UP544 ChatUP: Craig Hepburn on how Agentic AI changes sports consultancy

Craig Hepburn sits at the intersection of enterprise technology and cultural institutions. He spent years as UEFA’s Chief Digital Transformation Officer, overseeing its digital ecosystem, OTT platform build, and Innovation Hub. He moved to Art Basel as CDO in 2023. He is now an independent AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and prolific writer on the structural implications of AI for organisations and industries. His Substack has become essential reading on the gap between AI hype and implementation reality.

Hepburn’s central thesis is that most people and organisations are “tourists in someone else’s architecture.” He draws a sharp distinction between using AI (prompting chatbots, generating content) and building with AI (constructing proprietary systems, workflows and tools). He argues the latter is what will separate winners from losers — and that the window for making that shift is narrowing fast.

Crucially, Hepburn’s argument extends beyond sport. His recent writing on “The Builder and the Billion Dollar Lie” contends that entire industries — consulting, systems integration, transformation programmes — were built inside the gap between the person who understood a problem and the person who could build the solution. Agentic AI, he argues, is starting to close that gap. That has profound implications for the agency model in sport.

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