Everyone Says AI Will Cut Jobs. In Sports, It's Adding Them.

The fear nobody says out loud at these conferences is that AI is coming for the jobs. Phil Andrews said the opposite into a microphone: it's creating them.

"I would argue we're adding more people to USA Fencing's headcount because of AI," said the USA Fencing CEO, "and the more expansive our business has been able to become rather than the other way around." Then, flatly: "It's actually creating jobs, not diminishing jobs in sport." He delivered it as a matter of fact rather than a provocation, and down the panel, Gene Tinner of the UFC and the moderator nodded along.

That's a leverage argument, and it holds up. Andrews runs a lean governing body, and the tools let him expand the business instead of trimming the staff that runs it. By his account, "we're now the second-ranked national governing body by monetization per member," he said. "The number one is ski snowboard." Small shop, big output, more hands needed to handle the output, not fewer.

Aaron Holland brought the receipts. The co-founder and CEO of Attend has watched where the actual return shows up, and it isn't glamorous. "The coolest AI innovation in terms of effectiveness and hard ROI we've seen is a team told us their reps spend 70% of their time logging into the CRM, just logging data back into the CRM." Kill that, and "deploying that directly into the CRM moves your reps back to actually selling." His data also torches a long-held assumption about high-touch sales. When the Arizona Diamondbacks put premium inventory online, Holland said, 83% of buyers were new to file. His read: "not only is there an audience out there that doesn't want to talk to people, they may pay more not to talk to someone." If that holds, any premium sales team built on the assumption that big-ticket buyers need a human to talk them into it is staffing against the evidence.

Trevor Purvis sees the same thing from inside a club. The Astros' ticket operations director runs under 20 sales reps for a top-five revenue team, so AI's job is to hand those reps a running start, not replace them. The team warms leads with personalized outreach, and "when we get a response, then the rep jumps in." He also knows the limit. "Our fans would call us out if they heard us using a robotic type of a script." The reps aren't going anywhere; the busywork in front of them is.

Gene Tinner kept the UFC's stance simple. "I'd look at AI as just a piece to the puzzle. You can't replace that human interaction." The skill is knowing which moment wants a machine and which wants a person, and not confusing the two.

Edward Khoury gave the cleanest account of why this is real and not the hype cycle talking. "For the last 30 years, software has helped people do the work," said the Jump CTO. "And what's happening now is that software is actually doing the work." The result is raw leverage: "One operator can manage pricing, segmentation, and execution at a level that just wasn't possible before." His warning was blunt. The advantages compound, so teams that move early pull away, and "teams that wait, they won't just be behind, they'll be operating on an entirely different curve."

The same thinking extends past the back office, and Launch Pad is worth a beat of its own. It's the NBA deciding which outside ideas are worth building alongside the league, the call a front office makes one rung up: less about running a club, more about shaping what every club gets to use. The company it chose to incubate here was OneCourt. Co-founder and COO Antyush Bollini came up through the program after the Trail Blazers became the first pro team to run his haptic display, a tactile device that turns the NBA's live tracking data into vibrations a blind or low-vision fan can follow with their fingertips. Narrow use case, but the same instinct everyone else on the stage was working from: start with data the league already sits on, and make something out of it that couldn't exist before.

Strip away the headcount panic and the actual front-office story is compression: fewer hours lost to data entry, more spent selling and inventing. Treated as a way to cut jobs, AI misreads the moment entirely. It is capacity, and the teams using it that way are already pulling away from the ones still debating whether the robots are coming.

Leah Botts → Deputy AD, External Relations, Columbus State
Botts arrives from Lenoir-Rhyne by way of UAB, where she ran marketing and fan engagement across 18 Division I programs. A Division II program drawing that résumé tracks with how far down the divisions the competition for external-revenue talent now reaches.

Nick Hall → President and Chief Revenue Officer, Union Omaha
Hall takes over revenue and the run-up to Union Omaha's new downtown stadium, pairing with COO and GM Alexis Boulos to round out the front office. A USL League One club installing a president-plus-CRO this early reflects how central the venue economics have become to the lower divisions.

Keith McCloat → VP and CFO, NWSL Atlanta
AMBSE installed McCloat as the money chief for its 2028 expansion club, reporting to soccer president Mauricio Culebro. The finance function is going up well before the roster, the sequence expansion franchises now follow as a matter of course.

Amanda Shank → Partner and EVP, The Sports Facilities Companies
Shank moves over from Unrivaled Sports and Ripken Baseball, where she was EVP of strategic initiatives, into a partner seat at SFC. The youth and events-facility business has been drawing senior operators out of team and league roles, and her move continues the pattern.

Dave Marmion → President and CEO, Cotton Bowl Athletic Association
Marmion gets the top job at one of the sport's marquee bowls after nine years at the College Football Playoff, where he ran the finances and then the revenue side. He succeeds Rick Baker, who held the seat for 38 years, and he inherits it just as the expanded Playoff redraws what a New Year's Six bowl is worth.

Senior Director, Match Business — Major League Soccer (New York): Runs the P&L for Soccer United Marketing's event slate, the Concacaf Gold Cup, the Mexican National Team's U.S. tour, and the rest, managing venue deals, club relationships, and the cross-border partnerships with Liga MX and the FMF. Asks for ten-plus years staging international events, the rare operator who can build a tournament's business from the venue contract up. Apply here

Director, Events & Hospitality — Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix (Las Vegas): Plans and executes the hospitality builds and ancillary events around the Strip race, owning suite customizations, vendor relationships, and the year-round event calendar alongside the commercial team. Eight-plus years in event management, on a property that has to deliver a flawless premium experience in a window measured in days. Apply here

Director, Athletics Annual Giving & Operations / Assistant AD — Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA): Leads first-dollar athletics fundraising and the donor-facing parking, ticketing, and premium game-day functions across 31 varsity programs, carrying a $1.3 million gift goal. The role pairs annual giving with seating and suite operations, a reminder that in college sports the donor pipeline and the ticket office are now the same revenue engine. Apply here

Manager, Partnership Activation — USA Hockey (Colorado Springs): Manages the day-to-day of corporate and licensing partnerships for the sport's national governing body, keeping sponsors' deliverables on track and finding the upsells that grow each account. The job sits where the sponsorship dollars actually get earned or lost, in the execution after the deal is signed. Apply here

See you next Wednesday.