# Zendesk CEO Says AI-Assisted Basketball App Produced Fictional Players

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/52846
Published: 2026-11-10T06:01:54.000Z
Updated: 2026-11-10T06:01:54.000Z
Section: Technology

> Tom Eggemeier and his son built the transfer-analysis app in days. Their basketball expertise helped them identify errors in its player data and scores.

Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier and his son Will Eggemeier built a college basketball transfer app in days, but it generated fictional players and inaccurate scores that their basketball expertise helped them identify.

The app analyzed more than 5,000 transfers from 2019 to 2025. The pair aimed to help smaller college programs find overlooked players and predict whether transfers would succeed. “We wanted to create something that might be able to level that playing field a little bit,” Will Eggemeier said.

Tom Eggemeier estimated that 90% of their early effort went to planning, requirements and user experience. He estimated that 50% of their time later went to security, integrations, debugging, edge cases and technical debt. “Moving from ‘it works’ to ‘it scales securely’ is a different story,” he wrote.

As of Aug. 5, 2026, the app remained at the minimum viable product stage. Eggemeier said AI-generated work needed to be checked against expertise in the field. “If you're not doing it yourself personally, you're not going to understand it,” he said.