Jenn Chase, CMO and EVP at SAS Institute, and Peter Linder, head of thought leadership – North America at Ericsson, join theCUBE’s Paul Gillin and Scott Hebner at SAS Innovate to explore how AI and analytics are reshaping the sports fan experience. Their discussion highlights the power of real-time insights, 5G and private networks in personalizing engagement on and off the field.
Chase shares how SAS is working with the Orlando Magic to deepen fan loyalty and operational efficiency through advanced analytics. Linder explains how Ericsson’s connectivity solutions enable these innovations at scale, creating seamless digital experiences that bridge the gap between data and emotion.
The conversation offers a forward-looking take on the evolving sports tech landscape, from immersive content to player performance modeling. Chase and Linder emphasize the importance of balancing privacy with personalization as teams increasingly rely on AI to connect with fans in smarter, more meaningful ways.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
SAS Innovate 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For SAS Innovate 2025
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for SAS Innovate 2025.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
SAS Innovate 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to SAS Innovate 2025
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to SAS Innovate 2025. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Jenn Chase, SAS & Peter Linder, Ericsson
Jenn Chase, CMO and EVP at SAS Institute, and Peter Linder, head of thought leadership – North America at Ericsson, join theCUBE’s Paul Gillin and Scott Hebner at SAS Innovate to explore how AI and analytics are reshaping the sports fan experience. Their discussion highlights the power of real-time insights, 5G and private networks in personalizing engagement on and off the field.
Chase shares how SAS is working with the Orlando Magic to deepen fan loyalty and operational efficiency through advanced analytics. Linder explains how Ericsson’s connectivity solutions enable these innovations at scale, creating seamless digital experiences that bridge the gap between data and emotion.
The conversation offers a forward-looking take on the evolving sports tech landscape, from immersive content to player performance modeling. Chase and Linder emphasize the importance of balancing privacy with personalization as teams increasingly rely on AI to connect with fans in smarter, more meaningful ways.
Head of Thought Leadership - North AmericaEricsson
Jennifer Chase
CMOSAS
Jenn Chase, CMO and EVP at SAS Institute, and Peter Linder, head of thought leadership – North America at Ericsson, join theCUBE’s Paul Gillin and Scott Hebner at SAS Innovate to explore how AI and analytics are reshaping the sports fan experience. Their discussion highlights the power of real-time insights, 5G and private networks in personalizing engagement on and off the field.
Chase shares how SAS is working with the Orlando Magic to deepen fan loyalty and operational efficiency through advanced analytics. Linder explains how Ericsson’s connectiv...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What are the three main business objectives that SAS helps sports organizations with, and how has their partnership with the Orlando Magic evolved over the years in terms of data utilization and analytics?add
What is Ericsson's role in enabling the fan experience through mobility and 5G in collaboration with SAS?add
What are some potential uses of artificial intelligence in tailoring sports experiences for fans of different levels of understanding?add
What are some potential uses for digital twins in different industries, including sports and marketing?add
>> We're back here in Orlando, Florida at the SAS Innovate 2025 conference. I'm Paul Gillin with my colleague, Scott Hebner, and we're going to talk about sports now, I love this topic, about what SAS is doing and what Ericsson are doing with sports and bringing analytics to the game. We're seeing sports is so analytical now. Every basketball game that's played, every movement of every player, every time the ball hits the court, that is captured somewhere and it creates this massive analytical framework the teams are using. It's really changing the nature of the game. So our guests are from SAS, Jennifer Chase, chief marketing officer. Thanks for being here.
Jennifer Chase
>> Oh, my pleasure.
Paul Gillin
>> And from Ericsson, Peter Linder, head of thought leadership for North America.
Peter Linder
>> Thank you very much.
Paul Gillin
>> That's a cool title, Peter.
Jennifer Chase
>> I think we got the coolest topic of the day too.
Paul Gillin
>> Really.
Scott Hebner
>> Got to change our titles.
Paul Gillin
>> So, Jen, can you elaborate on the role of AI now in personalizing and improving the fan experience at sports events?
Jennifer Chase
>> Yeah. At SAS, we're partnering with a number of sports organizations, and we really help them with three main business objectives. Oftentimes, they're looking to do more player analytics, better understand the performance of their players. The second is they want to improve their operations, just the whole operations of the business. And then third is how do they better engage with the fans, both fans in the stadium during the game, as well as outside of that? So those are really the three main use cases that we're working with our sports organization partners with.
Scott Hebner
>> You had an announcement this week with Orlando Magic, right?
Jennifer Chase
>> We did. We did. Now we've been partnering with the Orlando Magic since 2010. Our original use case with them was they were seeing that... They needed to look at their ticketing prices differently. At the time, there was secondary markets that tickets could be made available to, and so they just wanted to better understand that. And here we are, fast-forward 15 years later, and we worked with them on a number of different use cases. One of the things that's extremely impressive to me is how strategic they are about data. So they really took this approach of, "We need to make sure we're understanding all of the data about our fans, their behavioral data, operational data about them." So they have one of the most sophisticated data warehousing strategies that we see, and as a result, they're able to just bring on new use cases because they can leverage that data. So really appreciate their partnership. One of the things we see them doing right now is sophisticated work with the app. They've got a really engaging mobile app. They're able to deliver real-time offers because of all the insights they have and how they are applying AI and analytics about their fan behavior.
Paul Gillin
>> And you really see that. You go to a sports event now and you see people are glued to their phones in the stands. They're not watching the game. They're watching the virtual game on their phones. Now Ericsson is involved in enabling the fan experience through mobility and 5G. What is your role in the initiative with SAS?
Peter Linder
>> So we're providing the underlying mobile radio technology that connects the fans in the stadium. And what we do typically in the case you just described is when you're perhaps not having the best seat where you're sitting and watching it, that you can get the best seat by bringing up your phone and getting a different camera angle. So what has happened very much over the last five years since we first connected a stadium with 5G, it's to evolve the fan experience. And so more of what we had at home in the TV sofa is coming into the fans in the arenas, but also that we get new camera angles and so on from the arenas to an enhanced experience at home. So I think you can say that it's both for the fans that are there, serving them, but also we used to deploy just a public 5G network that you access, any cellular network. But more recently we have had a private network component of it, where you can also support payment terminals and all the different business operations that take place at the venue. So it's kind of sophisticated networks growing pretty much year over year for new things.
Paul Gillin
>> Now explain that distinction, because I think probably a lot of people don't understand that you can have private 5G networks. There are also things you can do with 5G that you couldn't do with previous iterations, such as multiplexing, slicing. You have a lot more flexibility, I understand, with the technology.
Peter Linder
>> Yeah, so you can say... A very simple way to describe it. It used to be a straightforward network. You essentially replicate exactly what was happening in the network outside of the venues. And then you typically dimension the traffic in the network for a lot going down towards the fans and not so much going up in the network. But if you, for example, go into a sports or a music venue today, it's often that people want to share, "Hey, I'm here. I'm really cool. I'm at this kind of sports event." And all of a sudden a lot of traffic is going the other way. We connect professional TV cameras so you don't have to have the two guys running around with a cable behind the cameraman. You can connect the cameras over 5G today. But that means that you need to have a consistent bandwidth, 35 megabits per second, for 4K all the time, which take a lot of the capacity in the upstream. So when we talk about network slicing or the ability to provide virtual private network, it's that we take part of the capacity and use it so it doesn't interfere with the fan traffic. So these are essentially a lot of new capabilities that are introduced in the network and taken advantage. Because sports venue with 50, 80,000 people, or I'm going to Indy 500, 330,000 people in a single location, there's a lot of demand for the capacity, whatever we can put in. So it's putting it in and dividing it for different purposes. That's the name of the game.
Scott Hebner
>> Well, I guess statistically probably almost 100% of the fans are watching it from home, right? So how's this affecting the home experience for the fans?
Peter Linder
>> So the home experience, for example, the home experience is... You used to have limitations of where you could place cameras typically, that you had to have a tripod and the cameras that were covering us here, but now there's so many more camera types and more nimble cameras that you can use, so all of a sudden you can put cameras in new camera angles that hasn't been possible. That combining with the AI and with all the analytics and saying, "Hey, there's going to be an overtake probably in three, four laps. This is happening. That guy has 20% of his tires left," so I think this is the combination of the data components that everything that we know about the sport, making it available for the fan, together with interesting new camera angles that you perhaps wasn't able to do before, that changed the home experience for the fans.
Paul Gillin
>> Jen, talk about what some of your sports partners are doing. What are some of the more sophisticated analytics, just the routines you see them running these days?
Jennifer Chase
>> Yeah, I'll talk more about the Orlando Magic. I think what's really impressive to me is to see how hyper-personalized they are able to get with their fan engagement content. For example, they shared how they do almost like a Spotify year-end wrap-type campaign to their season ticket holders, so they get to see what was the Magic's experience and performance for the games that they had a seat in the stadium for? What a really unique way to connect with your fan base. So I think that's really sophisticated from the Orlando Magic's perspective. What we're seeing from the LA Football Club, and this is a new partner that we have just begun working with this year, is that they're looking at engaging the community within LA, not only the fans that are coming into the stadium, but the broader community, and I think it's really impressive how they are looking at personalization from that perspective. We're also working with the Dutch National Football Club. That's an area, too, where they're doing in-game, real-time offers, and they really understand their fans. And what we see is organizations like that that they have data about their customers, but they're doing such a nice job of respecting privacy and getting that balance between privacy and personalization and building trust all along the way. And it's really impressive now the fandom that they're able to nurture moving forward. The Orlando Magic talked with us last night about how they're able to see the benefit of that in the form of additional ticket sales and how they look at their business. So good fan engagement is just simply good business.
Scott Hebner
>> And Peter brought up AI. Tell me a little bit about how you see AI, AI agents, affecting the fan experience a little bit today, what's happening, and where you think this is all heading in the years to come.
Jennifer Chase
>> Yeah, yeah. Right here at SAS Innovate, we have an experience called the Magic Touch. Using AI computer vision models, we have modeled out what are the performance characteristics of an NBA player, and then you can match your skills up against that and see where you stack up. It's such an interesting way of engaging non-athletes here at this event with better understanding AI in a way that maybe they can imagine, "Oh, hey, maybe I could apply this in my work life." I think that's one of the interesting aspects and why at SAS we're partnering with some of these sports organizations, because it helps us tell the story of the art of the possible with AI. I do think you're going to see more with sensor data that you talked about earlier that allows us to gather even more data from a computer vision perspective. We're doing even more from a natural language processing, understanding customer sentiment that is on social media, being able to feed that back into models that they have and score. So just a couple of examples right there. What are you seeing, Peter?
Peter Linder
>> No, but I think you can use it in a lot of different ways. If you think about just the different levels that there are of fans, if I go to a race, there's very few people that want to listen to the same kind of level of details that I want to listen to. And if you then can help people that are less sophisticated understanding of the sport, just hold up your phone. "What is that car there? Oh, that's a red car. That must be a Ferrari or something." You can use AI to tailor the experiences. Or for example, for simple things, like audio, there's not just one person talking and then trying to feed everybody, that you can have different level of audio tracks and stuff like that. Those are the kind of personalizations that I think will make a big difference, both for people at home, but especially when you go with a diverse group of people where not everybody has got the same understanding of the sports or the same kind of interest for detail. I've been with friends where people literally pick up the phone and watch the specialized production, because I say, "Why do you do that?" "Well, I get more of the graphics and the statistics, the stuff that you know by just looking out." I get to tell... So all of a sudden we can have a conversation about what's going on.
Paul Gillin
>> You mentioned that increasingly the bandwidth is two-way. What are you seeing fans doing in the stands that is sharing their experiences or that is creating conversations?
Peter Linder
>> No, but I think it's like sports today. It's very much an experience for people and something that you share. Where there are playoffs in the hockey now, people that are at the game, "Oh, we're here right now. Can you see the vibe," and it's building up to the game. So I think it's a little bit, you become kind of a marketer for the sport itself as a fan by they're there and sharing the experience. Five years ago, you're lucky at some of these events if you could just tweet and say, "Hey, I'm at the hockey game. It's really cool." But now you can just share when people are screaming and people are doing things. And it also becomes a production tool for the broadcasters, because instead just zooming in on a group of, say, Dutch soccer fan, a football fan, which are the most passionate in the world, instead of just zooming in on them, you should have the cameras, their own cameras, standing there in the group, "Oh, here we are. We're losing," and that kind of engagement. So I think that is what lights up and takes the experience to a different level. Well, Let's just say they don't download anything during the concert, but Jesus, "I'm here. See all the action going on."
Paul Gillin
>> Are you seeing the broadcast networks are actually tapping into these fan devices and using it as part of their broadcast feed?
Peter Linder
>> Yes. Yes, there is. So these are the kind of things right now when they see that there are more and more powerful cameras that can be used. I've been embedded with broadcasting teams where, okay, we didn't have the cameraman. He didn't show up, or we couldn't get hold of him at the right time. What do we do? How do we save the interview with this athlete? We put their smartphone on a tripod and recorded it. It was perfect. No one could tell the day after what was aired, what was recorded on a professional camera and what was captured with a smartphone. So these are kind of things which gives you... like just pull up the storytelling and you can capture moment that if you should order a camera person be there three hours later, the moment is gone. And I think we're going to get even closer to that when we get to now with the integrated into your glasses, because all of a sudden you can start recording just by a tap. And then before, pulling up the phone into the camera app, turning over to video, I got outsmarted so many times last year on a race on this. One of my best friends, he did exactly that the whole time. I had so much more exciting video. And from there, it's very close to start integrating that. Your team sent around, "Hey, this was all the highlights." What if when you get the highlights, you see yourself in there every now and then from... So I think we're just in the beginning of this.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, I think as a sports fan, what's been happening over the years is it's more immersive. You do more and more and then you just want more. Like in football, it's third and three, and the big debate with your friends is, "Okay, what play should they run?" And if you were to do that electronically and people were able to say, "They should run this play," and feed it all back, and you get to vote, but you have to do that really quickly before they run the actual play. That's I think where you start to appreciate a partnership where you can do the data analytics, you can do the AI to bring it all together, and you have the speed and bandwidth to be able to pull that off and all the additional angles and things. It's just getting started here with what's possible. It's a fascinating space.
Paul Gillin
>> Jen, a final question. What can we expect from SAS in the future in the area of sports marketing customers-
Jennifer Chase
>> An area that I'm excited for us to explore, earlier today we announced a partnership with Epic Games, and specifically using their Unreal Engine to create digital twins. The example we showed was the digital twin of a manufacturing plant, but you could see where digital twins and sports could, essentially gaming and sports, come together in a way that could be really powerful. I think of myself, if I'm a marketer for the Orlando Magic, for example, I want to create a digital twin of what's happening at the game and scenario out different experiences that I could create. So I'm really excited about the potential for digital twins and how that can elevate the fan experience even more.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, no, I love that. That's the whole idea of what play should I run, or you run a play and then you say, "What if I had run this play," given whatever defense they ended up running. You're right, that whole partnership brings to life those what-if simulations, but they do it in a graphical way-
Jennifer Chase
>> A visual way. Absolutely....
Scott Hebner
>> over games. Yeah. Be fascinating.
Jennifer Chase
>> Yeah. It's almost like game theory that you do on for your game strategy, you're doing game theory for a fan engagement. It's-
Paul Gillin
>> Gives a whole new meaning to fantasy sports.
Jennifer Chase
>> That's right.
Paul Gillin
>> Jen and Peter, thanks so much for joining us today. This is a fascinating discussion.
Peter Linder
>> Thank you very much.
Paul Gillin
>> We'll be right back from SAS Innovate in Orlando. This is theCUBE, the leader in technology coverage and analysis.
Paul Gillin
Scott Hebner