Two years ago, IBM realized there was one glaring omission in its roster of sports partnerships: Formula One.
Formula One has become one of the world’s most popular sports, especially in the U.S., where Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” documented the working lives of F1 drivers and turned them into mainstream celebrities. The tech-centric sport has also become a hot ticket for tech companies like AWS, Oracle, and Anthropic, which partner with teams for sponsorship visibility and to provide data analytics and AI tools that can deliver a competitive edge.
So when IBM went looking for its next major sports partnership, it’s no wonder the company picked F1 and one of its most iconic teams, Scuderia Ferrari HP.
“They’re the winningest team in history,” Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s Vice President of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships, told TechCrunch.
At the heart of this partnership, however, is what has led other teams to start working with tech giants: access to more sophisticated tech solutions that can help them make the most of, especially, artificial intelligence. In fact, one of the best parts of sports, Stanhouse said, is how much data is available and can be used to help people get comfortable with AI.
“They actually see how it serves them,” she said of how AI is used in sports storytelling.
The IBM-Ferrari partnership centers on that idea of storytelling, enhancing fan engagement by overhauling the technology powering the Ferrari fan app. To help with this, Ferrari hired Stefano Pallard in the newly titled role “head of fan development,” who said the challenge the team wanted to tackle was not just reaching fans, but “making each of them feel like we know them.”
“That starts with taking the data we get from the track and turning it into content that is easy to follow and engaging,” he told TechCrunch.
Teams process millions of data points per second during each race, capturing every movement of the driver and the car. Turnin …