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. Turning this into content that fans can engage with is just one way that advanced enterprise AI can help businesses better interact with their consumers.
Among the 11 teams, Ferrari is one of the few (alongside the likes of McLaren and Williams) to have a standalone fan app strategy rather than lean on social media or the official F1 platforms instead, showing how the sport is slowly starting to capitalize on its growing global fandom.
Some of the changes to the Ferrari app were simple, like offering it in Italian. Even though Ferrari is an Italian company and many of its fans are Italian, their fan app was not available in Italian until the IBM partnership.
Stanhouse said the old Ferrari fan app was a place where people went to find race details and then leave. This new app has games where fans can play with others in the app, new AI-written race summaries, more behind-the-scenes stories about the team and the drivers, a place to make predictions, and an AI companion for fans to ask questions.
“There are two drivers, but did you know it takes 24 people working simultaneously in two seconds to change a tire?” Stanhouse said, adding that storytelling helps fans feel closer to the team.
Unlike other sports apps IBM has built, Stanhouse said the Ferrari app’s main focus is storytelling because it wants fans to stay engaged with it all year long, rather than for a few weeks a year, as with tournaments like the Masters. Engagement data for the app has been trending upward since IBM came into the scene, Stanhouse said, citing a 62% increase in engagement over race weekends as an example.
Pallard said the team then uses AI to analyze engagement signals in the app, such as which content people like to read and the sentiment of the messages fans send.
“That helps us understand what resonates most with the Tifosi [the fan nickname for Ferrari] and it directly informs how we shape our storytelling and how we deliver content,” he said.
The team hopes to dive deeper into personalization and create more immersive fan experiences.
The app developers also took into account Ferrari’s fanbase, which is much more diverse than it was even five years ago. F1 released stats last year showing that 75% of new fans were women, many of whom were Gen Z. A particular draw for women is the F1 Academy, an all-female racing series that aims to develop the next generation of women drivers. But these new fans, much like the old, are after one thing — more.
“They are asking for more data, more insight, more features, and we have to be able to deliver that,” Pallard said. “With IBM, the vision for the next five years is to make every fan feel like the experience was built for them, whether they have been with us for 30 years or 30 days. That is how you build loyalty that lasts.”