This article was originally published in 2019 and was last updated June 9, 2025.
- Tension: Fans crave deeper connection with teams—but the emotional thread often frays with time.
- Noise: AI in sports is framed as futuristic hype, sidelining its role in human memory and identity.
- Direct Message: AI isn’t just changing how fans watch the game—it’s reshaping how they remember, feel, and belong.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Back in October 2019, the San Francisco Giants quietly started something that would ripple into the future of sports fandom.
They weren’t chasing the latest VR gadget or building another app with push notifications. Instead, they turned inward to their own history.
With decades of rich media, player stories, and game footage stored in analog formats, the Giants began digitizing their massive archive.
But here’s what made it different: they used artificial intelligence not just to organize it, but to activate it.
Now, in 2025, this strategy looks prescient. As sports fans grow more fragmented across platforms, and as generative AI changes how we interact with content, the Giants’ AI-powered archive has become more than a library—it’s a bridge between generations, a marketing engine, and a personalized emotional connection machine.
But the deeper story isn’t about technology—it’s about identity, memory, and what it means to belong to something bigger than yourself.
Beyond search bars: What the Giants’ AI archive actually does
The Giants partnered with companies like Imagen and Stats Perform to build out an AI-enhanced digital asset management system that could “understand” video, text, and audio.
What used to take hours of manual combing—finding a 1987 Will Clark home run or Barry Bonds’ 73rd homer—could now be retrieved in seconds through natural language prompts.
But it didn’t stop there. The system now powers everything from fan engagement campaigns to real-time social content.
Want to celebrate a player’s 500th career hit? The AI finds five iconic hits from his career in minutes. Want to relive a legendary 9th-inning comeback on its anniversary? The platform not only surfaces the video—it suggests clips, captions, and player quotes automatically.
By 2025, this system has evolved into a full-on experience engine. Fans using the Giants’ app can search by emotion (“Show me the most exhilarating walk-offs”), by theme (“Father-son moments”), or even by personal history (“Games I attended in 2002”).
It’s not just search—it’s memory curation.
The deeper tension: Fandom isn’t passive—it’s personal
What the Giants tapped into—whether they named it or not—is that sports fandom is fundamentally about identity memory. People don’t just follow teams. They remember who they were when a game happened.
They recall the smell of garlic fries at Oracle Park, the voice of a late relative shouting during the World Series, the heartbreaks and the comebacks.
The modern sports ecosystem, filled with highlight reels and hot takes, often flattens this experience into fast content. But deep loyalty doesn’t come from updates, it comes from emotional anchoring.
This is the true value of what the Giants’ archive does: it lets fans re-anchor themselves in their version of the story.
What gets in the way: The hype cycle of “sports tech”
We’re inundated with noise about AI in sports: predictive analytics, biometric wearables, smart stadiums. All exciting. All real.
But often, this tech gets framed only as performance-optimization tools—ways to win more, train harder, bet smarter.
That narrative misses a crucial human layer: the fan. AI can do more than track player stats—it can track emotional arcs, memory threads, and social rituals.
But because the conversation is dominated by tech jargon and monetization models, many teams overlook AI’s potential to nurture emotional engagement, not just transactional loyalty.
The irony? The same algorithms that power real-time betting odds can also power a custom highlight reel for a father-daughter duo.
It’s just about what you prioritize.
The Direct Message
AI isn’t just a tool to optimize the future—it’s a lens to reawaken the past, and rehumanize how fans experience belonging.
Integrating this insight: Rebuilding memory ecosystems, not just content platforms
The Giants’ approach reveals something larger than sports: in a fragmented attention economy, emotional loyalty is built not just by giving people more content, but by helping them feel more connected to their own memories.
For brands, organizations, and even educators, this offers a powerful lesson. Archives are not dead spaces. With the right tools and framing, they become living ecosystems.
The stories we already have—about people, moments, achievements—can be mobilized in new ways that don’t just inform, but resonate.
This requires a shift in mindset: from content creators to memory curators.
In 2025, as AI matures and personalization deepens, the organizations that succeed won’t be those that simply shout louder—but those that whisper more meaningfully.
The Giants understood that early. That fandom isn’t just about showing up, it’s about remembering why you care.
And now, thanks to AI, that remembering can be as vivid—and as connective—as the moment itself.
