What’s the one moment in sports that you will never forget?

For me, it was India winning the Cricket World Cup in 2011. I was on the streets of Mumbai after midnight. Everyone was celebrating. The whole city felt like one room. When the Knicks won the championship this June, New York had a night of its own. I was there for that one too.

Wins like those bring a city, and sometimes a whole country, together.

But all season, there are also moments that matter deeply to particular fans. You might support a team because you grew up watching it with your family, and that loyalty stays even as the players change, long after you’ve moved miles away. Someone else might be watching a former college favorite make their first professional start, having followed them for years.

People bring years of memories to a game, and those memories shape which moments matter to them.

The challenge for sports organizations is to recognize those moments and serve the fans who care most about them while the game is still unfolding. I believe AI’s next advantage will come from shortening the distance between a live moment and a useful decision about it. Done well, that will also shorten the distance between a team and a fan.

When a commentator drops the perfect stat and rivalry storyline seconds after a big play, it sounds like memory.

But it’s a system.

Before every game, commentators spend hours building a spotting board: one large sheet with a section for every player, packed with their stats, recent form, college career, and the story behind their last injury.

During the game, the lead commentator describes the action as it happens. Beside them sits a spotter, whose job is to identify who just made the play and point to that player’s section on the board. The commentator reads the right fact without missing a beat. Next to them, a statistician searches sports databases live and slides the answer across the desk. Outside the stadium, producers sit in a production truck, a control room on wheels, telling the commentator through an earpiece which stat is about to appear on screen.

We saw this up close working with a major global broadcaster. One stat on air can pass through four or five people in under a minute. It sounds chaotic, but the people doing it are exceptional and work in near-perfect harmony.

They are also the bottleneck. A crew like that is expensive, so it goes to the biggest games, the primetime matchups between marquee teams. There might be 15 baseball games on a single night. Smaller crews have less capacity to research every worthwhile storyline.

So we built an AI system that helps commentators and editorial teams make decisions at the speed of the live game. It completes the full editorial workflow, from a milestone being hit through comparisons, research, verification, and writing the story, in under a minute, compared with 15 minutes manually. Running across several games at once, it makes that depth of coverage possible for more games and more athletes.

Most of a game happens between the scores, and that’s where commentators and editorial teams earn their place. They tell you why a rivalry runs three generations deep, or that the Los Angeles Dodgers used to be the Brooklyn Dodgers, named after Brooklyn residents who dodged the trolley cars that crisscrossed the borough.

You can watch a game on mute and still find out who won. Diehard fans will, if that’s their last resort. But diehards are rare. The casual fan, the newcomer, the friend who came over because the game was on, stays for the story. Those storylines might be exactly what turns them into diehards. Without the story, a score is just a number.

Take Roma against Real Madrid in the Champions League on October 14, 2026. Real Madrid was losing 3–1 with half an hour left. Their coach, José Mourinho, went to his bench and sent on Endrick, a 20-year-old who had barely played all season after an injury in August. Months earlier, his future at the club was openly questioned. In the last seven minutes, Madrid scored three times. Endrick helped set up the first, then headed in the second himself to tie the game. Madrid won 4–3, and Endrick was named Man of the Match.

Endrick’s wasn’t the only story that night. Mourinho used to coach Roma, and the home crowd honored him with banners and chants. The winning goal came from Antonio Rüdiger, a former Roma player. And Kylian Mbappé, who scored Madrid’s first goal, was playing his 100th Champions League match, the youngest player ever to get there.

Each of those stories has to be found, checked, and chosen in seconds, and reach the fan before the moment passes. On live TV, a correction cannot undo what the audience has already heard. Get Mbappé’s game count wrong, and millions hear it. Miss the story entirely, and millions of fans, many watching from the other side of the world, get a score with no reason to connect.

This summer’s FIFA World Cup final drew about 80,000 people to MetLife Stadium and more than 60 million viewers in the US alone. The 2022 final drew roughly 1.5 billion viewers worldwide, by FIFA’s count. Most fans, even the most devoted, will never set foot in their team’s stadium. They tune in from another city, another country, often another continent. And a broadcast cannot reflect every fan’s personal history with the game.

Think of an Indian cricket fan in San Francisco. He grew up watching Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, two of the greatest batsmen India has ever produced. Fans call them RoKo, and together they are one of the most prolific batting pairs in the sport’s history.

Now picture India against the West Indies in Guwahati, October 2018. India is chasing 323. Rohit and Kohli have both hit centuries, and their partnership is already past 230. Every run from here pushes India into new territory: the biggest partnership the country has ever put together in an ODI chase. They finished with 246 together that night.

Back in San Francisco, our fan is nowhere near a TV. A story pops up on his phone, in his language: RoKo have just set a new Indian record, and they’re still going. Within a minute, he’s tuned in.

His native language might be Hindi. It might be English, Tamil, or Bengali. India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages and more than 120 spoken ones. The story has to be built for him, with the context he cares about, not merely translated.

That’s the job our system does. It reads the live game, spots the storyline the moment it forms, fact-checks it, and shapes it for each fan: their language, the players they’ve followed for years, and why this moment matters to them.

Sponsorship still runs on relationships. A partnerships executive may nurture a conversation for months, sometimes years, and no software replaces the dinner where a deal actually closes. But relying on existing relationships can mean overlooking a brand that would be a better fit.

The old way is getting harder. Across the New York market, the Yankees, Knicks, Liberty, and Gotham FC all compete for sponsors. With new leagues launching every year and women’s sports growing, brands have more options than ever.

The market isn’t local anymore either. The NFL is playing nine regular-season games in seven countries this season, and an international player has won the NBA’s MVP award eight years in a row. Finding partners abroad still depends on local agencies and personal contacts.

A brand signals where it’s headed long before it signs a deal. It opens offices in new countries, hires a new CMO, watches its competitors move into sports. Reading those signals across a global market to find the white space, where a brand fits a team and no rival has claimed it yet, is more than any partnerships team can do by hand. With Greenfield, we already connect those dots, helping a team research a new signal and prepare a relevant approach within hours. The relationship still closes the deal. AI helps find the right partners and a timely reason to start the conversation.

I see AI becoming part of the fabric of sport: carrying context from one moment to the next, and making it useful to people who meet the game in very different ways. The history behind a player’s comeback will inform a commentator, help a new viewer understand the stakes, and give a sponsor a relevant way to support the experience.

What interests me most is how far that attention will reach. A smaller club’s fans can finally get the stories they care about. An athlete building a career becomes easier to discover before they’re a household name. A fan who moved across the world can still feel close to the team they grew up with. The same shift will reach other places where the live moment matters more than the report that follows, from live commerce to emergency response.

That future will demand judgment. Shared intelligence has to carry corrections as readily as it carries stories. Commercial relevance cannot decide whether a sporting moment deserves coverage. Fans should have a say in when and how the experience reaches them.

I remember what it felt like on those streets in Mumbai and New York. Sport can make a whole city feel connected. But it also matters on ordinary nights, to small groups of people scattered across the world. Those fans already have their reasons to care. I want AI to help more of sport meet them with the attention they deserve.

The AI Collective is built by volunteers across 180+ chapters in 40 countries.

Thank you to the thousands of volunteers around the world who make this work possible. We truly could not do this without you.