiums and arenas: MLB, NFL, NBA, MLS and concert venues. Kiosks, order-taker tablets, payment terminals and phones, all in one operation.
We've integrated the stack you actually run
Point-of-sale integrations including Simphony Micros, NCR and Square, plus loyalty programs including Fan Maker and Venuetize. We know how these systems disagree with each other. Reconciling them nightly is a workflow we have designed, not one we have shipped.
We run our own company on the agent layer
Neural plans, builds, reviews and ships at CKS every day. That part is demonstrable on a call rather than described in a deck.
The venue workflows are designed, not deployed
They are specified against the ordering platform we built, which is why they name stands and kitchen depth rather than generic KPIs. They have not run in a live building.
What we haven't done: run these agent workflows inside a live venue.
[05]Deployment
The questions IT will ask.
Answered here rather than in the third meeting.
- Where it runs
- Your infrastructure or a private tenant. Not a shared multi-tenant product.
- What it reads
- The systems you already run. Read access first, always.
- Who approves
- Actions you designate as consequential stop at a named person before they happen. You set that boundary; the platform enforces it rather than relying on discipline.
- What's recorded
- Each agent action is logged with its inputs, the sources it cited, what it did, and who approved it. The things that hold up in a review.
- Who owns it
- Your data and configuration are yours, and we'll put the exit terms in the contract rather than asking you to trust a web page.
[06]How it starts
One workflow. Sixty days.
Not a platform rollout. We pick the single workflow where it is costing you most, stand it up against your real systems, and you judge it on whether it caught things your people did not have time to.
Week 1
The workflow and the success metric are agreed in the first session, not discovered over a month. Read-only access to the systems it needs; your security review runs in parallel.
Weeks 2–7
It runs alongside your people on live work. Every output reviewed by your team, nothing acted on automatically, false positives tuned weekly.
Week 8
Measured against the metric we set in week 1. Keep it, change it, or walk away. Because it stayed read-only, walking away means revoking credentials and removing an integration rather than migrating off a platform.
- What it costs
- Fixed fee, quoted after the working session, so it is priced against your actual systems rather than a guess. No per-seat licence during the pilot.
- How it's judged
- One number, agreed before we start. Usually exceptions caught that your team didn't have hours to catch, measured against a baseline period.
- What we need
- Read-only access to two or three systems, one person who reviews the output, and an executive who reads the weekly.
- What you keep
- The configuration and everything it produced, whether or not you continue. Data handling and retention are in the agreement before access is granted.
A working session is ninety minutes with your operators, not a pitch. We map where the cost actually lands and tell you which parts of it are worth pointing an agent at, including the parts that are not.
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