iTero, GIANTX and the Unregulated Grey Zone of AI Coaching in Esports

Earlier this month, an analytics coach I know in Shenzhen sent me a Discord snippet pulled from the internal server of a League of Legends team in the EMEA region. The chat ran forty lines. One sentence made me reread it three times: "We already have the pre-match report from iTero. The opponent has taken Dragon three matches in a row on the same timing. We can see twelve minutes ahead." Twelve minutes. In a discipline where error margins are measured in seconds. No team name. Only a number. And a product name. I sat in silence for a long while after reading it. Not out of shock. But because I realised what I had suspected for two years had become fact: an AI tool is being sold privately to one esports organisation, and the rest of the league has no idea that its opponents can see the future before it happens. Jack Williams' interview about iTero, GIANTX and the future of AI in esports coaching is not a PR piece. It is a record. And like any record, it only has value if you read it to the end. Fans hate the truth, but I did not go on air to be loved. To understand why this interview matters, we need to place it inside the eight-year transformation of the esports analytics industry. In 2026, when I filmed my first League of Legends clips for a small channel in Ho Chi Minh City, pre-match analysis was done with Excel and A4 paper. Coaches watched VODs, wrote behavioural patterns on paper, and shouted them across the meeting room. Human speed was analytical speed. By 2026, working at a content company in Shenzhen, I watched LPL teams hire analysts with master's degrees in mathematics. They bought data from commercial APIs. But humans still read the data and humans still drew the conclusions. Then came 2026, when a wave of AI companies appeared. Some names surfaced at industry conferences. Others stayed submerged, known only to insiders. iTero belongs to the second group. It is not a mass-market product. It is a B2B tool sold only to professional organisations, with no free trial and no social media advertising. Tools like this usually come with exclusivity contracts, or they sell to the few teams that can afford them. GIANTX is an EMEA organisation, a European team inside Riot Games' LEC system. If you do not follow professional League of Legends, you may never have heard of GIANTX. Inside the LEC, it is a brand present since the early seasons. The Jack Williams named in the headline is not a player. He is a founder or technology executive in esports, the man behind iTero, answering questions about an exclusive partnership with GIANTX and the risk of being copied in the AI coaching market. The two themes in the interview — working exclusively with GIANTX and the likelihood of being copied, plus the question of AI-assisted cheating — are two ends of one stick. One end is commercial. One end is ethical. Neither has clear rules. The first thing I want to say plainly: commercial exclusivity in coaching tools is a competitive-fairness issue, not a business issue. In an open circuit, the best team wins. In a closed league like the LEC — where teams are permanent members with no relegation — structural advantages are not competed away across seasons. If Team A holds exclusive access to a tool that Team B does not, Team A keeps that advantage forever. There is no mechanism for rivals to catch up, because they are not permitted to buy the same tool. Inside the iTero–GIANTX exclusivity model, this is reality. Rivals can build their own tool, of course. But how many months of labour separate a team with a ready tool from a team starting from zero? How many failed experiments? How much data spend? That gap cannot be closed inside a single season. This is the point the interview does not address. Jack Williams talks about protecting his product from being copied. That is the argument of a businessman. I do not attack him for it. I attack the industry for letting a debate about competitive fairness be framed as a debate about intellectual property. Remember: the U19 final that year taught me one lesson — an editor's silence is a crime. When esports journalists cover tech exclusivity deals and only ask "how does this tool work", they skip the real question: who is allowed to use it, and who is locked out. Now the second problem: AI-assisted cheating. Every major league bans it, yet nobody has defined it clearly enough. Riot Games and Valve both prohibit real-time assistance during matches. No tool runs while a team is playing. Everyone knows that. But what about mid-series — during the break in a BO3 or BO5, when game two has not started and the coach has three minutes to talk to the team? Is an AI tool allowed then? This is the largest grey zone in esports today. And it is the grey zone that AI coaching tools like iTero exploit. If, during the break, the coach opens a dashboard where AI has already finished analysing the first twelve minutes of the previous game, and reads out "the opponent rotated to the left lane after losing Dragon, high probability they repeat it in the first five minutes of the next game" — what is that? Legitimate analysis, or unfair assistance? I used to fear being wrong on air, until I was wrong and understood I was born to speak. And I say this: no rule prevents it. But no rule does not mean it is right. Riot Games has precedent. Years ago, LCS teams were allowed to bring note sheets into the match room, then banned, then allowed again under a different format. In-game coach communication was progressively tightened until only the mid-game break remained. Every tightening, the organiser said it was protecting competitiveness. Every tightening, a new tool sprouted in the freshly emptied space. With AI coaching, the freshly emptied space is at its widest. There is a factor most articles about AI coaching never mention: patch cadence. Valve's Dota 2 ships major updates infrequently, but when they land, they overturn the entire meta. Riot's League of Legends patches every two weeks, small adjustments, continuously. This difference determines the value of AI in two opposite directions. In Dota 2, a machine-learning model trained on historical data can maintain value over a long window. Because the meta is stable for longer, behavioural patterns repeat, and AI learns more before those patterns break. This is the soil of statistics and deep learning. In League of Legends, every behavioural pattern learned has a short shelf life. Because patches shift every two weeks, "the opponent takes Dragon at minute eight" may hold for three matches, then fail after a new patch. Here, the value of AI is no longer understanding the meta — it is detecting the meta shifting faster than your opponent. This is the crux: an AI coaching product sold for both Dota 2 and League of Legends with identical promises is a red flag. Its value proposition inverts between the two titles. If someone tells you their tool works equally well in both games, ask them specifically about patch cadence. The answer tells you whether they understand the craft or are just selling. And now the part I know you have been waiting for. You think I am defending the view that AI coaching is bad. You think I stand with the technology sceptics. Wrong. AI coaching will exist. Nothing can stop it. Teams that do not use it will lose to teams that do, just as teams that ignored VOD analysis lost to teams that used it since 2026. What I am saying is not that AI is bad. What I am saying is that AI exclusivity is unfair. Imagine a football league where only one team is allowed to use GPS player tracking. Nobody calls that a technology upgrade. They call it cheating. In esports, we have not used that word yet because AI coaching is still new, still treated as future technology, and still sold in Silicon Valley language. But the nature does not change. If half a league has the tool and the other half does not, results stop being decided by player skill. They are decided by organisational budget. And do you know what happens when results are decided by budget? Fans stop watching. They watch to see talent, not a balance sheet. I once worked with a small esports organisation in Vietnam. Their annual budget matched one month of an average LEC team's budget. If I had told them that to compete they needed a six-figure exclusive AI coaching contract, I would have been thrown out of the room. This is why I worry about the exclusivity model. It does not merely create injustice within one league. It builds a wall between Western esports and Southeast Asian esports. Hard truth: while Western esports media debates whether tech exclusivity affects competition, VCS and PCS teams cannot afford to enter that debate. They can only watch. Compare two models: Vietnam and China. Vietnam has an esports scene growing fast in viewership but slow in analytics infrastructure. VCS teams have no dedicated analysis rooms. They outsource, use free tools, and lean heavily on coach experience. China is the opposite. LPL teams budget for an entire analytics department, with data scientists and sports psychologists. Some LPL teams have developed internal AI tools for years. The gap between these two scenes is not just money. It is structure. And when exclusive AI coaching tools appear, that gap is multiplied. If you are a VCS fan wondering why Vietnamese teams struggle to escape the group stage internationally — this is part of the answer. Not all of it. But a part nobody says out loud. I know my limits. I only have information from a forty-line chat, an interview I have not read in full, and a summary of its headings. I do not hold the iTero–GIANTX contract. I do not know the money. I do not know the clauses about whether the tool can be used in official competition. But an information gap is not a reason for silence. It is a reason to ask louder. Whenever new technology enters sport, three questions must be answered before it becomes standard: Who may use it? Who is excluded? And who supervises? In the case of AI coaching, these three questions have no official answers from any major game publisher. Riot Games has clear rules on third-party software in competition. Valve has its own regulations. But AI coaching sits in the middle: not in-match software, not an everyday tool. It is a new layer that no regulatory framework yet contains. This is when I remember the line I learned during my podcast years: Do not tell me to analyse objectively. I love sport, and love is not objective. I love esports. I love the way a Vietnamese team can beat a large organisation through better preparation. And I worry that the thing I love is being bought and sold behind my back. There is one historical detail I want to use to connect this story to my own past. In 2026, Natus Vincere lifted the Aegis of Champions at Gamescom in Cologne. It was the first The International, held inside a gaming trade fair, not a purpose-built arena. Fourteen years later, people still cite it as the moment an industry was born. Back in 2026, every team had the same amount of information. That was a world without commercial APIs, without data vendors, without AI. Only craft and instinct. If we look from 2026 to today, we see a simple process: analytical tools got stronger, and the advantage concentrated in teams with money. AI coaching is simply the endpoint of that process. It does not create a new problem. It makes the old one visible. So what do I predict next? First: publishers will soon have to define a framework for AI coaching. Riot Games may move first, given its precedent on in-game coach rules. I expect an official document within eighteen months defining what counts as legitimate AI assistance and what counts as cheating. Second: exclusive deals like iTero and GIANTX will not last. Not because of ethics, but because of pressure from other teams in the league. If the LEC lets one member use a tool others cannot access, the remaining members will create political pressure. Riot Games will have to choose: ban such contracts, or open access to everyone. Third: Southeast Asian teams will be hit hardest. Not for lack of talent, but for lack of money to buy the edge. This will not be said publicly. It will show in international results. Fourth: a generation of young players will be coached by AI from their teenage years. They will grow up assuming the machine always knows what the opponent does next. When they reach the big stage, the human concept of reading a match will change. I do not know if that change is good or bad. I only know it is coming. A stadium with no crowd, yet I still hear my own echo. When the pandemic shut stadiums and esports moved online, I learned one thing: sport survives when the crowd is absent, but it only means something when the rules are clear. No rules, no fairness. No fairness, no sport. Only an auction. Jack Williams' interview about iTero and GIANTX has opened a door most fans never knew existed. The door is open now. The question is whether we walk in and demand a rulebook, or stay outside and keep believing everything is fair. I chose to walk in. I do not know enough. But I know enough to ask. And if one day someone proves me wrong — proves exclusive AI coaching deals create no injustice, proves every LEC team has equal access, proves patch cadence does not matter to AI value — I will correct myself. I still write that line at the end of every piece: if I am wrong, I will fix it. But I am rarely wrong. And wait — before you close the tab and think this is a foreign story, remember this: if a European AI company is selling exclusive advantage to one LEC team, it is only a matter of time before a Chinese AI company sells the same advantage to one LPL team. And when that happens, where will the VCS teams stand? That is the question I leave you with. Not for you to answer me. But for you to answer yourself.