Americans have spent almost $450 billion on sports betting since 2018. Now, artificial intelligence is part of the equation.

Fanatics Holdings Inc., a sports platform that includes betting sites, e-commerce, collectibles and event operations, is harnessing Snowflake Inc.’s data analytics and AI services to derive new insights about fans.

Fanatics’ Kevin Longo and Snowflake’s Erin Foxworthy talk with theCUBE about their organizations’ partnership.

“Our data is really unique in that … it’s more grounded in passion,” said Kevin Longo (pictured, left), vice president of sales and product marketing at Fanatics. “Think about the daily habit of betting gaming and how often you would go in and place a bet. Five bets a day, 10 bets a day. And we’re sort of developing an understanding of the fan through that.”

Longo and Erin Foxworthy (right), global industry GTM lead, marketers and advertisers, at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the role of AI in marketing and what sports fans are looking for. (* Disclosure below.)

Betting on an AI-driven future

AI is changing how advertisers access data, Foxworthy emphasizes. Snowflake implements a semantic layer across structured and unstructured data and puts an AI model on top, enabling companies such as Fanatics to more critically analyze its customers.

“What’s happening is they’re needing to understand a platform that can handle the different types of data sets that we’re talking about, unstructured video, audio assets, things that we’ve never had before as marketers to leverage in our campaigns,” Foxworthy said. “But we need that to be able to come in a platform that can unify that and allow us to bring the AI to the data. And that’s really where a lot of marketers are transforming their businesses.”

Fanatics has created a knowledge layer called FanGraph that compiles everything its system knows about a fan. The platform can then apply predictive modeling to analyze what a fan will do next. By implementing AI in this way, Fanatics hopes to increase the trust, relevance and impact of its marketing, according to Longo.

“As we’re building everything, we have trust at the center because we can never violate the trust of the fan,” Long said. “We think we can increase relevance again by virtue of our understanding of the consumer. But then impact has been really interesting because I think again, that’s going to be advertiser outcomes and that’s where we have to partner with Snowflake to ensure that we can drive those outcomes.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit. Neither Snowflake Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE