AI firms rush to cricket sponsorships, but RMG sized hole in sports advertising remains

India’s cricket economy is witnessing a new class of advertisers step up to the crease. Artificial intelligence platforms, led by Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are making high-profile entries into cricket sponsorships, signalling both the growing ambition of global AI firms in India and the enduring power of cricket as the country’s most scalable brand-building platform.

However, despite the splashy deals and marquee visibility, industry executives caution that AI brands — for all their financial muscle — are unlikely to fully compensate for the sponsorship vacuum left behind by real-money gaming (RMG) companies, which were once among the most aggressive spenders in Indian sports.

The most significant of these new moves comes from Google, whose AI platform Gemini has signed a three-year sponsorship agreement with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) for the Indian Premier League (IPL), covering the 2026–2028 seasons. The deal is estimated to be worth around ₹270 crore, making it one of the largest sports marketing investments by an AI brand in India to date.

Under the agreement, Gemini becomes a principal commercial partner of the IPL, joining the ranks of long-term sponsors such as Tata Group, which holds the league’s title sponsorship rights through 2028. For Google, the IPL partnership offers unmatched mass reach across television and digital platforms, delivering access to hundreds of millions of viewers across demographics.

Earlier, OpenAI’s ChatGPT marked its own entry into Indian cricket by signing a two-year sponsorship deal with the Women’s Premier League (WPL), valued at approximately ₹16 crore. While significantly smaller in scale than the IPL deal, the ChatGPT-WPL partnership was notable for being one of the first instances of a generative AI platform associating itself directly with a mainstream Indian sports league.

Industry watchers say the ChatGPT deal acted as a proof point that encouraged larger AI players to view cricket as a strategic marketing vehicle rather than a peripheral experiment. “These partnerships are not about logo placement alone. They are about buying cultural relevance,” said Abhinay Bhasin, SVP – Product & Tech at dentsu.

According to Bhasin, India’s sports advertising ecosystem is now valued at over a billion dollars, commanding a disproportionate share of audience attention, engagement, and advertising expenditure. “With deals like Gemini-IPL and ChatGPT-WPL, it’s apparent these AI brands are buying mass visibility and fandom association. Cricket delivers millions of eyeballs across TV and digital platforms at a scale unmatched by most other media formats in India,” he said.

For AI firms, the logic mirrors that of direct-to-consumer (D2C) tech brands that need rapid, hyper-scaled reach. Ashish Pherwani, Partner, Media & Entertainment at EY India, said cricket remains unparalleled in its ability to reach over 500 million users across age groups, genders, income segments, and geographies.

“As with every new D2C brand launch, there is a need for hyper-scaled impact properties. Growth in digital content consumption only increases the relevance of cricket. Hence, tech brands looking for mass adoption will definitely benefit from cricket association,” Pherwani said.

Yet, despite the momentum, executives are clear that AI sponsorships do not equate to a one-to-one replacement for the financial heft once brought in by real-money gaming platforms. RMG companies historically used sports sponsorships as direct monetisation levers, tightly integrated with match outcomes, fantasy contests, and real-time user participation.

Dream11 had secured the lead sponsor rights in 2023 for ₹358 crore, covering July 2023 to March 2026, at a base price of ₹3 crore per bilateral and ₹1 crore for ICC and ACC matches. While My11Circle spent around ₹150 crore on jersey sponsorships for IPL. The RMG firms spent over ₹4,000 crore in advertising in India.

“RMG brands relied on incentive-driven engagement — the promise of winning big was the hook,” said Kumar Awanish, Chief Growth Officer at Cheil India. “AI brands operate very differently. Their objectives are brand positioning and long-term ecosystem engagement, not immediate transactional behaviour linked to matches.”

This distinction matters for sports bodies and broadcasters. While AI brands help diversify sponsor portfolios and reduce regulatory risk, they do not replicate the aggressive, high-frequency spending patterns that RMG companies deployed to drive rapid user acquisition.

Bhasin noted that while current AI sponsorship commitments are significant, they remain far smaller than the overall sponsorship headroom created after restrictions on RMG advertising. “These brands are still in an exploratory phase. The focus now will be on learning how to co-create associations — through predictive insights, personalised fan experiences, and tech-led engagement — before scaling investments further,” he said.

Globally, technology players such as AWS — which serves as the official cloud provider for the DP World Tour in golf — have shown how cloud and AI capabilities can be embedded into sports operations themselves. However, replicating that depth of integration at the scale of Indian cricket will take time.

For now, AI brands are softening the blow left by RMG’s retreat and helping future-proof cricket’s commercial ecosystem. But industry consensus is clear: while artificial intelligence may be the new frontier of sports sponsorship, it has not yet filled — and may never fully fill — the revenue vacuum once occupied by real-money gaming.