If you run sales, marketing, or fan engagement for any organization, you know the daily grind: too many disconnected tools, fans or customers asking the same questions over and over, and sponsors who expect a personal touch even when your team is stretched thin. The San Jose Earthquakes, playing out of PayPal Park in Silicon Valley, are tackling these exact problems with AI. Their approach is a useful case study for any business leader wondering where to actually start with AI, rather than just talking about it.
It's worth saying clearly up front: based on the club's own public announcements, almost all of the Earthquakes' confirmed AI use lives on the business and fan-experience side. There is no publicly confirmed on-field tactical AI system for this club. That distinction matters, because it shows AI delivering real value long before it touches a game plan.
In April 2025, the Earthquakes and Theta Labs announced Quakebot, which the club describes as its first official AI-powered chatbot and the first of its kind in MLS. It runs on Theta EdgeCloud and lives on the club's official website.
Quakebot uses a custom AI agent trained on Earthquakes and MLS soccer data to handle the questions fans ask constantly:
Chief Strategy Officer Ian Anderson pointed out that being headquartered in Silicon Valley made it a natural fit to partner with a Bay Area AI infrastructure company. The club's release also calls PayPal Park the first cloud-enabled venue in MLS, which signals a broader bet on infrastructure, not just a single chatbot feature.
The lesson for other organizations: routine, repetitive questions don't need a human every time. A well-trained AI agent can answer instantly, at any hour, freeing your staff to handle the conversations that actually need a person.
Back in August 2023, the Earthquakes became the first MLS team to adopt Gong's AI-powered revenue intelligence platform. Gong is now the club's official Revenue Intelligence partner.
The idea is straightforward: every call, email, and meeting with a sponsor or prospective partner contains information. Gong helps the commercial team capture and analyze those interactions so they can serve existing sponsors better and identify opportunities with new ones.
The lesson here: your team is already having the conversations that reveal what customers want. The question is whether you're capturing and using that information systematically, or losing it in someone's inbox.
The Earthquakes also entered a multiyear partnership with Apollo, which became the club's Official Go-to-Market Partner and sleeve sponsor. According to the club, Apollo is being rolled out across revenue teams for:
The stated goal is to give sales and marketing a single, unified view of the customer, replacing fragmented ticketing, CRM, marketing, and sponsorship systems. Club President Jared Shawlee and Ian Anderson both spoke about wanting to stay ahead of the technology curve as soccer's popularity continues to grow in the U.S.
This is a pain point almost every mid-size organization recognizes: your ticketing system doesn't talk to your CRM, your CRM doesn't talk to your marketing platform, and nobody has a complete picture of the customer. Unifying that data isn't a luxury. It's the difference between a renewal campaign that feels personal and one that feels like spam.
The Earthquakes also partnered with Plug and Play, a startup ecosystem, to explore AI and sportstech innovation across MLS. Ian Anderson said the club has prioritized investment in data and technology and wants to tap into AI advances that could affect the club both on and off the field.
To be clear: the announcement did not name any specific player-performance tool, so we won't claim one exists. This partnership reads as an exploration pipeline, not a finished product.
For perspective, it's worth noting what's happening elsewhere in soccer, though none of this is confirmed as part of the Earthquakes' own program:
These are league and industry-wide developments, not Earthquakes announcements, but they show where soccer's AI conversation is heading.
You don't need an MLS budget to apply these same principles. The Earthquakes' playbook, based entirely on their own announcements, comes down to four moves:
Most small and mid-size businesses don't have a Theta Labs or an Apollo contract waiting in the wings. That's where Anablock CRM (crm.anablock.com) comes in. It's an AI-first CRM built with sales and marketing assistants already inside it, so a lean team can get a unified customer view, instant responses, and better pipeline visibility without stitching together five separate platforms.
If the Earthquakes' approach has you thinking about where AI could save your team time and strengthen your customer relationships, we'd like to talk. Contact Anablock today at https://anablock.com/contact-us to see how an AI-first CRM can bring these same advantages to your business.
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