The San Antonio Spurs aren’t just running pick-and-rolls anymore; they’re running custom GPTs. The organization has rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise across its business operations, and the early numbers are hard to ignore. What started as a 150-person pilot has ballooned into a 94% adoption rate, with AI fluency jumping from a paltry 14% to over 85% in a matter of months. The result is a staggering 1,800 staff hours saved every month. That’s not a typo.
CEO RC Buford framed the pivot as a competitive necessity, not a gimmick. “We were looking to create real competitive advantages,” he said. “Being early adopters of artificial intelligence is one powerful way to do that.” But unlike organizations that drop a new tool with a mandate and a prayer, the Spurs’ Director of Business Strategy & Innovation, Charlie Kurian, focused on pull rather than push. After testing other LLM tools that suffered from low engagement, the team found that OpenAI was a natural cultural fit. They prioritized in-person training, custom guides, and an internal hackathon to ensure employees were comfortable, not coerced.
The actual GPTs built by staff are surprisingly practical. Business intelligence analyst Daniel Arzouman created a Fan Voice GPT that digests thousands of post-game comments into sentiment summaries in minutes, a task that previously took hours. On the retail side, strategist Andre Moyce uses a Counterfeit Merchandise GPT to automatically flag fake resale listings by cross-referencing images with official inventory, a process he used to do manually in a vacuum. These aren’t theoretical use cases; they are homegrown solutions tackling specific pains, from tailoring leadership workshops to local cultures to converting dense sponsorship data into actionable insights.
For a franchise looking to deepen ties in international markets like France and Argentina, the language capabilities are a quiet superpower, with GPT solutions now engaging fans directly in Spanish and French. The rapid deployment, validated by a recent AI Challenge Day where 150 staffers prototyped their own tools, suggests something more durable than a brief honeymoon phase with new tech. By betting on their people’s ability to identify problems rather than forcing a top-down digital transformation, the Spurs turned a generic enterprise license into a roster of specialized digital assistants that actually do the grunt work.
