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Forbes’ recent sit-down with Kameryn Stanhouse, IBM’s vice president of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, lays bare what the company calls a strategic integration of technology into global sports marketing. To many Americans this will be sold as innovation and convenience, but it’s also Big Tech wrapping itself tighter around our national pastimes. The sales pitch about “enhanced fan experiences” masks an aggressive corporate play to own the data and the narrative around how we watch and talk about sports.
IBM isn’t dabbling — it’s doubling down with marquee relationships that read like a who’s-who of the sporting world: Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, The Masters, Scuderia Ferrari in F1, UFC and major fantasy platforms. These partnerships give IBM a stage to convert loyal, tradition-minded fans into daily users of its apps and AI tools, and they do it under the respectable banner of “partnership.” What starts as scoreboards and stats quickly becomes habit-forming tech that positions IBM as the indispensable middleman between fans and their teams.
IBM’s own research and product push show why this matters — fans reportedly want AI-driven insights, real-time translations, and automated highlight commentary, and IBM has rolled out tools like SlamTracker updates and a Match Chat assistant to meet that appetite. The company frames these features as fan-first improvements, but every convenience is also a data point and every “insight” is another vector for influence. Americans should be skeptical when corporate labs teach us to trust machines to narrate the games we once shared around radios, in bars, and at tailgates.
Listen to IBM’s own playbook — they use sports to “create relevance” for a brand that many still see as a legacy enterprise business, not a consumer-facing powerhouse. Turning fantasy platforms and stadium apps into doorways for enterprise AI is clever, but it’s corporate marketing dressed up as fandom. Instead of merely cheering stats, fans are being primed to accept automated commentary, targeted promotions, and a steady erosion of organic, human-driven sports culture.
Patriots don’t have to reject innovation to demand accountability. When tech companies use beloved American institutions to normalize massive behavioral tracking and automated decision-making, that deserves scrutiny from fans, lawmakers, and venue operators alike. We should insist on clear opt-ins, strict limits on how long fan data is stored, and real protections for workers whose roles — from broadcasters to data analysts — could be hollowed out by a rush to replace people with algorithms.
This is a moment for commonsense conservatism: champion the fan experience, yes, but require transparency, competitive access for smaller players, and safeguards that protect privacy and livelihoods. Sports are part of our national fabric, not a testing ground for unchecked corporate ambition; hardworking Americans deserve technologies that serve them, not technologies that sell them. If we want to keep our stadiums, broadcasts and fandoms human and free, it’s time to demand the terms under which Big Tech gets to play.
