Interview to Tom Gutteridge, Chief Product Officer of Gana Media Group

From the outset, our ambition was clear: if we were going to compete for the attention of sports fans, our sports offering had to be built for the fan, rather than for all the fans. That distinction matters.

For decades, sports products have largely been built for audiences. Millions of people receive broadly the same homepage, statistics, stories, and experience. AI is breaking that model apart. We are moving from building products for audiences to building products for individuals, and I think that is one of the most important changes happening in sport right now.

Mexico is an incredibly exciting market in which to do that. There were more than 104 million internet users in Mexico in 2025, while Nielsen estimates that 64% of the population are football fans, significantly above the global figure of 51%.

At the same time, fan behavior around AI is already changing. Capgemini found that 54% of sports fans surveyed are now using AI tools to access sports information rather than traditional search, while around 70% want real-time player performance data and live insights during matches.

For us, those numbers tell us something important. Fans aren’t waiting for an AI-powered future of sport. Their behavior is already changing. Our job is to be at the forefront of building the products that meet that change.

Today, our ecosystem spans gaming platforms, sports content sites, mobile apps, live football streaming, premium video, live sports and gaming data, partnerships, and interactive fan experiences. And one of our biggest advantages is that we own that ecosystem.

That is important from a product perspective because AI does not have to sit inside one isolated product. It can increasingly learn across content, streaming, apps, data, experiences, and gaming, helping us understand more of the fan journey and make every interaction more relevant.

We are already seeing this across our apps. Fans increasingly expect information to be live, immediate, and connected to what is happening in that moment. We are delivering live gaming data, building live streaming experiences, and increasingly connecting content and gaming.

And ultimately, sport should be exciting. Whether it is football, the NFL, basketball, or one of the great global sporting events, you already have drama, rivalry, anticipation, and jeopardy built into the experience.

From a UX perspective, our job is to amplify that excitement. The product should understand what is happening before, during, and after an event and surface the content, data, or experience that makes that particular moment more meaningful to the individual fan.

One of the ways we are already doing this is by using AI to transform sports data into predictive, data-driven narratives around individual fixtures.

Rather than simply displaying a match and some statistics, AI can identify what is interesting about the fixture, interpret the data, build a story around it, and create interactive predictive experiences. It can do that across thousands of sporting events, in multiple languages and at a scale that simply isn’t possible through traditional editorial production.

For us, that is an important distinction. A fixture is no longer just a fixture. AI can increasingly understand the teams, players, history, data, and context around the event. It can identify what matters, explain why it matters, and connect that sporting moment with the experience most relevant to that particular fan.

That is a fundamentally different sports product. Sport is moving from being broadcast to you to being intelligently built around you.

A Club América supporter and a Chivas supporter shouldn’t necessarily open the same product and see the same experience. Their rivalries are different. Their players are different. Their interests are different. So why should their product be the same?

But we are thinking beyond personalization. The next generation of AI-powered sports products understands both the fan and the match.

Live data and multimodal AI are increasingly allowing technology to understand what is happening on the field in real time. Combine that with an understanding of the individual fan, and the possibilities become much bigger.

Rather than forcing customers through menus, scores, fixtures, videos, and statistics, AI creates the possibility of simply asking the product: Why is my team struggling? What should I be watching for in the second half? Show me the important moments!

That changes the relationship between the sports fan and the product completely.

So when people talk about putting a chatbot onto a sports website and calling it an AI strategy, we think they’re missing the bigger shift. AI is becoming part of the architecture of the sports product itself.

And because we own an ecosystem spanning content, streaming, apps, data, experiences, and gaming, we have the opportunity to apply that intelligence across the entire relationship with the fan.

The first generation of digital sport put the match online. The next generation uses AI to understand the match, understand the fan, and connect the two in real time.

That change is already happening, and it’s exactly where we are positioning GANA.