WILL BRASS
AI APPLICATIONS
The bigger purpose of the Premier League Companion The Premier League Companion is powered by Microsoft’ s well known Copilot.
The platform acts like ChatGPT, but instead of helping write emails, it’ s diving into three decades of football history to answer questions like“ Which keeper has made the most saves against Manchester United?” or“ Show me every time Thierry Henry scored from outside the box.”
The system runs on Azure OpenAI Service – Microsoft’ s cloud platform that gives access to GPT-4 and other large language models( LLMs). For football fans, that translates into having a conversation with the sport’ s entire digital memory bank.
Will Brass, the Premier League’ s Chief Commercial Officer says:“ Our role is to create value for our clubs by engaging with as many fans as we can and bringing them into the Premier League ecosystem.
“ Ultimately, a big part of that is making sure our channels are best equipped to engage with those fans and more importantly, deliver to fans what they want.”
However, modern sports fans are scattered across platforms, chasing highlights on TikTok, stats on ESPN and transfer gossip on Twitter.
This is part of the motivation behind the partnership: to pull fragmented experience back together using AI as the glue.
WILL BRASS
TITLE: CCO COMPANY: PREMIER LEAGUE INDUSTRY: FOOTBALL
Will Brass is Chief Commercial Officer for the Premier League, leading global partnerships, brand innovation and commercial strategy in world football’ s most-watched competition.
Under the hood: How Azure makes football smarter Microsoft isn’ t just throwing some chatbots at the problem, but is deploying Azure AI Foundry alongside agentic architecture – AI that doesn’ t just respond to questions but actively hunts through data sources to build comprehensive answers.
The raw material is staggering: 30 seasons of match statistics, 300,000 articles and 9,000 videos, plus real-time data from 380 live matches per season.
All of this gets processed, translated and personalised in real-time for fans across the world.
ML algorithms crunch live match data to generate insights tailored to individual users. Computer vision tech analyses match footage to spot tactical patterns, great goals and moments that matter – then packages them up based on what each fan actually wants to see.
56 September 2025