Watch or listen to episode 331 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Phil Andrews, CEO, USA Fencing.
Phil discusses why membership and not medals is the number he watches most closely, why participation comes before fandom in a sport built on doing rather than watching, why coming from outside the sport is a feature and not a bug, why awareness never converts without someone to walk a newcomer into a club, how the mask makes the most cinematic sport in the world also the most marketable, what Mandy Patinkin and a Creator Showdown deliver that $50 million in ads cannot, how USA Fencing earned the most CNN appearances in Paris, the business and operation of a sport’s national governing boy (NGB), and more.
For a while, that’s where they remained. A quick way to figure out the clear bag policy for the game. As the underlying tech improved, the bots became more skilled; they stored more knowledge, understood a bit more nuance, and became more interactive.
But that was all the 1.0 era. Call it the first quarter. We’re well into 2.0 now. They can still do everything the old bots did, answering any question a fan may have on game day, from where the vegetarian food options are located to what time the gates open. The new era is more strategic, more aligned with business objectives, and more woven into every service and revenue-generating department in the organization.
This is the world that Bill Bailey navigates now. As large language models and the ChatGPTs of the world introduced hundreds of millions to unimaginably sophisticated chatbots, the remit for these bots and highly trained ‘agents’ extended from gameday ops to, well, everything. As Chief Revenue Officer at Satisfi Labs, which runs chat agents for about 70% of major league teams, Bailey sees the evolution playing out firsthand in the conversations he’s having with clients and prospects, and the use cases Satisfi is bringing to life.
“Our meetings with our clients shouldn’t be about content. We have that,” said Bailey, who has been with Satisfi Labs since 2019, following stints at sports-focused data management company SSB (acquired by KORE, now part of Two Circles) and the New Orleans Hornets. “It should be about campaigns you’re running. Our agents run campaigns. And so all we need to know is, where are you in your sales cycle? Are you launching renewals in the next month? Okay, let’s start getting the renewal campaigns going. Let’s start making sure I have the latest nudges and I’m pushing people to renew in the conversation, whereas a month ago I wasn’t because it was too early.
“So our conversations have shifted now to be much more strategic and fun about your business. And we’re just an extension of your marketing arm. Not about, ‘hey, we’re not answering where a hot dog is; what should I say?’ Those days are gone.”
One of the biggest accelerants behind what Satisfi’s agents can do, and the generative AI space in general, is the infusion of data. The platforms are connected to data sources, pulling in what a team knows about a given fan (with their authentication and permission) and delivering the level of personalization the modern consumer now expects everywhere from Amazon to Netflix to ChatGPT. And now from their favorite team’s bot.
The fan experience with AI is getting closer to that with a human. A service rep or salesperson knows what tickets you’ve purchased, what level of experience you prefer, whether you’re attending games as a parent with kids or a sales executive with clients, and even what food allergies you have. Bringing a profile and context to the conversation is what separates this era from the last. The capability is ready. But teams are still figuring out which use cases to deploy and hand off to their computerized colleagues.
“If you tell me some more things, like they’re a suite holder or they have a season ticket, then I can do even more,” said Bailey. “All the way to, if you have a data warehouse and the desire is there, we can take that identifier you gave me and we’ll go get what fan profile they belong in, what segment. Have they renewed yet? Things like that.
“So there’s lots there. That’s the next frontier. We’re ready for it. It’s more of the business decisions and user stories being developed by our clients as we speak.”
While uber-personalization is enticing, and often welcomed, there is a fine line between knowing about you and knowing so much about you that it feels creepy. Contextual awareness, like knowing which entrance you scanned in from and pointing you to the nearest restroom, is cool and helpful for many, but concerning for others. It seems good that, because the AI knows you have small kids, it will recommend you stop by the children’s playground outside gate 120, but maybe not so good when it knows their names and hopes Jacob has fun on the merry-go-round.
The capabilities to connect all these data sources are largely there, as Bailey noted, but there’s a human element to introducing this to fans.
“[It] stops short of saying, ‘Hi, Bob, how’s your wife, Jennifer?’ That kind of personalization is available,” Bailey explained. “A lot of people aren’t really ready for that. I’m not sure I even am. That’s the creepier part of it.”
Personalization, fan context, and official affiliation with the team may be necessary parts of the moat for team bots. Because the competition to be the first stop for any query, sports team-related or not, is fierce. More of consumers’ everyday queries are migrating from Google, which at least pointed them to the team’s official site, to whichever LLM they favor. So if a fan is planning their gameday experience, isn’t their first instinct to ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Copilot or whomever?
That’s not hypothetical. Bailey said teams and leagues are already concerned about web traffic being down significantly, with those queries going to ChatGPT and other models. Still, there are real advantages to having those conversations with the team or venue’s official bot. One is the personalization already discussed, bringing your fan profile and context to the table. But the most important is trust. Skepticism follows any LLM conversation that depends on getting the facts right. The generic LLM may give you a confident answer about the parking situation and the outside food and drink policy, but can you really trust it?
The story is still playing out. Getting burned by a confidently wrong answer may well send some fans back to the source, but old (and new) habits die hard. Plenty of people will tolerate something short of perfect accuracy for the convenience. Maybe the future is reliance on a multitude of specialized, trustworthy models. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s on the official bots, and the platforms powering them, to convince users through a decisively better experience to ditch their daily LLM app. No easy task.
“It is my belief that as those people find out you can get the wrong answer from those models, they go back to the trusted source,” said Bailey. “And our clients are reminding their fans as best they can: we’re the trusted source, come back to us. And by the way, with the help of Satisfi, our experience is very much like ChatGPT when you talk to us. But you’re talking to us.
“So it’s still that really nice, robust conversation, that warm conversation, that intuitive experience — but you’re having it with me, not with some model that scraped the interwebs and God knows what Reddit articles it was referring to.”
Accuracy and trust in information are compelling reasons to use the official team bot. But information is a commodity, and the large, well-capitalized LLMs can close any margin there. So it’s on the teams and platforms like Satisfi to stay a step ahead, doing the things the generic LLM platforms won’t or can’t do as well.
Commerce and service actions are part of it. Paired with the profile connections discussed earlier, an official agent can take a fan from question to ticket, concession, or merch purchase in a few beats, where a general model could only get there with a lot of friction. Bailey brought up something else, though: a novel feature Satisfi introduced with the NHL, which ChatGPT isn’t going to prioritize or invest in.
“…Let’s connect a live feed of every NHL game. And now there’s a game companion module that’s your companion while you’re on the couch watching it, or in the building — but anywhere you are watching the game,” said Bailey, who also noted the bots are trained on the rules of hockey. “And you can say, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’ Because often the play is fast. The referees don’t always stop like an NFL does and announce what happened. It can be quick, you missed it. But what was that? Oh, here’s what happened. That was icing by so and so. That was a goal by so and so. And then, ‘Well, what’s icing?’ And now they’re talking about what’s icing and offsides. And you can actually have a whole conversation about that with our agent today, with our NHL games.”
This isn’t just a traffic and O&O (owned and operated) play for teams, though. Because when you have access to a frictionless, always-on agent that never gets impatient and will assuredly not judge you for a dumb or odd question, you’ll ask anything and everything. And that qualitative and quantitative data is often worth more than any survey can hope to deliver.
It’s not what fans say they do. It’s the actual path they take, including what stopped them and what pulled them through. It can bring up ideas or questions the team never thought of.
Said Bailey: “I often say to our prospects: don’t think of any questions going unanswered. Think about any questions going unasked. And the Predators here in Nashville (NHL), where I live, are a client, so I’ll use that as an example. If they weren’t a client — how important must a question be before I’m going to pick up the phone and call the Predators? That must be really important, because otherwise I’m just going to guess.”
Bailey gave an example from a college athletics client and its softball program. Softball is a non-revenue sport there, admission is free, and fans kept asking the same thing: how much are tickets? That was enough to start the school rethinking whether they should be free at all. Questions are currency. And an official bot collects them at a volume no other channel comes close to.
The passive benefit is ingesting all those conversations. The next step is pre-empting them. Bailey talked about journeys built on a bank of past conversations and outcomes, where the AI learns when and how to ‘nudge’ a fan toward something. Because your ChatGPT is always eager to keep the conversation going, and Satisfi’s bots take a similar ‘and then’ approach. The underlying goals can vary, from getting ahead of your next question to putting on a more purely promotional cap.
That’s the spectrum of nudges. Some come out of what you’re already doing. You’re asking about tickets for you and some friends, and the bot points out a group threshold with experiences and savings attached. You never would have asked and otherwise never would have known. Other nudges come out of what the team’s marketing is prioritizing. Bailey’s example was Korean nachos, a new menu item nobody knows about, worked into a conversation that started somewhere else entirely. Also a nudge, just one coming more from a sales lens than a service one.
That’s the revenue side of being proactive. The service side is quieter, and probably more interesting.
“I think in more and more proactive pushing of that conversation,” said Bailey. “That’s the next level. I know you have a ticket to the game tomorrow, so I’m going to go ahead and give you some information. I’m going to try to start a conversation. Today, that’s in the form of the know-before-you-go emails that people send out, and we’re buried in those emails that say, here’s some information, if you have more questions, ask, click here.”
Bailey continued, discussing the next generation of Satisfi agents and where the space is headed: 1:1, contextual, personalized conversations and services that augment what a resource-limited staff can cover.
“Our newest agent we’re releasing now is a season ticket membership agent, where the endpoint to that agent is specific to that season ticket holder,” he said. “So I can start to know where they sit. I can start to know who their rep is. I can text it and ask questions. Someday, add a ticket to my account because my son’s coming tonight — let’s get a ticket close to me. Things like that. So that’s where we want to head with these, because that’s where the conversations are going.”
Chatbots in sports now reach far deeper into the business than the concessions and venue policies of the earlier era. The conversations are rich with fan profiles, personalized offerings and responses, and whatever campaigns and promotions the team is running that week. Teams and their platform partners need to keep minding the moat, finding the jobs where they can beat the generic models outright, while balancing the service and sales pull on every conversation.
But the chatbot should now be treated as a channel. Heck, it may belong near the top of the list, above touchpoints teams have been resourcing for years, because of how much the agents now know and how much they can do. More sales, better fan experiences, and a running record of what fans actually want. All because there are more conversations happening, and an operation built to analyze and act on them.
The battle of the present day is over questions. Google owned them for years. Then ChatGPT took a big bite. Now, when a sports fan wonders what time the gates open or what just happened on the ice, they have options. Where will they go?
Watch or listen to episode 330 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Bill Bailey, Chief Revenue Officer for Satisfi Labs.
Bill discusses what changed for conversational AI in sports when ChatGPT arrived and why LLMs improved the product instead of killing it, the guardrail work that keeps a team’s agent on-brand, his build-versus-buy rule (build your own internal tools, buy anything that touches a fan), the personalization ladder from a QR code on the suite level to a logged-in season ticket holder and where it turns creepy, why the real danger is questions going unasked rather than unanswered, how live escalation hands a fan to the right rep mid-game, what it means that team web traffic is leaking to ChatGPT, and more.
Try Skipper, the AI tool trained on 13+ years of knowledge shared on this podcast.
When social media first hit the sports world, most teams and leagues had their single @ handle or official Page across the few major platforms. ‘Content’ mostly consisted of links to press releases, website videos (which were mostly interview scrums and the occasional ‘feature story’), ticket links (oh, yes, ticket links with camefrom codes), and answering the occasional fan question about logistics or policies.
Safe to say things have changed a bit.
The scope of social media for sports teams has transformed, to say nothing of the nature of social platforms in general. (Some may argue it’s inaccurate to call most of the major apps ‘social’ networks these days). Fans have more options than ever to learn about and engage with their favorite leagues, teams, and athletes. Even when they ‘follow’ the official accounts, there’s no guarantee they’ll see the content those accounts post. Heck, even what it means to be a ‘fan,’ or a general consumer of ‘sports’ content, has such a loose definition nowadays.
So what is the purpose of a team’s social media presence in 2026? How can they even begin to earn attention amidst the crowded sports ecosystem across social? These are a couple of the questions Andrew Taylor and his colleagues wrestle with day to day.
“You need to rely on what makes you unique content-wise,” said Taylor, Senior Manager of Club Social Strategy for the NFL. “For the NFL clubs, that’s access to their players that no one else has. We call it helmets-off content.
“So all those fun videos of them walking around at practice, answering the funny questions — we call that helmets-off content. And that’s the best performing content across NFL clubs, because it gives fans the opportunity to see a side of players they don’t get to see on the field, that they don’t get to see on ESPN or Fox or CBS on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, occasional Saturday. The content is what really drives everything. And that access.”
It’s that access approach to content that will get football fans to consume what’s on team accounts, because they’re not getting it elsewhere. The actual football? Whether that’s highlights or X’s and O’s or transactions or hot takey arguments — there is no shortage of sources for that. So teams do what only they can do to earn fan attention and engagement.
But, at the same time, sports teams want more than a larger slice of the existing fan pie. And in today’s content-driven, interest graph-fueled, recommendation-based feeds, users are ripe for attraction. New fans need not form first from an exciting touchdown, a buzzer-beating three, or a home run robbery. Their first exposure could be only tangentially related to the sport or team; the fan funnels are as numerous and diverse as ever. Team social media strategies have evolved to take advantage of this new world, Taylor explained.
“You’re casting that wide net, especially on social, where we’re in this post-TikTok world, where followers aren’t as important as they used to be, because content is being served to so many different people,” he said. “This is life in social — you have to react to what the platform algorithms are doing. And the platform algorithms are saying you need to be broad and reach a wide group of people. Yes, it’s still important to cater to your diehard fans. But to survive on social, you need to do what the platform is telling you.
“And I think that’s just the top of the funnel,” Taylor added. “And then they like a video because they like food, they like an NFL video because they like fashion…”One of the best performing videos last year from NFL clubs was their kitchen staff going through what a team eats every year. And I think the broader an audience you can go after, that’s a win.”
Reaching a broad audience and flooding the top of the fan funnel is only part of the strategy, however. And while a viral kitchen staff video deserves to be celebrated, those massive metrics exist in a different bucket than the ones tied to content that creates lifelong connections to the team. These goals don’t exist in a vacuum; it’s perfectly fine to have fans of your content, even if they don’t end up caring about the team’s playoff push. The deeper consideration is how much the content leaves a mark on someone, such that there’s a connection to the brand, and it’s not just another faceless account with an interesting piece of content amidst the sea of others.
Billions of views happen daily, and users don’t know, and oftentimes don’t care, who produced the content they’re watching. That brings both opportunities and challenges, adding a wrinkle in how to think about social media strategy, KPIs, and defining success in this new era.
“I think there’s a difference between having quality interactions with fans and more vanity interactions, like a post that goes viral,” said Taylor, as we discussed how impact differs across content. “Yeah, it’ll hit a lot of people, a lot of eyeballs. But are people going to scroll through and they’ll like it, but then are they going to remember it in two posts, or two hours, or two days? Whereas if you have a really compelling piece of content and it maybe reaches a quarter of the audience as that other post, but people are still thinking about it two days later — what’s more valuable?”
One of the best ways, historically, to know if content was truly developing fans was tracking follower growth. That metric still matters, but getting someone to click follow was once the biggest factor by far in determining the potential audience for content. Today, a user’s following status is just one factor among many affecting to whom content gets served. Which means that while reach and engagement metrics going up can represent meaningful success on social, they’re not as directly tied to fan growth.
Despite this new reality, Taylor and his team still track follower increases and decreases among teams. Because there’s still value and insight in that number.
“I think [follower count today] is best to be used as a barometer,” he said. “I don’t think it’s necessarily important as like an end-all number. A good example is, when a player signs with a team, we can see on the day that you announced the signing, or the day that you posted a video of him coming to practice for the first time, your follower count spikes. That’s usually an indication that people who are fans of this player are now coming to be a part of your team for this journey …
“I still think it’s always important to see growth. But I think it’s just important to see kind of like when there is a spike in followers, why. And I think understanding that why just kind of helps you understand your fans’ behavior. And I think that’s a really important thing … Follower growth can still be powerful. It’s not the same as it used to be, but still it’s a good indicator of popularity, and what’s happening at that given time.”
The breadth of potential audience and the size of the top of the funnel have had significant implications for the scope and strategy of social media. Back in those single @ channel days, arguably no one had a more comprehensive view of everything happening inside the organization than the social media manager. It meant going a mile wide but often an inch deep in most areas. Then the single @ multiplied into many, and all of a sudden there were dozens of channels across several platforms. There is more value to capture, more opportunity to lean into a specific department or element with a unique POV, strategy, and content production.
Org charts expanded and roles evolved, whether it’s the vertical video specialist, the YouTube strategist, the UK account manager, or, as Taylor offers as an example, the person running one of the increasingly massive mascot accounts.
“I think the smart organizations will have their social team do it all,” said Taylor, reflecting on where the teams overseeing the ancillary accounts reside within an organization. “And I think if you have the resources, you can have someone who’s just the mascot person, or just the international accounts person.
“And I think that, similar to kind of what we talked about back at MLB, it’s so important to know everything that’s going on. So if it’s your job to just know everything that’s going on with the mascot, that makes your life so much easier. That makes the content that much better … That’s, again, where resources come into play. It’s crazy to say, oh, we have one person on social that just does a mascot account. That’s the use of a very precious head. But then you can be like, well, this mascot generates these millions of views for our organization, which you wouldn’t be able to do without the person running it behind the scenes.”
So what started way back when as a simple feed of glorified press releases and a one-person show has evolved into an ever-expanding team telling stories that extend beyond sports into lifestyle verticals, and finding new ways to reach people and define ‘fans.’ The old joke that the social media reins were in the hands of the intern is farcical now, with social an indispensable part of the business, not merely an amplifier of everything else, but the fulcrum around which the organization’s strategies get built and implemented.
The earliest social media coordinators and managers are among the senior leaders in sports now. They recognize the power of these platforms: that with focus and investment, you can turn just about anyone into a fan. And that may be the most important evolution of all.
