Beyond Dashboards: Building a World Cup Prediction Challenge with Domo

Mark: What is up, everyone? On this Thursday, the second of July, I have a very, very special guest right now. For anybody who has been in the Domo community for a while, they know that Alexi happens to be a legend of all legends. This man at Sony Interactive Entertainment is doing so much amazing stuff; it is pretty cool.

I got a note talking about this really cool Domo app that they had built to be used at Sony just to have fun with the World Cup. Alexi, in case you are wondering, is rooting for France. It feels like a really safe answer, if we are being honest. But I am excited to have Alexi on with me. How are you, my friend?

Alexi: I am doing well. Thank you, Mark, for the invitation. Thank you.

Mark: Of course. So, Alexi, let's not wait. Jump right in and tell us what you are doing and why you built it.

Alexi: Yeah, thank you. I believe everybody knows Sony Interactive Entertainment; most people know us as Sony PlayStation. If you saw my presentation at Domopalooza or Big Data London, we have a lot of Domo instances and we are real fans of Domo.

One of our challenges was to grow our internal Domo community at Sony. So, we spun up a new instance called Sandbox, where we'd like to put all the cool visualization projects. One of these projects was the idea of a World Cup prediction challenge.

It is a funny story because we had this idea one week before the first match started. We had a discussion with Sean just speaking about work and thought, "Wait, this can be really good engagement, an experiment, right?" That was on Thursday, and next Thursday the first match was starting. I finished my work, opened my laptop when my kids were sleeping, and started developing. In two hours, the app was ready.

On Friday, we launched a beta test, and on Monday, we announced to our internal Domo community at Sony: "Guys, this is the World Cup prediction challenge, let's try it. You should predict your matches, we have a leaderboard, let's make a fun competition." That is how it started. We literally launched it three or four days before the first match.

Mark: Alexi, to help people understand the scale, we've got a wide variety of really amazing customers across the globe who are using Domo like Sony, but you have a pretty significant amount of Domo users, right?

Alexi: Yes, we have a lot of Domo users internally. One of the challenges was that we have a lot of Domo instances, so how do we onboard our users and upscale them? That is the reason we brought this Sandbox instance—to upskill them. It is a playground for new users, helping us enable and grow our Domo community together.

Mark: So part of the idea here, Alexi, is just that we want our current Domo users to have fun playing with Domo. And for those who don't know Domo, we want them to get to know Domo in a fun way. Is that fair?

Alexi: Yes, and to be honest, it is not only fun—it is also a showcase of Domo's capabilities. My goal was to present what you can do with a custom application. Inside, there is a very good use case of AppDB, Domo AI workflows, and an AI agent is working in this app. Everything is wrapped up in our custom app framework. Each component is pretty straightforward, but altogether, it offers a really cohesive experience for our end users.

Mark: I love it. Alexi, show us what you've got. Show us what you built.

Alexi: Okay, let's show it. Before I show the World Cup, just to be clear, for privacy reasons, I had to replace the names of my colleagues. Only my name is real. You can see how bad I am at predicting matches!

Mark: You've done pretty well with France, though, thus far, right?

Alexi: I know, I know. So, this is the app. There are four tabs. Let's start with the fixtures. Here, we see all the matches that are already completed, and you can see the real score. This is what I put as my prediction. I had a chance to predict the exact score for the first match, but after that, my predictions were not really good.

My intention was to support our colleagues who are all around the world; we have communities in Tokyo, London, and San Diego. My goal was to show the match time in their current time zone. Right now, I'm in France. For example, the next match is Spain vs. Austria, which starts at nine PM. We lock predictions one hour before, and as you can see, all times are calculated based on the user's time zone, so it feels comfortable. And congratulations to the United States, who won yesterday!

This is the first informational tab. My next tab is "My Predictions." This is where you can choose your score; for Spain vs. Austria, I put two-zero. If you change your mind, you can update it, and it synchronizes in AppDB. You can also check your completed predictions and see how many points you got. For the United States, I hoped they would score three goals, but it was only two. For a correct outcome, you get three points. If you get the exact score, you get five points; a correct outcome gets three points, and if you didn't predict well, it's zero points.

Now, I will show you the leaderboard. This is probably the most visited tab where all the competition goes, and people visit it literally every day after every match. The rankings are updated, and I'm still only in the sixth position.

Mark: Alexi, it could be worse. You could be number six hundred, so I'd feel pretty good.

Alexi: I know, I know. As you can see, we are very close, so I might get into the top three. We'll see.

I also thought about how we can use AI in this project. For AI, I used an AI agent in the workflows. I built a Code Engine function that gathers all the KPIs and the leaderboard, and sends them to the AI agent. The agent takes these KPIs and writes a sports-summary-style text explaining the leaderboard, how many predictions you have made, and how far you are from the top ten.

This is a really interesting use case, and I know people love checking what's going on and how far they are from the top spots. We also have live metrics showing the number of predictions and participants. This is just a snapshot in our demo AppDB, so the actual figures are much bigger. But, yeah, that is basically it.

Mark: Alexi, walk us through. It's so intriguing and fun what you did to drive engagement. But I'm intrigued: walk us through some of the top Domo features that you used. You talked about what you did in AppDB, the custom app piece, but walk us through the things that really helped bring this to pass.

Alexi: Yeah. I started developing the custom app using Claude, and the app was doing very well. For the custom app, I connected the list of matches from Google Sheets, and it's updated with the scores. When a match is finished, I connect it to AppDB and load everything there. All of the orchestration is handled under workflows, using the Domo AI agent.

I experimented a lot with the prompts. The prompt is actually quite big in the Domo AI agent, and I iterated multiple times to get this nice sports style. I wanted to make sure it didn't show any participant names or emails, keeping it anonymous on one side, but maintaining an engaging style on the other side to drive excitement for our end users. So, we literally used a lot of tools: AppDB, workflows, Domo AI, connectors, and the custom app.

Mark: I love it. Well, Alexi, keep leading out. Sony Interactive Entertainment has been doing really cool things with Domo for a long time, and we are grateful for you as a customer. You've spoken multiple times at Domopalooza. You even throw your own version of Domopalooza, our user conference, at Sony every year, right?

Alexi: Yes. We run it every year, and we call it PlayStation Palooza. We have main offices in the US, United Kingdom, and Japan. We literally have a local "PlayStation Palooza" in each location to bring our Domo community together to run enablement, training, and certification sessions.

We have a lot of certified Domo users, and we work closely with the Domo training and certification teams, which I really appreciate. We also invite the Domo team to present roadmap features, speak, and host roundtables. It's a really great engagement event.

Mark: I love it. Well, Alexi, thank you for leading out, my friend. Thanks for being a great customer. Enjoy the World Cup! I hope all your dreams and wishes come to pass with France winning. Although, I also hope that the US pulls off some Cinderella wins in the coming rounds.

Alexi: Yeah, absolutely. There is just one thing I wanted to show: the prizes. My community doesn't know yet, but these are the prizes we prepared, complete with nice, funny slogans and t-shirts for the winners of our prediction challenge. I'm happy to offer these after the final match.

Mark: This is amazing, my friend. So amazing. Well, thank you again, and thanks for being a great customer. Enjoy the World Cup, and we'll be talking soon.

Alexi: Thank you, Mark. Thank you. See you, everybody. Bye.

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