How Pacers Sports & Entertainment Uses Agentforce to Unify Fan Data

Pacers Sports & Entertainment (PS&E) struggled to connect fan data spread across 30 disconnected platforms, making personalized engagement nearly impossible. By deploying Salesforce Data 360, Marketing Cloud, and Agentforce, PS&E unified its entire fan data ecosystem into a single golden record. The organization is now positioned to deliver hyper-personalized experiences across the Fever, Pacers, and all PS&E properties.

Impact

340,000+ fans

Home game attendance (Indiana Fever 2024 season)

40+

Countries represented in new fanbase

30+

Data sources unified

Up to 15 days

Negative survey follow-up lag (before)

More in 3 weeks than most NBA teams sell in a full season

Merchandise sales pace

Challenge

PS&E's fan data was fragmented across 30+ disconnected platforms, making it impossible to build unified fan profiles or deliver timely, personalized engagement across its growing global audience. Operational gaps meant negative fan feedback could go unaddressed for up to 15 days, and the same fan could appear as multiple separate individuals across different events and venues.

Solution

PS&E deployed Salesforce Data 360 — with Databricks as an aggregation layer — to unify fan data from 30+ sources into a single golden record per fan, then activated those profiles through Marketing Cloud for personalized outreach and Sales Cloud for conversion tracking, with Agentforce being implemented as the AI action layer on top.

Tools & Technologies

What Leaders Say

One of our biggest challenges is that we have data coming in from 30 different places — where you're buying your ticket, where you're buying food, where you're buying our retail. Collecting all of that data, marrying it together, cleaning it up, and then actually making it actionable is our greatest growth opportunity right now.

Mel Raines, CEO, PS&E

There are a lot of different sources that sit in our lakehouse, and Data 360 connects all of them to create a unified profile that is essentially the golden record of the customer. We've been putting all that information together to get to a place to actually understand the whole Customer-360 view. We're getting a way better picture now of who that one unique individual is.

Taylor Griffin, AVP, Customer Insights & Engagement, PS&E
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Full Story

Pacers Sports & Entertainment manages some of the most exciting properties in American sports and entertainment — including the Indiana Pacers NBA team, the Indiana Fever WNBA team, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse arena. The 2024 Fever season proved to be a watershed moment: record-breaking attendance, explosive merchandise sales, and a surge of new fans arriving from across the U.S. and more than 40 countries. But with that growth came a data challenge that threatened to undermine the organization's ability to capitalize on its momentum.

PS&E's fan data was scattered across more than 30 disconnected systems — ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster, point-of-sale tools like Square and Shopify, food and beverage systems, retail platforms, survey tools like Qualtrics, and chatbot providers. Without a unified view, the same fan attending a Fever game in June and a concert at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in September could appear as two entirely different people. This fragmentation made personalized outreach nearly impossible and created operational delays — including a lag of up to 15 days before the team could follow up on a negative post-game survey response.

To solve this, PS&E partnered with Salesforce and built a modern data infrastructure anchored by Data 360. Databricks serves as the aggregation layer, consolidating related data streams — such as merchandise purchases from Shopify and retailcloud, or food and beverage transactions from Appetize, Amazon Just Walk Out, and VenueNext — before feeding them into Data 360. The result is a single, unified fan profile, or "golden record," that captures every transactional, behavioral, and qualitative interaction across all PS&E brands. Marketing Cloud then activates these profiles through personalized email journeys, automated outreach, and mass communications like gameday offers and season ticket campaigns, with Sales Cloud dashboards tracking conversions and closing the loop between marketing and sales.

Looking ahead, PS&E is preparing to deploy Agentforce as the intelligent action layer on top of this unified data foundation. Agentforce will enable the organization to move from insight to real-time impact — automatically triggering personalized marketing actions based on each fan's unified profile. The goal is to build what PS&E describes as "the most valuable database in all of sports," enabling cross-brand loyalty programs and deeply personalized fan experiences at scale.

The transformation represents a fundamental shift in how PS&E operates — from reactive, siloed data management to a proactive, AI-powered engagement engine. With a rapidly expanding global fanbase and the infrastructure to understand and serve each fan as a unique individual, PS&E is positioning itself to lead the next era of sports and entertainment personalization.

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