By Andy Marston, Sports Pundit
The International Cricket Council (ICC) successfully introduced ICC Insights during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, an AI-powered fan engagement tool designed to make the game more accessible, intuitive and interactive for a global audience.
The platform allowed fans to ask questions about matches, players and tournament scenarios, receiving instant responses powered by real-time data and delivered through an AI avatar trained on the voice of renowned commentator Harsha Bhogle.
Fans could explore how a key innings shaped a result, assess the impact of a bowling spell, or understand the significance of a captain’s decision at the toss, all through clear, contextual explanations delivered in real time.
ICC Insights integrated live match data, historical player information and tournament permutations, enabling users to analyse individual performances and track wider competition scenarios. It answered more than 400,000 fan queries, achieving a 75% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
Notably, the second-highest volume of queries related to Associate Nations, highlighting growing engagement across emerging markets.
Post-match, fans could “Ask Harsha What Really Happened”, a voice-led feature that delivered deeper analysis in an authentic voice. This achieved a 72% CSAT, with around 15% of users engaging in multi-turn conversations for more detailed insight.
ICC Insights formed part of a wider push to deliver the most globally accessible ICC event to date. The ICC achieved that through a series of initiatives, including broadcasting in a variety of new languages, live-streaming the final on China’s Douyin social media platform, expanded global coverage on ICC.tv, global Fan Parks and more, all designed to reach a worldwide audience on their terms.
More broadly, it reflects the ICC’s ambition to evolve how fans experience cricket. Not just how they watch it, but how they understand and connect with it worldwide.
Why It Matters
Cricket is one of the most followed sports in the world, but it is also one of the most complex. Formats, qualification permutations, net run rates, and tactical nuances create a depth that lifelong fans enjoy but which can be difficult for newer audiences to navigate.
On the surface, ICC Insights looks like a solution to that problem but reading it purely as a fan engagement tool misses the more significant point here…
The greatest insight the ICC likely gained from this beta sits in the data architecture behind it. Essentially, whether their information could be structured cleanly enough and made accessible enough to power a conversational interface in the first place.
That question has implications far beyond offering a digital feature at a single tournament.
As tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity become the default way fans discover and interrogate sports information, the nature of digital authority is shifting.
It is no longer enough to publish accurate content and rank well in search. The new question is whether your data becomes the canonical answer when someone asks an AI about your sport.
Rights holders who structure their information well will shape what those systems return. And those who don’t will find their own competitions explained through someone else’s interpretation (a dynamic which turns data infrastructure into a strategic asset, rather than a purely technical function).
There is also a deeper question sitting beneath this about what owned platforms are actually for.
General-purpose AI models will increasingly outperform any sports organisation on breadth of information. Competing on depth alone will be difficult. The opportunity instead lies in offering something structurally unavailable elsewhere: authorised athlete personalities, licensed voices, and direct access to the people and moments fans care about.
The engagement data reinforces this as a meaningful portion of fans appear to be choosing to go deeper than basic answers, seeking explanation, narrative, and perspective.
In that context, the reason a fan comes to an ICC platform cannot simply be to find out what happened. It has to be to experience it in a way that no external model can replicate.
ICC Insights (however early-stage) points toward that future.
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