Premier League executives used IBC2026 to outline how the league is extending AI deeper into its fan-facing digital products, with Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Azure, and MediaKind supporting personalized content discovery, Fantasy Premier League assistance, and backend streaming operations.

At the center of the strategy is the Premier League Companion, an AI-powered conversational experience available through the league’s official website and mobile app. The platform is designed to personalize what fans see based on their interests, preferred clubs, favorite players, and previous interactions.

The system can surface news, statistics, video, and historical content from more than 30 seasons of Premier League data, including roughly 300,000 articles and 9,000 videos. Fans can use natural-language prompts to search for specific moments, compare players, explore club history, or prepare for upcoming matches.

The league’s partnership with Microsoft began as a broader digital transformation effort and has since expanded into a five-year strategic relationship that makes Microsoft the Premier League’s Official Cloud and AI Partner.

The audience scale behind the project is significant. The Premier League says it reaches 1.8 billion fans across 189 countries, while its digital properties are being rebuilt around a more personalized model rather than a one-size-fits-all content experience.

Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer of the Premier League, said the league’s clubs backed a substantial investment in owned-and-operated digital platforms to create more individualized experiences for fans.

“It’s about creating bespoke appeal to our fans and drawing them closer to an ecosystem they enjoy.” – Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer, Premier League

The AI strategy has now expanded into Fantasy Premier League through the Fantasy Premier League Companion, powered by Microsoft Copilot.

The tool is built using Microsoft Foundry and combines Azure OpenAI, ChatGPT 5.4, and official Premier League data. It can answer questions, compare transfer targets, surface relevant FPL analysis, explain game rules, and incorporate a manager’s current squad, available budget, and player availability into its responses.

The league says the Companion is designed as a decision-support tool rather than an automated manager. It provides multiple options instead of issuing a single recommendation and does not generate predicted points.

The Premier League said more than 13 million managers were participating in Fantasy Premier League entering the 2026/27 season, while Brass told IBC that the broader FPL product serves more than 30 million people during the season.

The expanded Companion builds on the league’s broader effort to create individualized fan journeys across content, video, data, and Fantasy.

According to Microsoft, early deployment of the Premier League’s new personalized fan environment contributed to a 20% increase in fan engagement, with 60 million fans participating during the early months of the rollout.

MediaKind is supporting the infrastructure behind that experience, including live streaming, content personalization, server-side ad insertion, and operational reliability.

Moore Macauley, Chief Architect at MediaKind, said AI plays a central role in content discovery by identifying relevant moments at ingest and helping determine which content should be recommended to individual viewers.

“For content discovery at ingest, we want to understand the high and lowlights of that content.” – Moore Macauley, Chief Architect, MediaKind

Reliability is another major focus because personalization only works if live video, advertising, and streaming services can operate consistently at Premier League scale.

MediaKind is also applying AI to backend operations. Large language models are being used to configure and create services more quickly, while AI agents running on Azure analyze system alerts and logs and provide troubleshooting recommendations.

Macauley said those agents have reduced the number of issues escalating from first-line support to engineering and shortened resolution times for more complex problems over the past 15 months.

That backend automation supports a broader Premier League technology stack built around Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365, with AI being added across both fan-facing and internal operations.

The league is also planning additional personalization features, including multilingual interactions, real-time match data, deeper Fantasy integration, and more context-aware content recommendations.

The shift reflects a broader change in how the Premier League is defining the “next generation” of sports fans. Rather than limiting that term to younger audiences, Brass described it as a change in expectations across the entire fan base as consumers become accustomed to more personalized digital products in other parts of their lives.

“To reward the choices we are all making with our discretionary time, we need to create the personalised, bespoke, trusted, and tailored experiences which we believe will be critical going into the next decade.” – Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer, Premier League