Why NFL Teams Are Struggling with Fan Engagement, And How to Fix It

Amperity's co-founder and CTO breaks down the messy reality of sports fan data, how agentic AI is changing what small teams can actually do, and why the biggest mistake brands make is waiting too long to start

Community & Social EngagementExplainer

Published: April 8, 2026

Rhys Fisher

Ask most people to picture the data operation behind an NFL franchise, and they’d probably imagine a war room of analysts.

The reality, according to Derek Slager, Co-Founder and CTO of Amperity, is often a team in the single digits trying to make sense of 20 or more disconnected systems.

That fragmentation is at the heart of a challenge Slager discussed with CX Today’s Rhys Fisher: how do sports organizations build a complete picture of their fans when the data is scattered across ticketing platforms, point-of-sale systems, merchandise vendors, and social media?

The Seahawks case is a telling example. Using Amperity’s platform, the team surfaced 5,000 fans they had no prior record of.

Beyond sports, Slager argues the same problem shows up across industries, and the solution is the same: get the data unified first, then act on it.

With Amperity’s recently launched Customer Data Agent, that second step is moving faster than even Slager expected.

“Once you’ve sort of figured out, hey, this is the path we want to go down, it’s like, do you want me to do all the work for you and just make the campaign? And you just say yes, and it’s there.”

For brands still sitting on the sidelines, Slager’s closing advice cuts through the noise: stop evaluating and start doing. The organizations seeing real results from AI aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the longest roadmaps. They’re the ones who picked a starting point and moved.

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