How Tottenham Hotspur worked with Salesforce to create the ‘world's best experiences’ for fans

Tottenham Hotspur FC has a huge fanbase, with millions of loyal, passionate followers across the globe. From Europe to Asia, fans tune in every week to cheer on their team at all hours of the day.

Yet engaging with these fans is a complicated challenge, according to the club’s chief technology and digital officer, Rob Pickering.

With a treasure trove of data on fans stretching back decades, the club embarked on a sweeping digital transformation project with Salesforce around 18 months ago.

The aim here, according to Pickering, was to consolidate data sources and deliver a more engaging digital experience for fans.

“When you look at our fans, [we have] an incredible fanbase that is global, that is very engaged with the club, and it’s a privilege to work with them,” he told assembled press at Dreamforce 2026.

“We have the world’s best fans, and I want to make sure they have the world’s best experiences. To do that, we needed to make sure we had enough data to be able to serve them what they need, when they need it, and where they need it.”

A key component of the club’s engagement with fans lies in the Ask Spurs digital assistant, which provides answers to frequently asked questions on topics such as ticketing, stadium navigation, and details on public transport options.

With thousands of fans using this service, quality data is critical to providing accurate information. It’s the lifeblood that powers the service and provides users with reliable answers to queries.

Fan data was spread across an array of disparate sources, however, and individual fans themselves often duplicate profiles, which prevented the club from fully capitalizing on this data to provide bespoke experiences.

Working with Salesforce, Spurs consolidated more than 35 separate data sources to create a centralized source of truth and a “single fan record”.

“Across those systems, historically, we had a Rob Pickering, we had an R Pickering, we had an RP,” he said. “The work we’ve been doing with Salesforce over the last 18 months has been bringing that data into a single fan record, which allows us to see every interaction that a fan has with the club into one single record,” he explained.

“That allows us to see that those fans are the same people,” Pickering added. “The same fan that buys a team shirt, and the same fan that comes to a game, and the same fan that attends one of our third-party attractions on site, like F1 Drive.”

Powering Ask Spurs

Agentforce, Salesforce’s flagship agentic AI service, is what underpins the Ask Spurs assistant. With this, the club was able to build a highly flexible application capable of contending with a global fanbase.

The digital assistant provides answers in 11 languages and operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Our fans are global, so it doesn't necessarily suit them to call us at 930am on a Monday or a Tuesday morning,” Pickering said. “We've got Korean fans who want to speak in Korean and be serviced at what will be 3am our time.”

Notably, Pickering said that Agentforce is enabling the club to create a more intuitive assistant for fans. It’s evolving from being a simple question and answer chatbot to an agentic assistant.

“We’re moving from question to answer to question to action, and eventually we’ll go to question to buy something,” he said.

“So instead of asking us, say, ‘how do I buy a membership?’ In a world of agentic commerce with what we've built with Agentforce and with Commerce Cloud, we could say, ‘I would like to buy a men's home team shirt in medium’, and have that transaction just occur naturally as we would ask Google or other ways to do today.”

Pressing the advantage

Pickering told ITPro that, long-term, the aim is to transform the assistant into a “fan engagement agent” more akin to other AI-powered assistants in the footballing world.

In mid-2025, the Premier League signed a deal with Microsoft to roll out the “Premier League Companion”, for example. This is a Copilot-powered assistant that allows users to query various stats on players, clubs, and access thousands of articles and videos.

Pickering appears to envisage a similar setup for Spurs fans around the World. As an example, he said users could one day request information on how many goals an individual player has scored. Thereafter, the agent will provide them with details and even video content showing said goals.

Features like these are only one potential area the club is exploring, however. The assistant also has applications for staff working on the frontlines on matchdays and during the various events and concerts Tottenham Hotspur Stadium hosts each year.

Spurs has hundreds of employees, many of whom interact directly with fans and concert goers. Equipping them with the assistant could simplify their roles, provide them with valuable information, and ultimately benefit fans and attendees.

“We have dozens of staff that work on a match day,” he said, “Not all of them can know everything about every policy of how things work.”

“So as we expand the usage of this, not just externally to our fans, but internally to our employees, they'll be able to ask questions they might not know an answer to, and have that answer returned to them in the same way that a fan might if they were at home.”