Famous football manager Jose Mourinho is not shy about publicly criticizing players. He calls it “confrontational leadership.” As Snickers leaned against this famous trait for an advertising campaign in the UK last summer, the chocolate bar brand partnered with Openai, Meta and other tech companies to develop an artificial intelligence clone of Mourinho and roast friends with personalized videos.
All someone had to do was open WhatsApp and chat with the bot and share information about a friend's gaffe. Then a video is created featuring a Mourinho digital twin.
This new type of sponsorship agreement is just an early example of how the spread and rapid improvements in generating AI capabilities will launch the outlook for new revenue streams for athletes, leagues and media companies.
In the core, legal and technology infrastructure has not evolved sufficiently for easy commercialization, but the core is IP monetization, but a new way.
“The law is also developing naturally, but we still don't protect the first digital twins with copyright,” said Oneteam CEO Sean Sansiveri, adding that the current shelter preparations are valuable. “We believe that as a steward or athlete IP shepherd in a group context, our library of digital assets (the voices of all these players, the player data that underpins them all) will move both offensive and defensive values in the future.”
To produce his approved avatar, Mourinho spent three hours in the studio. There, his video and voice were filmed to give power to AI models. This is a similar process behind CAA Vault, a product with Veriton to maintain and promote agency talent as a digital portrait.
“AI has now become a sponsorship category. I think some properties will grant certain rights to sponsorship transactions that they want to return when they do media rights transactions.”
– Doug Perlman, CEO of Sports Media Advisor
“We believe this will unlock opportunities that would otherwise not exist,” CAA's Head of Strategic Development Alexandra Shannon told Sports Business Journal. She acknowledged that the market is still forming, but “but the idea that clients own their digital likeness is a truly important step in the right direction, so we decided to launch this as a service for clients.”
Sansiveri offered several other possibilities. It's possible that all players' digital twins will appear on e-commerce sites, using the voices of star quarterbacks to promote season ticket sales or citing market research to buy jerseys when more fans see them in athletes.
League assets can also be recycled for profit. Scott Gutterman, senior vice president of PGA Tours at Digital and Broadcast Technologies, suggested that a large-scale language model featuring the tour's own data and video can be licensed to third parties who want to build their products using a verified Golf IP. However, there is still a long-term timeline. “We have a lot of people in the same place, and we're waiting for the industry to come together a bit to get that closer to reality,” he said.
The tour shifted its focus on AI to running more than 30 ongoing projects simultaneously, from proof-of-concept development to automatic creation of Golfbet player profiles. Using an agent AI copywriter to ensure proper tour and Associated Press style for all writing. Tourcast uses AI-powered commentary to provide context for all shots. The average Tourcast visitor spends 60 minutes on a four-day event, and in an age of AI-driven, over-recruiting, Gutterman expects it to tend to be higher. Longer dwell times lead to higher ad spending and increased interest in betting increases the value of official league data.
The tour also explores the use of Agent AI to interact with other LLM agents, such as Openai and Anthropic's Claude. It's part of understanding how fans behave on tour apps and websites will “migrate to an AI-first experience” and thus change.
WSC Sports is working closely with a tour of several personalized products, and AI Video Company is currently creating short episodes and daily highlight shows for a specific demographic. Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer Aviv Arnon said one such show has already been produced with a North American partner. He was unable to disclose any further details, but he informs that such content is already in the public domain and is spared from obvious identification as fully automated.
“It's a new type of show and an asset they can commercialize,” Arnon said, explaining that personalization is also possible. “You may have three kids, and they like different animated characters, so maybe you can give them their own NFL or NBA shows with another character telling the story – [you can] Change the show based on your viewer. ”
Other areas where AI is already increasing its bottom of its properties are due to sponsorships in which blue chip brands such as AWS, Google Cloud and IBM are aligned with the league as official partners for various designations such as technology, cloud, and AI. Ensuring that there is a clear portrayal of what is included is important to ensure that more AI generates content creation.
“AI has become a sponsorship category, and some properties hope to return when they do media rights transactions.
