The Buffalo Sabres today announced a multi-year partnership with sports artificial intelligence company SprintAI to bring advanced artificial intelligence into the club’s hockey operations and build a more connected approach to on-ice player performance, organizational workflows and front-office decision-making.
At the center of the partnership is a shared vision for how AI can help a modern sports organization operate. Rather than simply adding another source of analytics or another dashboard for staff to monitor, SprintAI is designed to connect information across existing data sources and workflows, continuously interpret what is changing and help surface the information, questions and actions that require attention.
The mutual goal is to create an intelligence and orchestration layer that helps the Sabres transform fragmented information into decision-ready context. Over time, AI-powered workflows will support staff in monitoring on-ice player performance, identifying relevant changes, searching and synthesizing information, automating routine reporting and workflows, and preserving organizational knowledge so that important context can move more efficiently across hockey operations.
“We are constantly looking for ways to improve how we support our players, how we make decisions as an organization and how we build a hockey operation that is prepared for the future,” said Jarmo Kekäläinen, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres. “The opportunity today is to help our people leverage AI to connect and interpret the information we already have, understand what is changing and get the right context in front of the right people at the right time. We believe SprintAI can help us build that capability while creating a more connected, adaptable and future-ready hockey organization.”
The initial development roadmap will span both on-ice player performance and hockey operations. It includes the deployment and continued development of a Performance Staff Module that drives next-level efficiency and productivity gains, communication and workflow automation, and the development of a General Manager Module in collaboration with the Sabres’ front office.
The partnership is designed to evolve as the organization’s needs evolve. SprintAI and the Sabres will work together to determine development priorities, incorporating new AI capabilities and workflows while protecting the Sabres’ proprietary data, methodologies and competitive information.
“Professional sports organizations already have vast amounts of data, expertise and institutional knowledge. The next competitive advantage comes from being able to connect and orchestrate all of that intelligence continuously,” said Juha Tiihonen, Founder and CEO of SprintAI. “Agentic AI changes the model from people constantly having to search for information to an environment where the system understands context, monitors what is changing and proactively helps prepare the organization for its next decision. Our ambition with the Sabres is to build that capability together, augmenting the expertise of their people, helping the organization learn and operate faster, and building toward an AI-native future of sport.”
SprintAI develops AI-powered intelligence systems specifically tailored for professional sports operations. Its platform combines data integration, sports-specific artificial intelligence, workflow automation and decision-support capabilities to help athletes, performance staff and team leadership turn complex information into actionable intelligence.
