Microsoft has entered into a five-year strategic partnership with the Premier League, replacing Oracle as the British football association’s official cloud partner in addition to providing AI services. Premier League mobile and web apps will begin featuring a chatbot powered by Copilot and Microsoft AI, which will also be used for the league’s fantasy games. The Premier League says it has 1.8 billion fans in 189 countries and claims to be “the world’s most-watched football league.” Microsoft will also help modernize the League’s technical infrastructure, both internally and in broadcast operations.

The pact will have value beyond dollars for Microsoft, letting the U.S. firm “tout its AI technology to a captive audience of sports fans,” reports Bloomberg.

In addition to migrating all technical ops to the Microsoft Azure cloud, Microsoft will be customizing a model for the club, presented to fans as the Premier League Companion.

Built using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry services and powered by Copilot, the model will leverage Azure OpenAI to provide a “highly personalized experience” that pulls information from over 30 seasons of stats, 300,000 articles and 9,000 videos, “unlocking a whole new world of facts and figures for fans,” according to a Microsoft news post.

“This is the future of football — it’s data-driven drama, it’s smarter stats, it’s deeper stories, it’s a better connection of the fan to what’s going on,” Microsoft UK Chief Darren Hardman told Bloomberg, noting “such deals are prized by technology companies because sports is the rare entertainment that people still watch live.” Oracle’s arrangement with Premier expired earlier this year.

The Premier League Companion is available now on the Premier League’s new mobile app and website, where the chatbot can be accessed by clicking a Microsoft Copilot icon that has been added to the top right-hand corner of the landing page next to the search box.

The Premier League Companion “will be enhanced throughout the upcoming Premier League season,” explains a Premier news post explaining that future functionality will include “open-text questions and answers in fans’ native languages through text and audio translation.” The Fantasy Premier League component is also a future upgrade, planned to launch later this season.

The official English Premier League season begins August 15, writes CNBC.