The Growth Market You’re Overlooking

The Growth Market You’re Overlooking

“I want us to lead the NBA in AI.”

The Technology Sports Leaders Need May Already Be in Your Product

“I don’t just want to modernize our tech stack,” an NBA executive told me recently. “I want us to be the undisputed leader in AI across the entire league.”

Then we got into the details.

Customer data spread across different systems. Manual processes slowing down his team. Growing expectations from fans. Commercial opportunities that required better technology to capture.

As he spoke, several companies came to mind.

One helps retailers improve conversion. Another automates complex workflows. Another helps subscription businesses understand and reduce churn.

They had already solved many of the problems he was describing. Most had never considered a sports organization as a potential customer.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with hundreds of companies and sports brands and been involved in hundreds of deals. This conversation reflected a pattern I keep seeing.

Technology companies often have more relevance to sport than their leadership teams realize.

The Way We Define a Market Can Limit What We See

Companies naturally build their identity around the customers they serve.

A platform gains traction in retail. Its case studies, sales team, and product roadmap develop around that market. When the leadership team discusses expansion, it looks toward familiar buyers and adjacent industries.

Sport can sit outside that field of vision.

Yet inside a club, league, broadcaster, or venue, many of the operational challenges will sound familiar to an enterprise technology founder.

Payments. Subscriptions. Customer service. E-commerce. Fragmented data. Complex workflows.

In conversations with sports executives, these subjects come up regularly. They want to understand their customers, grow commercial revenue, and give their teams better tools to execute.

The opportunity becomes clearer when you look at the organization through the problems it needs to solve.

A company with years of experience improving online conversion may have something valuable to offer a ticketing or merchandise operation. A platform handling multilingual customer inquiries may be relevant to a club serving a global audience.

That connection deserves a place in more growth discussions.

Sport Gives Familiar Problems a Different Intensity

Experience in another industry is a useful starting point. Understanding the operating environment matters.

Sport concentrates demand around moments.

A ticket release, a major signing, or a championship can bring a sharp increase in transactions and inquiries. A club serves people inside a venue while maintaining relationships with fans across countries and time zones.

The commercial team has to connect those experiences, often across systems and partners that evolved separately.

From the outside, it is easy to see the size of the audience. Inside the organization, the questions become more specific:

• Can fans complete a purchase during peak demand?
• Can the service team respond across languages?
• Can commercial teams understand a fan’s relationship across ticketing, content, and merchandise?

These are the conversations where proven enterprise capabilities become relevant.

I have also learned that relevance needs to be precise. A sports executive needs to understand what a product will improve, how it will fit into existing operations, and who will take responsibility for delivering the result.

What This Means for Your Next Growth Decision

One example from our ecosystem involved a Finnish software company with a solution for a more interactive home-viewing experience.

Within three weeks, it secured a paid commercial project with CBS for NFL broadcast coverage.

What stayed with me was the fit: an existing capability reached a buyer with a specific, immediate need.

That is a useful lens for any leadership team considering a new market.

Through our work at HYPE Sports Innovation, I see how much depends on recognizing that fit. The conversation becomes productive when both sides understand the problem, the capability, and the commercial value.

Final Thoughts

As you build your 2027 strategy, I would put one question on the agenda:

Which capabilities have we already proven that could solve a meaningful problem inside a sports organization?

Answering it takes some work. You need to understand the buyer, the operating context, and the economics.

After years in these conversations, my view is clear: sport deserves serious consideration from a much wider range of technology companies.

For many technology companies, the next growth opportunity in sport starts with a capability they have already proven elsewhere.