SBJ Unpacks: The state of AI in sports

Tonight in Unpacks: Generative AI has become more than a buzzword three years after the launch of ChatGPT. But the sports industry is still grappling with the technology’s potential, as SBJ’s Rob Schaefer reports in this week’s cover story for the magazine.

Also tonight:

• RBC renews pair of PGA Tour title deals
• USAA signs long-term extension of NFL sponsorship
• NASCAR confirms O’Reilly as new sponsor of second-tier series
• Op-ed: What the Rugby World Cup 2031 needs to crack America

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour opens the week with Box-to-Box’s “SEC Football: Any Given Saturday” on Netflix, Tuesday’s debut of the docuseries on the business and football life of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, NASCAR’s big multiyear sponsorship deal with O’Reilly Auto Parts for its second-tier series and more.

Nearly three years after the public launch of ChatGPT catalyzed a groundswell of generative artificial intelligence adoption, levels of AI maturity within the sports industry vary widely.

Where most organizational leaders agree, however, is that reconciling this transformative and constantly evolving technology is a core business priority, particularly in investigating ways it can streamline operations. And this emphasis comes from the top down.

“One of [our five biggest company objectives] is master AI to boost efficiency and impact,” X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom recently told Sports Business Journal. “That is a leg on the stool, it’s not a peripheral goal or an afterthought.”

Internal efficiency-focused AI use cases are not always flashy, nor directly revenue generating. They run the gamut of areas such as segmenting fan data, drafting communications and employee onboarding, and are increasingly tapping agentic workflows, a class of artificial intelligence that is more autonomous — meaning minimal or no human intervention — and layered in its decision making than large language models, and can act on behalf of users.

The empirical benefits of AI in these contexts remain theoretical in some cases, but tech leaders center their efforts on increasing productivity and freeing understaffed departments to focus on big picture priorities, rather than mundane daily tasks.

Everyone is different

Enamored with the potential impact of AI on the sports industry, Josh Walker, co-founder and CEO of data firm Sports Innovation Lab, earlier this year launched a sports-focused AI education program called AI Advantage. With two of four planned sessions completed, the program has assembled hundreds of industry professionals — split evenly among teams/leagues, brands/agencies and media/technology companies, in Walker’s estimation — to learn more about AI and investigate potential use cases through presentations and product demos.

The biggest trend he has noticed with how sports teams and leagues are adopting AI?

“There is no pattern,” Walker said. “It would make perfect sense for the leagues to centralize the services that they are building for AI and roll it out to the teams. The teams never wait for that. You have some enterprising data science team or some enterprising CTO at the team level — they’re going to try stuff faster than the leagues do.”

Professional basketball is a hotbed of such enterprising teams.

The Cleveland Cavaliers, according to Michael Conley, the team’s executive vice president and chief information officer and president of Rock Entertainment Sports Network, began their generative AI discovery 3½ years ago. This started by consulting tech experts on the potential impact of generative AI and forming a cross-departmental generative AI committee. Eventually, they even transitioned one of their data quality analysts, Ben Levicki, into a full-time AI solutions architect, a first in the sports industry.

Since then, the Cavs have found success in initial use cases, such as building a semantic search function for the team’s basketball operations manual and a generative AI insights layer for their real-time ticket, food and beverage and retail data platform. At the direction of their C-suite, they are now focused on automating elements of their external communications, streamlining the processing of internal fan data and personalizing fan interaction.

During the NBA’s first Data Strategy Forum in July, the team presented the working prototype of a custom-built product that leverages a network of AI agents and fan information to distribute individualized emails to subscribers, down to details such as color scheme and emoji usage. After further testing using real fan profiles in September, the Cavs’ plan is for the product to be a part of email workflows by the start of the 2025-26 NBA season.

“Our goal is to be able to increase the amount of engagement that comes off a click action for those emails, to be able to eventually lead to better results down the funnel,” Conley said. “Is the messaging more effective, where we’re seeing greater open rates? Are we seeing greater engagement?”

Elsewhere, the Indiana Fever have seen potential in deploying AI agents (via Salesforce’s Agentforce platform) to comb through and segment internal fan data, which Joey Graziano, Pacers Sports & Entertainment executive vice president of strategy and new business ventures, said will help the team deliver personalized offers, content and experiences to fans and eventually be a resource for partners as well.

This is a massive potential use case in sports, given the multifaceted nature of fan data and ability for AI to scale the capabilities of understaffed data engineering departments.

“We are getting more sophisticated every day,” Graziano said. “And it’s not just the sophistication, it’s the speed and it’s the volume of segments you can create.”

The San Antonio Spurs, as a unique example, are using OpenAI to train models on previous years’ travel calendars (and other custom rules) to ingest the NBA’s overarching schedule and create deliverables such as team-specific master calendars, flight charters and email templates for outreach to preferred hotels and practice facilities on the road.

Human oversight is required, of course, but Charlie Kurian, the team’s director of business strategy and innovation, said tests have shown that first iterations of the deliverables can be produced in about 20 minutes, with the end-to-end, manual process of inputting information into Excel block-by-block distilled from three weeks to, at worst, one. He anticipates a version of the technology will aid the Spurs’ schedule-making as early as this season.

“This came directly from our CEO,” Kurian said. “[The message was], ‘Our people need to be focused on the higher ROI items. How do we use AI to deal with some of these tasks we’re bogged down with?’”

Culture matters

Kurian, at the head of the Spurs’ AI adoption effort, often says the first step of building a company’s “AI muscle” is enabling an AI-empowered workforce.

“We still believe we are very, very early on in the AI revolution. It’s hard to tell who is going to win, and what is going to stick,” Kurian said, comparing the current marketplace of competing AI platforms to the early days of social networking. “But what we can undoubtedly say is this technology will absolutely stick for the foreseeable future. [We’re] making sure we have invested in the most important thing we have — which is our people — so that, agnostic of what tool it comes to, we will still win.”

The team put this focus into action last year by piloting a generative AI learning program using ChatGPT, which has led to 90% of the 150 participants adopting the technology on a week-to-week basis, according to Kurian.

“We’ve crossed a threshold in people broadly using AI tools,” he said. “Now we’re doing discovery across every single department in our organization, understanding workflows, and, in the most positive way, blowing up the workflows to be able to integrate where AI can add value so that the real human beings can focus on the best use of their resources.”

Across its properties, TKO also is undertaking a hands-on approach to AI discovery and education, according to Alon Cohen, executive vice president of innovation. He and Melanie Hildebrandt, TKO and WME Group’s CIO, brought in an advanced prompt engineer for hands-on AI training with “natural early adopters” (e.g., TKO’s innovation and IT teams), and are now looking for other areas the technology can provide business value.

“The next version of almost every business application that we use has a heavy AI component to it,” Cohen said. “So, every team is identifying places where they think they can be successful, and when they go through their next upgrade cycle — or we consolidate to a new tool that’s also a good moment for an upgrade cycle — those tools become available.”

X Games encourages its staff to dedicate 10% of their working hours to experiment with AI tools that could boost productivity, Bloom said. One particularly effective use case has been in training a model on droves of internal data to be a resource for new hires on everything from finding sales deck templates to signing up for benefits.

“The company that I founded before [joining X Games], we had 600 employees, so we had really big and built-out functions across all these specific areas,” Bloom said, referring to the software startup Integrate. “[At] X Games, we have like 30 full-time employees. Necessity is the mother of invention for us.”

Reason for optimism

Across virtually all corporate industries, there is palpable and understandable anxiety about the potential for AI to replace certain job functions.

Bloom, for one, noted that the AI startup he recently launched, Owl AI — which offers AI-powered competition judging, data processing and broadcast commentary capabilities, including for X Games — is leveraging AI agents for market research, effectively substituting for an internal team or expensive third-party consulting firm.

However, he views live sports as not just insulated from automation, but potentially a benefactor of it.

“AI is going to disrupt so many jobs and so many industries,” Bloom said. “But I think the tailwind for us, and for any sport, is humans are still going to want to watch humans play football, and not want to watch robots play football. I think that is a huge tailwind for X Games, for the NFL, for Major League Baseball, basketball. I think it’s one of the big reasons we’re seeing so much private equity want to get into sports.”

The PGA Tour has secured a multiyear commitment from one of its biggest title sponsors, as RBC has extended for both the RBC Heritage and RBC Canadian Open. It’s the latest renewal in a string of deals for the tour this year, but the RBC agreements carry more weight than some others.

In recent years, RBC had only signed one-year renewals for the tournaments as it waited to see how the tour’s negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund played out. RBC has been outspoken about ties to Saudi Arabia.

Early in 2025, the tour and PIF appeared close to striking an official agreement, but talks have cooled off substantially in the months since. To the point that many industry insiders believe an investment from PIF will not happen at all.

Financial details around the agreements weren’t revealed, but full-field events (Canadian Open) in recent years have been commanding in the $15M-$20M range annually from sponsors. Signature events (RBC Heritage) have been higher, and $25M per year in some cases.

A growing rumor in the past week is that the Heritage and Canadian Open would alternate years as Signature events moving forward, but an RBC spokesperson said that’s not the case and that Heritage will remain the Signature event. Canada’s national open has a much larger field than the cut-down Signature tournaments and often invites many Canadians to compete. Moving to a Signature model would scale that back significantly.

Wasserman works with RBC on its golf sponsorships.

The tour has a handful of other deals coming up for renewal, including the Sony Open (2026), Farmers Insurance Open (2026), Charles Schwab Challenge (2026) and Wyndham Championship (2026), among others.

Meanwhile, the tour is expected to add a new tournament to Trump Doral next year in the week prior to the Truist Championship. The tour has not locked up a title sponsor but is said to be in discussions with multiple unnamed companies for the tournament.

USAA has renewed its longstanding NFL sponsorship, which the company termed a “significant long-term” extension. USAA, which markets insurance and other financial services to veterans, military members, and their families, has been an NFL corporate patron since 2011, when it became the league’s first “military appreciation” sponsor.

“The military community’s love for football above all sports far exceeds anything,” said USAA EVP & Chief Strategy & Brand Officer Ameesh Vakharia. “The NFL has been a great way for us to reach our audience and elevate our awareness, even outside of the military.”

The renewal isn’t drastically different from USAA’s prior rights. Given the NFL’s imperative for incremental overseas exposure, USAA will ramp up events around the league’s growing International Series of games, which will see six games in Europe this season. USAA remains the presenting sponsor of the Salute to Service Award. It will also be presenting sponsor of a 60-minute show focusing on its Salute to Service NFL efforts; distribution is TBD. Vakharia said, “The Salute to Service piece gives us real authenticity in a highly competitive category.”

160/90 and antecedent IMG have been handling USAA’s sports marketing since it became an NFL corporate sponsor. The most intriguing part of the deal is that the NFL simultaneously has Nationwide as an insurance sponsor, bifurcating one of the noisiest and most contentious marketing categories. Nationwide’s NFL marketing backs the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award, while USAA leverages a military appreciation platform.

NASCAR this morning will name O’Reilly Auto Parts as the fourth title sponsor in the history of its second-tier national series, with a switch to an endemic car industry company meant to be part of NASCAR’s quest to return to its roots. What is currently called the NASCAR Xfinity Series will become the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Jan. 1 next year, ending the 11-year reign of Comcast’s Xfinity internet brand, which remains a premier partner of the top tier of the sport. NASCAR and O’Reilly aren’t revealing financial terms, but the multiyear deal will be medium term in length, not long term, NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell confirmed to SBJ.

Still, he said, “we expect any partnership we go into, we’re in it for the long haul.” NASCAR had been seeking $15M in average annual spend between rights and activation. Missouri-based O’Reilly was founded in 1957 and has over 6,400 stores in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, and plans in-store activations around the deal. O’Donnell told SBJ: “When you look at the Xfinity Series as its currently known, really from a popularity standpoint, No. 2 in the U.S. in terms of viewership, enthusiasm and the fan base, we knew we needed a partner that could continue to build on the story that Xfinity has had where names are made. They’ve done a really, really good job and it was important for us to find a partner that could activate in the local markets. O’Reilly Auto Parts stores are everywhere, and that’s going to be huge to have that activation, working with the race tracks where we’re hosting races, continuing to get the names of the drivers out there and obviously we believe we can really help them grow.”

Nexstar Media Group’s The CW channel started a new media rights deal this year to air the entire season for the Xfinity Series through 2031. The series is averaging around 1.1 million viewers per event, with 19 of 23 races so far this season having topped 1 million viewers. The numbers are on pace to be the best since 2018, NASCAR said. Intriguingly, the Xfinity Series has become something of a favorite for some of NASCAR’s hardcore fans who say the seventh-generation car used in the top-tier Cup Series isn’t creating as much entertainment value as the old-fashioned car used in the second-tier circuit. In prepared remarks, O’Reilly VP/Advertising & Marketing Hugo Sanchez said: “Partnering with NASCAR and The CW at this level enables us to further deepen our connection to one of the most loyal fan bases in all of sports.”

A couple different agencies were involved in the search to find Xfinity’s replacement, O’Donnell said. Klutch Sports Group was the main agency NASCAR worked with, but NASCAR ultimately negotiated directly with O’Reilly because it already had a relationship with the company, which advertised on NASCAR’s Motor Racing Network. The search for NASCAR was led by SVP & Chief Commercial Officer Craig Stimmel. Offers were made by multiple companies, O’Donnell said. The switch to an endemic brand in the sport comes after NASCAR told Ad Age in July that it was looking for a new creative agency to “help steer the stock car racing circuit back to its heartland roots and reconnect with the blue-collar fans who have long been its backbone.” To that end, O’Donnell told SBJ: “There was a lot of interest, and for us it came down to who is going to support the series the best but also who fits our brand as well and where we’re going, and O’Reilly was a natural fit for us.” While the publicly traded O’Reilly has missed analyst expectations in five of the last six quarters, it met forecasts in the most recent period and its stock is up 28% year to date. SBJ first reported on Saturday that O’Reilly was in line to replace Xfinity as title sponsor.

FIFA’s Club World Cup bombed spectacularly in America, and World Rugby should take note. Stadiums averaging just 52% capacity, despite promises of sellouts, should be a massive wake-up call for the 2031 Rugby World Cup. With the first Rugby World Cup in a country that isn’t mad about rugby approaching, World Rugby needs a complete marketing revolution.

The American sports marketing playbook

Americans respond to one thing: spectacle. If you’re not making jaws drop, you’re wasting everyone’s time. The Club World Cup struggled because it treated Americans like they owed football something. They don’t. Rugby needs to earn every eyeball by being undeniably, impossibly entertaining.

Forget everything World Rugby knows about traditional marketing — “the gentleman’s game,” the “values” chat, the focus on teamwork and respect. When it comes to marketing sports, Americans have a completely different playbook.

Find rugby’s Jonah Lomu first

To make rugby talkable in the U.S., it needs a “Jonah Lomu.” During his era, he became the most recognisable rugby player in the world, and this even filtered into the American media. At 6′5″ and 18 stone (252 lbs.), running like a sprinter, he was everything Americans understand: bigger, faster, stronger.

Look at the Six Nations stars that rugby showcased on Netflix’s “Six Nations: Full Contact”: Finn Russell (5′10″, 176.3 lbs.), Marcus Smith (5′8″, 165.3 lbs.), Stephen Varney (5′7″, 158.7 lbs.). These are good rugby players, but they look like accountants next to American athletes. Compare Russell to NFL quarterbacks like Josh Allen (6′5″, 238 lbs.) or NBA stars like LeBron James (6′9″, 113kg).

Americans want stars who look like they were built in a laboratory — think The Rock meets Usain Bolt. They need a player so physically imposing that even casual sports fans stop channel-surfing when they see him. That’s the kind of athlete that gets the attention of Americans.

My recommendations for cracking America

Find the freaks of nature: Rugby needs to identify and promote its most physically impressive specimens. Who’s the fastest? Who hits hardest? Who’s built like a Greek god? American sports marketing is simple — find the genetic anomalies and make them household names. LeBron James isn’t just good at basketball; he’s a 6′9″ athletic freak who moves like a dancer. Rugby needs to find its freaks and sell them accordingly.

Use the Olympic formula: Watch American Olympic TV coverage, and you’ll see the blueprint. Every athlete gets the full treatment — dramatic backstory, physical stats, slow-motion highlights showcasing superhuman abilities. NBC doesn’t just show you a swimmer; they show you a 6′4″ machine who overcame adversity and can move through water like a torpedo. Rugby needs that same approach — find the genetic freaks and sell their stories.

Sell the story, not just the sport: Americans adore rags-to-riches narratives, and rugby actually has plenty. Find the Pacific Islander who went from poverty to international stardom, the South African who escaped apartheid through rugby, the English farm boy who became a giant. Package these stories with the same emotional intensity as Olympic coverage — slow-motion training montages, family interviews, dramatic music. Make people care about the person before they care about the sport.

Go digital-first with proper stars: Traditional media won’t work — rugby fans are half as likely to read newspapers or listen to radio. Netflix’s Formula 1 success proves documentaries can build American audiences — 34% of F1 viewers became fans after watching “Drive to Survive.” But rugby’s Netflix attempts featured players who barely looked like athletes when Americans expect bigger, faster, more physical specimens.

Embrace social media comparisons: Create funny, shareable content comparing rugby to NFL and college football. Show rugby’s nonstop physicality versus American sports’ endless timeouts. Highlight the endurance, the real contact, the fact that play doesn’t stop every 30 seconds.

Target the right audience: Research shows just 2.8 million Americans actually follow rugby. The real audience is young, male and educated. 32% are age 18-24, they’re heavy social media users, and they’re five times more likely to second-screen during games. They’re also NBA fans (27%), MLB fans (24%) and NHL fans (19%). Focus on the 800,000 existing players and 3,100 clubs as your foundation — these communities will travel and create atmosphere.

Partner with crossover sports: The explosion in women’s sports and diverse athlete representation shows there’s appetite for “underdog” sports stories. Position rugby as the next frontier.

Venue strategy: Pick 30,000-capacity MLS stadiums over prestigious NFL venues. A packed Red Bull Arena beats a half-empty MetLife Stadium every single time. Picture 22,000 people rattling around in an 84,000-seat venue in Dallas — the optics will be catastrophic.

Grassroots opportunity: 57% of rugby players globally are pre-teen, with 24% being girls. The tournament could be a massive catalyst for American rugby if handled properly. Partner with colleges, offer youth programmes and make it accessible to curious Americans who might discover they love the sport.

Reality management: Talk about “introducing rugby to America” and “growing the game” rather than promising sellouts. When you inevitably get decent crowds, it’ll look like success. France created local interest for matches between complete unknowns — that’s the gold standard to achieve.

The bottom line

The 2031 Rugby World Cup isn’t just another tournament — it’s rugby’s one shot at cracking the world’s most lucrative sports market. Get it right, and rugby gains 330 million potential new fans. Get it wrong, and the sport remains forever locked out of American consciousness.

Rugby has the raw ingredients America craves: authentic athleticism, nonstop action and stories of triumph that put Hollywood to shame. What it lacks is the marketing sophistication to package these assets for American consumption. While FIFA fumbles with half-empty stadiums, World Rugby has the chance to learn from football’s mistakes and show Americans something genuinely spectacular.

The formula is simple: Find the genetic freaks, tell their stories like movies and sell rugby as the most physically demanding sport on Earth. Americans will pay attention to superhuman athletes doing impossible things. Give them rugby’s version of LeBron James, and they’ll fill stadiums to watch him play a sport they’ve never seen before.

The clock is ticking. 2031 is rugby’s moment to either break America or prove it’s not ready for prime time.

Joshua Van Raalte is CEO of Brazil Communications in London and a consultant to the rugby industry.

• Rich Eisen will host “SportsCenter” on Monday night for the first time in 20 years, anchoring the 11pm ET show from L.A. following the Bengals-Commanders NFL preseason game on ESPN, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• LIV plays its 50th event this week at its team championship in Michigan, and as SBJ’s Josh Carpenter writes, the circuit continues to lean on post-round concerts.
• Mythical Games’ FIFA Rivals added Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund to its NFT mobile game in a multiyear deal, its first with a single team as the free-to-play soccer game expands its offerings for markets outside the U.S, notes SBJ’s Jason Wilson.