The Visibility Crisis That Shaped an Industry
When I oversaw Sponsorship Marketing at Amazon in early 2022, women’s sports occupied a frustrating place in the sports ecosystem, viewed largely as community initiatives rather than commercial opportunities. ESPN’s SportsCenter allocated less than 6 percent of airtime to women’s sports. The entire WNBA payroll was eclipsed by a single NBA player’s contract. Sponsorship dollars flowing to women’s sports properties comprised under 1 percent of the global sports marketing spend.
This stark reality crystallized when Oregon basketball player Sedona Prince’s viral TikTok video in 2021 highlighted the glaring disparities in facilities provided to NCAA women’s athletes. Her seven-million-view exposure helped spark a national conversation, demonstrating that women’s sports were not underperforming — they were systematically undervalued and underfunded.
From Crisis to Catalyst: The Explosive Growth Era
The transformation since 2021 has been nothing short of revolutionary. Women’s sports have shattered every metric that previously defined their limitations. The 2024 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship attracted 18.9 million viewers, surpassing the men’s final for the first time in history. The WNBA’s regular season reached 54 million viewers in 2024, representing a staggering 170 percent increase from 2023.
Perhaps most telling is the financial validation from media companies. Streaming platforms and broadcasters have dramatically increased their investment, with some media rights deals growing by more than 10 times their previous value. The WNBA’s new broadcast agreement represents a more than four-fold increase over their previous deal, signaling that the industry recognizes sustainable, long-term value rather than temporary momentum.
College softball exemplifies this growth trajectory. The Women’s College World Series final in 2024 attracted 2.4 million viewers, with attendance hitting nearly 120,000 over ten days — figures that now rival major men’s sports championships.
AI as the Great Equalizer
While traditional media gatekeepers historically controlled which stories got told and which athletes received coverage, artificial intelligence is fundamentally disrupting this dynamic. AI technology offers huge opportunities to close the visibility gap by democratizing content creation, personalizing fan experiences, and identifying overlooked talent and narratives.
The technology addresses three core visibility challenges that have plagued women’s sports for decades: resource constraints in content production, difficulty in audience discovery and engagement, and limited analytical insights for performance optimization. Where traditional approaches required massive human resources and editorial decision-making that often overlooked women’s sports, AI can scale content creation and distribution efficiently while removing historical biases from the equation.
Industry Leaders Pioneering Change
Forward-thinking organizations across the sports ecosystem are already demonstrating how AI can transform visibility and engagement for women’s sports. These early adopters are establishing new benchmarks for what’s possible when technology meets opportunity.
Through my work as both a marketing executive and AI consultant, I’ve collaborated with several organizations at the forefront of this transformation. I’ve seen firsthand how AI is being deployed across different aspects of the women’s sports ecosystem, and these experiences have shown me what works — and what doesn’t — when implementing these technologies.
Empowering Athlete Networks: LaunchBreak’s Community-Driven Approach
LaunchBreak, a professional network of over 2,100 current and former collegiate and professional women athletes, demonstrates how AI can strengthen athlete communities and career development. The platform utilizes AI summarization tools to provide personalized member updates, creating stronger connectivity within its community of women transitioning from sports to business careers. “Additionally, we see many of our members launching startups that use AI to revolutionize the women’s athlete health and wellness space.” Teresa Saputo-Crerend, Co-founder LaunchBreak
Through strategic partnerships with AI consultants including Power10 Consulting, LaunchBreak helps athletes understand and adopt artificial intelligence as a career acceleration tool through training, recognizing that AI literacy will be essential for future business success.
Data-Driven Competition: Athletes Unlimited’s AI-Powered Model
Athletes Unlimited has built their entire competitive model around artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms in ways that transform professional sports. Unlike traditional leagues where AI supplements existing structures, AU’s unique format — featuring individual championships and weekly team redrafting — literally cannot function without sophisticated algorithmic systems.
At the heart of AU’s innovation is their AI-powered scoring system that determines the precise value of each player action and maintains competitive balance across sports. These sophisticated algorithms required extensive data analysis using five years of historical competition data to ensure accuracy. For women’s sports specifically, this creates next-level transparency in athlete evaluation — every play, every contribution is quantified and visible, eliminating the subjective biases that have historically undervalued female athletes.
Beyond competition, AU leverages AI through strategic partnerships including Uplift Labs for biomechanical analysis, ScorePlay for content automation, and Clicktivated for interactive fan experiences. The result is a league where AI fundamentally redefines what professional sports competition can look like when technology and athlete empowerment align.
Media Innovation: The Gist’s Authentic Storytelling
The GIST, a women-founded sports media company that recently surpassed one million newsletter subscribers, provides a compelling model for responsible AI integration in sports journalism. This milestone reflects the enormous appetite for women’s sports content when delivered authentically and consistently.
Focused on amplifying women’s sports through genuine storytelling, The GIST employs AI primarily for operational efficiency — transcriptions, data analytics, and internal content summaries — while maintaining strict editorial oversight. Co-founder Jacie deHoop describes their strategic approach: “For the growth of this space overall, we need better and more content and storytelling and media around women’s sports. That’s how fandom really grows, and that’s how you bring in that next layer of fans.” The organization uses AI to enable their all-female content team to focus on this mission-critical storytelling rather than administrative tasks.
This balanced framework ensures that while AI streamlines certain processes, preserving editorial authenticity and human judgment remains paramount for audience trust and athlete representation.
Broadcasting Revolution: Enhanced Production and Distribution
Major broadcasters and streaming platforms are strategically using AI to transform women’s sports visibility through two key approaches.
Enhanced Content Creation: ESPN now employs generative AI to produce instant game recaps for leagues like the NWSL and NCAA softball, enabling deeper coverage that traditional resource allocation couldn’t support economically. DAZN uses AI-powered short-form content creation to optimize soccer highlights for platforms like TikTok, attracting younger demographics and expanding global reach. Automated tactical analysis provides teams with deeper insights while creating richer storytelling opportunities for fans.
Personalized Viewer Experience: Prime Video uses advanced machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized highlights and rapid search capabilities, allowing viewers to instantly access key moments from WNBA and NWSL games. Peacock’s approach during the Paris 2024 Olympics included AI-generated, tailored recaps that significantly enhanced viewer engagement across women’s competitions.
College softball’s explosive growth showcases AI’s ability to amplify existing momentum in rapidly expanding sports. The previously mentioned Women’s College World Series final in 2024 which attracted 2.4 million viewers, used ESPN’s AI-driven highlight generation to help fuel this dramatic audience growth. Personalized content feeds and instant performance metrics position softball to expand beyond collegiate markets, demonstrating AI’s potential to transform what have been considered niche sports into mainstream entertainment. Similar opportunities exist across women’s volleyball, hockey, and gymnastics — sports with passionate, established fan bases that could achieve breakthrough visibility by strategically implementing AI-powered content and engagement strategies.
Responsible Growth: AI Ethics and Implementation
The expansion of AI in sports media must adhere to established ethical frameworks to ensure technology serves as a force for equity rather than perpetuating existing disparities. Organizations should follow guidelines established by the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and OECD AI Principles, which emphasize transparency, fairness, and accountability.
A specific concern involves recommendation algorithms that might reinforce historical viewing patterns favoring men’s sports content. If AI systems are trained on data reflecting past inequities — such as lower engagement metrics for women’s sports due to limited distribution — they could inadvertently perpetuate underrepresentation by recommending less women’s sports content to users.
Responsible implementation requires diverse training data, regular bias auditing, and transparent decision-making processes. Organizations must ensure their AI systems actively work to surface women’s sports content rather than simply reflecting historical preferences that were shaped by limited access and opportunity.
Strategic Actions for Sustainable Growth
Stakeholders across the women’s sports ecosystem should prioritize several key initiatives to maximize AI’s potential while maintaining ethical standards. Investment in AI analytics can help identify and address remaining coverage gaps through data-driven insights rather than assumptions about audience interest.
Organizations need scalable content production systems that can efficiently create highlights, analysis, and promotional materials across multiple sports and leagues. Developing transparent ROI measurement frameworks will help demonstrate the business value of women’s sports investments to potential partners and investors.
Cross-sector collaboration, inspired by successful models like Athletes Unlimited and The GIST, can help smaller organizations access AI tools and expertise that might otherwise be cost-prohibitive. Strategic partnerships between technology companies, media organizations, and women’s sports properties can accelerate innovation while sharing both costs and benefits.
The Future Powered by Intelligence and Opportunity
Women’s sports have reached an inflection point where artificial intelligence can serve as the catalyst for sustained, equitable growth. The visibility gap that has constrained the industry for decades is not an insurmountable challenge — it’s a solvable problem that requires the right combination of technology, investment, and commitment.
The organizations profiled here demonstrate that AI is not simply an efficiency tool but a transformative force capable of reshaping how sports content is created, distributed, and consumed. When The GIST reaches one million subscribers, when Athletes Unlimited builds an entire league around algorithmic transparency and fairness, when LaunchBreak empowers athletes through AI-driven career development, and when major broadcasters invest in AI-powered women’s sports coverage, they’re not just serving existing demand — they’re creating new possibilities for fan engagement and athlete visibility.
The next phase of women’s sports growth will be defined by how effectively stakeholders harness artificial intelligence to solve persistent challenges while maintaining the authentic storytelling and community building that makes women’s sports uniquely compelling. For industry leaders willing to invest in both technology and values, the opportunity extends far beyond financial returns to fundamentally reshaping the sports landscape for future generations.
The visibility gap is closing, powered by intelligence both artificial and human. The question now is not whether women’s sports will achieve equity, but how quickly and completely the transformation will unfold.
