At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Larry Fink and Bruce Flatt described a $10 trillion rebuild of the global economy around AI infrastructure: cloud computing, chips, power generation, fiber and data centers the size of cities.

The sports industry was conspicuously absent.

The reason is simple: Most sports organizations still do not know who their customers are.

You cannot run AI on a fan you cannot identify.

The average professional sports team can rarely identify even 25% of the people inside its own building by name. Tickets are transferred. Seats are resold. Merchandise is purchased through third parties. Media consumption occurs anonymously across disconnected platforms. Sports may be the most emotionally valuable consumer category in American life, yet it remains one of the least structurally informed about its own customers.

Other industries solved this problem decades ago.

Harrah’s Entertainment launched Total Rewards and rapidly became better at understanding gambler behavior than many banks were at understanding depositors. Tesco transformed itself through Clubcard. American Airlines did it with AAdvantage. American Express built an empire around a simple proposition: Membership has its privileges, and those privileges depend on the company knowing exactly who you are.

The real innovation was not software. It was incentives.

Customers will gladly identify themselves when........

© Sports Business Journal