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📊From Data to Devotion: How AI Builds Superfans

📊From Data to Devotion: How AI Builds Superfans

Transform fan data into devotion: AI strategies to boost loyalty, engagement & revenue.

Nilesh Deshmukh
July 28, 2025

💌 Welcome to sportsnexus fan:pulse

Fan engagement goes beyond likes and ticket sales, creating meaningful, two-way relationships that make fans feel seen, valued, and deeply connected to the brand. This newsletter features the best fan engagement stories from all over the world.

🧐 FEATURED STORY

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🏟️ Why AI is the Game-Changer

Today’s fans expect more than live scores—they seek personalized experiences, second-screen interaction, tailored content, and dynamic loyalty rewards. With escalating fragmentation and competition for fan attention, AI transforms raw data into devotion—turning casual viewers into emotionally invested, monetized superfans.

🎯 Why It Matters – The Business Imperative

✅Retention & revenue:
    • AI-driven loyalty can boost average fan spend by 12–18%, and frequency by up to 43% .
    • 65% of executives report declining live-viewer relevance—AI-powered funnels are critical for countering trends.

✅Ownership of engagement:
    • Second-screen AI experiences (e.g., PGA’s TOURCAST) turn passive viewers into active participants.

✅Monetization opportunity:
    • AI-driven dynamic merchandising (e.g., NBA generating 50K personalized highlights, boosting retention by 62% and merch sales by 18%).

🏆 Who’s Already Scoring? Real-World Applications

✅NBA / MLB / MLS – AI‑personalized content feeds and highlight reels .

✅Elevate’s EPIC platform – Combines emotional, ticketing, and behavioral data into one AI engine to drive real-time pricing, churn prediction, and loyalty insights .

✅PGA TOUR’s TOURCAST – AI shot commentary transforms plays into interactive storytelling .

✅Orlando City SC (MLS) – App-based personalization increased concession revenue by 14% and drove >$1.5M annually.

✅Sports Innovation Lab & Zoomph – AI-powered audience intelligence helps rights holders and sponsors measure and grow fan engagement .

🧩How to Build It – 5-Step Playbook for Rights Holders

Step	Action	Why It Matters
1. Centralize and digitize fan data	Unify ticketing, mobile, streaming, and social data	Enables personalization & predictive modeling
2. Deploy AI-driven insights	Use churn models, emotional profiling, and real-time analytics	Identifies at-risk fans & engagement moments
3. Power second-screen experiences	AI commentary, real-time stats, dynamic feeds	Engages multitasking fans
4. Personalize content & offers	Tailored notifications, in-app merch, and gamified loyalty	Drives conversions & lifetime value
5. Optimize continuously	A/B tests; adjust pricing, content, packages	Adapts to behavior and market changes

🔑Key Takeaways

✅Data = Devotion: First-party data is the backbone of AI-powered loyalty.

✅Scale ≠ dilution: AI lets you treat a million fans uniquely.

✅Experience > Transactions: From personalized commentary to real-time rewards.

✅Iterate, don’t set-and-forget: AI demands ongoing tuning and testing.

✅Cross-partner advantage: Combine ticketing, broadcasting, sponsors, and merch for holistic monetization.

🏁Conclusion

AI isn’t just tech—it’s the key to building relationships that last beyond the final whistle. For sports rights holders, leveraging AI across content, commerce, and community means boosting revenue, loyalty, and relevance in today’s digital arena. Prioritize data unity, personalize experiences at scale, and continually adapt. The path from data to devotion is your competitive edge.

🎯Case Study

🏀 Sacramento Kings: The Smartest Arena & Mobile-First Fan Ecosystem

✅Golden 1 Center: A Technological Hub

Built from scratch to be the world’s most connected indoor sports venue. Features include redundant 100 Gbps internet, arena-wide Wi‑Fi capable of handling hundreds of thousands of posts per second, and infrastructure built like a flexible software platform to support over-the-air updates .

✅Kings + Golden 1 Center App: Arena “Remote Control”

Launched via Built.io infrastructure, the app delivers live scores, multi-angle video replay, AR activations, interactive stats, ride-ordering integration, food and merch delivery to seats, feedback tools (e.g. seat temperature), and bot-powered customer support ("Kai") .
Powered by Built.io’s mBaaS and automation engine, the platform processes half a million in-app activities per month and runs ~1,500 automations per game across multiple APIs and services .
The Kings pioneered a mobile-first fan strategy: fans can digitally buy tickets, access loyalty rewards, order concessions, participate in AR experiences, and interact socially—all within one ecosystem.

✅AI-Powered Direct Messaging & Accessibility

The team partnered with Glowing, Inc. to send AI-driven SMS messages to fans—starting with premium account holders and expanding to all in-arena guests. This supports anticipatory service: assistance, offers, and engagement in real time via chat.

✅Augmented Reality & Media Innovations

From 2020 onward, the Kings integrated augmented reality (via ImagineAR) into their app for virtual photo booths with digital players, scavenger hunts, sponsorship activations, and giveaways .

Early VR trials: the Kings experimented with broadcasting games via Samsung Gear VR to provide immersive, multi-angle live viewing experiences, foreshadowing remote fan engagement beyond the arena .

✅Cultural & Community Moments: “Light the Beam”

In 2022, the Kings introduced a fan-facing laser beam ritual that lights up after each victory, becoming a viral symbol—documented as a “place of worship” in fan culture. While not strictly AI, it’s part of a data-activated fan tradition driven by digital amplification and persistent fan behavior mapping.

📥 Call To Action

👉 Got an AI data-based story? Share it with us.
👉 Want help to identify or activate AI data-based fan engagement around your club, league, or brand? Let’s chat.

📬 Want More?

Next week’s feature: The Rise of Multilingual AI Chatbots for Global Fanbases. Stay subscribed, stay ahead.

📩 Keep the Pulse Going

If this sparked ideas, let’s connect. Reply with your biggest fan engagement challenge—or forward this to a colleague who's exploring AI. The future of fandom isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s one fan at a time.

See you next week,

✍️ Nilesh Deshmukh