The football club will deepen digital supporter engagement using AI-driven marketing and advanced analytics from SAS; AI agents will enable more adaptive, orchestrated fan experiences.
I’ve been a fan of Liverpool Football Club (Liverpool FC) since I was 14 years old – from the heydays of Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish through to the field heroics of Ian Rush, Steven Gerrard and Mohamed Salah in later times.
So, of course, it piqued my interest when preparing for my trip to SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, to learn that marketing leaders from Liverpool FC would be speaking at the event.
Another great way to celebrate SAS’ 50th anniversary, in my opinion.
Liverpool FC will use AI and data analytics from SAS to transform how it engages digitally with its supporters – one of the world’s largest and most passionate fanbases.
“Our focus is on our supporters – how we engage them digitally, the quality digital experiences we offer and how we continue to grow that audience globally,” said Chris Jennions, Vice President of Marketing, Liverpool FC.
As part of its multiyear partnership with SAS, Liverpool FC is deploying AI-driven marketing technology in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, alongside the advanced data, analytics, and modeling of SAS Viya, to deliver relevant, timely and personalized digital fan experiences, while laying the foundation for the future with more adaptive, real-time digital fan engagement with AI agents.
Jennions added: “With SAS Customer Intelligence 360 we can deliver AI-powered real-time, individualized digital fan experiences, serving our supporters better than ever before. Just as importantly, it gives us a clear way to measure success through engagement, conversion and fan sentiment supporting long-term sustainability.”
Leveraging AI for more meaningful fan experience
Liverpool FC will apply SAS AI and analytics to create more targeted and personalized digital interactions for supporters worldwide – connecting fans anywhere in the world. By unifying data across web, mobile and social platforms, the club can implement always-on, insight driven engagement.
Key fan‑experience use cases to be powered by SAS technology include:
- Personalized merchandising offers: AI-driven insights help tailor merchandise marketing recommendations to fans based on their interests and digital engagement patterns with the club.
- ·Optimized journeys: AI and advanced analytics reveal friction points across web, mobile and social interactions, helping improve marketing experience across digital properties.
- Fan engagement modeling: AI‑driven insights predict fan behaviors and preferences, enabling Liverpool FC to deliver more personalized, relevant communications and experiences based on how fans engage with the Club.
AI-orchestrated fan engagement at global scale
Liverpool FC’s Director, Marketing Operations & Insights Helen Bennett also shared the club’s new partnership with SAS and the implementation of SAS technology during SAS Innovate 2026.
Moving forward, Liverpool FC will use specialized AI agents within SAS Customer Intelligence 360 to orchestrate digital fan engagement across real-time customer journeys. Working alongside marketers, these AI agents help accelerate execution, enhance precision and enable more responsive, real-time interactions at scale. This will enable Liverpool FC to:
- Create and iteratively improve customer audiences based on AI-based adaptive learning
- Continuously optimize fan journeys in real‑time based on behavior, context and engagement signals
- Gain operational and performance insights from their customer engagement platform
The real opportunity for Liverpool FC will lie in moving from AI‑assisted marketing to AI‑orchestrated digital fan engagement.
As AI usage in marketing organizations accelerates exponentially, marketing leaders are increasingly asking how much autonomy AI should have, where human control matters most, and how to move beyond isolated AI features toward systems that measurably improve outcomes.
With the AI agents embedded in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, Liverpool FC can begin coordinating intelligent audience creation, designing customer journeys and decisions in real time using AI to surface insights, and recommend next best actions to accelerate execution and conversion, while marketers remain firmly in control of strategy, approvals, and guardrails.
People still matter
SAS’ approach is that AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. To aid with this, the company announced at SAS Innovate 2026 the expansion of agentic AI capabilities within SAS Customer Intelligence 360 with specialized AI agents designed to work alongside marketers.
This new generation of purpose-built AI agents will collaborate with users, operate within defined guardrails and deliver value across audiences, journeys, decisioning and execution while transparency, governance and human oversight are maintained.
We are seeing AI systems accelerating rapidly. This means responsible deployment and human oversight are essential.
Rather than a single, monolithic AI, SAS has developed a multi-agent system within SAS Customer Intelligence 360 with each agent specialized, context-aware and designed to act on behalf of the marketer while remaining transparent and controllable.
These agents do not replace existing SAS Customer Intelligence 360 capabilities such as audiences, journeys, destinations or marketing decisioning. Instead, they operate across them to retrieve the right objects, make recommendations and accelerate execution under human supervision.
This approach transforms SAS Customer Intelligence 360 from a marketing platform into an intelligent operating system for customer engagement, removing traditional constraints on scale, speed and precision.
