By Andy Marston, Sports Pundit
ChatGPT has been confirmed as a Premier Partner of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, a landmark moment that represents the platform’s first formal sponsorship of a sports league.
Sitting just below title sponsorship and carrying high-visibility broadcast, in-venue and digital assets, the BCCI has placed ChatGPT in its Premier Partner tier, a defined commercial category that includes on-air exposure, LED inventory, and premium digital placement across WPL broadcasts.
Industry reporting values the new partner slate (which also includes the addition of beverage brands Kingfisher and Bisleri) at £4.5m (₹48 crore), marking one of the WPL’s strongest commercial seasons yet and signalling growing confidence in women’s cricket’s commercial runway.
The WPL deal is the first time ChatGPT has taken a formal sponsor role within a sports property’s commercial structure. However, OpenAI has previously worked with sports teams, including a notable enterprise technology partnership with the San Antonio Spurs, centered on internal workflows and activations, rather than sponsorship rights.
The decision places ChatGPT inside one of India’s most dynamic fan ecosystems, leveraging a young, mobile-first audience that is rapidly adopting AI tools and engaging deeply with women’s cricket.
Why It Matters:
This is a smart entry point for ChatGPT into the world of sports sponsorship:
a women’s league on a steep upward trajectory, a fan demographic that mirrors the platform’s global user base, and an Indian market that is becoming one of the most competitive battlegrounds for AI adoption.
It also represents a notable shift in how AI companies think about brand building. Rather than relying solely on product marketing or enterprise partnerships, ChatGPT is now placing itself inside high-visibility cultural moments in a market where Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are all racing for mindshare. We saw earlier this year
Lewis Hamilton launch a partnership with Perplexity and yesterday they announced a partnership with Cristiano Ronaldo.
For the WPL, securing a global tech brand as prominent as ChatGPT strengthens the league’s positioning as one of the world’s most commercially significant women’s sports properties. And with India’s Women’s World Cup victory fresh in the collective memory, the timing is hard to ignore.
This feels like the start of a broader trend: AI companies using sports as a way to tell a more progressive, future-focused brand story in markets where the next generation of users is being shaped right now.
.png)
