Fans are the soul of AC Milan, with around 628 million of them dotted around the world. To support them and transform the fan experience, the world famous club is turning to AI agents.
Massimo Venneri, Head of Digital & CRM AC Milan explains that AC Milan is built on relationships. It has a global TV audience of 248 million watching its matches and an annual stadium attendance of 1.4 million, as well as a social media following of 90 million.
The club is a long time user of Salesforce clouds to merge its fan data, automate personalized marketing, and power an AI-based fan service.
It’s now applied Data 360 to unify data by pulling ticket, store, and hospitality information into one place so the agent has access to the fan’s complete history instantly. Data from transactions, touchpoints, marketing, B2B, activations and fan support all link to a single point fan view, giving the club greater insights into its fan base, and more trust in its data foundation, integrations and governance.
Taking a data driven approach has boosted its marketing ROI by over 40%, increased ticket sales by 16%, and lifted email open rates by 26% already.
Agents incoming
The club now has three agents in place – Mila for fan support, customer care and the subscription journey; Service Copilot to help employees help fans, and handle customer care productivity; and Hospitality Advisor, which drives commercial opportunities and handles corporate hospitality. Venneri says:
The architectural vision was very important, and we spent a lot of time on it so the three AI agents are using the same heart, and it gives us a single fan view through the CRM, ERP, and each touchpoint along the way. We have the same data lake, which allows us to personalize the fan experience using different layers to orchestrate the process.
Mila is powered by Salesforce’s Agentforce, and can recognize fans by their MyMilan login and subscriptions, and provide personalized support. It can also solve more complex fan inquiries through an interactive self service tool, and if the problem becomes more difficult it can transfer the exact context of the conversation to live club operators. Venneri says:
Mila has removed friction for the fans however they connect with the club. For example, one challenge was to explain the difference in the newly introduced ticketing options. Mila explains those differences, whilst handling any local legal constraints. Around 60% of current season ticket holders had an interaction with Mila, and their data is now locked in, recognized and available far more quickly.
However, single ticket sales always create the most common inquiries, especially for away games with questions about parking, access, the gates and so on. Also for visiting fans who want the best possible information about the world famous San Siro stadium. Mila handles all of those inquiries as well. Vanneri comments:
Expectation has changed faster than the service model and now fans expect instant answers across different support moments as they engage through web, mobile, ticketing and commerce, 24/7. The Mila season ticket campaign has also offered the club a new way to think about these agentic opportunities.
The club’s Service Copilot is a tool which helps employees help fans and improves customer care productivity allowing employees to anticipate problems and analyze sentiment. It also allows repeated actions to be automated, like marketing emails and branding
Venneri explains that there is a big human element here:
We need better human agents, not fewer, and they can be helped to be better using AI. For example, it can offer human agents only qualified leads, which have a better chance of being converted to sales or subscriptions. Managing different scenarios in this way creates an ecosystem of agents, all using the same data. And it helps make fans feel they are close to the club, even if they aren’t physically, like the 6.5 million fans in India
Similarly the objective of AC Milan’s Hospitality Advisor agent was to create and maintain a close relationship with fans through a support agent that handles corporate hospitality and drives commercial opportunities.
The fan journey
Personalized marketing and what Vanneri calls “fan journeys”combine Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud tools to treat a ticket purchase not as an end point, but as the start of a relationship. The fans might receive automated, personalized emails for player shirt discounts, based on the highest goal scorer in the the match they just attended.
Meanwhile with retail and e-commerce modules in place, the club can now more effectively deal with problems like shipping, logistics and returns, as well as dealing with third party supplier issues and Shopify payment processes.
All this is only as good as your foundation knowledge, so it is critical to focus on that, and the resulting service which will become a creativity driver. Trust in the data foundation is critical as the answer must always be right. Lead qualifications aren’t easy on a website, but the sales expertise on the Data Cloud means agents can explain products and identify real leads far more efficiently.
The relationship between AC Milan and its fans is key. It is about loyalty to the club. Fans expected changes faster than the service model, so the benchmark had to be effective applications and better streaming apps. The unified data model allows agents to analyze fans and their questions, and provide fast answers. For us the future of fan engagement is not digital, it is agentic. Tomorrow relies on engagement, loyalty, data leverage and empowerment.
