The New York Jets, under new Chief Data & Analytics Officer Iwao Fusillo, are treating AI less like a side experiment and more like office plumbing.
Fusillo, who started in January, told Sports Business Journal his remit spans both business and football analytics. His two priorities: building internal analytics apps for coaching, scouting, and business intelligence, and expanding AI usage across the organization — an effort owner Woody Johnson formally began two years ago.
The adoption number is doing a lot of the work here: Fusillo said 91% of the Jets’ front office now uses Microsoft Copilot day to day, up from “a handful” about 100 days earlier. Users are averaging two to three prompts per day.
Fusillo is fairly unsentimental about what that means. He calls it “level one, or horizon one” — adoption. Useful for culture, not necessarily for the business case.
“Do we have large business gains from that level one? Not really,” he told SBJ. “But have we changed the culture of the entire front office? Yes. To think AI-first.”
The Jets’ “level two” is workflow automation. Fusillo said the team already has “over 20 deployments” there, including sponsor prospecting research, revenue reconciliation, and structuring data from physician evaluations of players at the draft combine. He said those deployments are expected to drive “double-digit gains” in metrics like top-line revenue and productivity. Expected, not reported.
A big part of the rollout appears to be change management with a side of cafeteria anthropology. Fusillo described doing a listening tour in the team cafeteria to understand employees’ AI habits. Next League, the Jets’ AI education partner, ran months of workshops with a six-person team covering business intelligence, sponsorship, social media marketing, and other specialties.
Those workshops produced more than 60 business-side AI deployment ideas and “probably double that” on the football side, according to Fusillo. Next League’s Shripal Shah pointed to sponsorship prospecting as the “cornerstone example,” because it let staff see time savings quickly enough to produce the visible “light bulb” moment.
The open question is the usual one: beyond prompt counts, workshops, and deployment lists, when — and how credibly — do the projected “double-digit gains” show up in the Jets’ business results?
Read more at Sports Business Journal.