In Houston, VIP hospitality packages for the 2026 World Cup already stretch to eye-popping prices for pitch-side lounges and ultra-premium clubs. The sports hospitality market overall is on a trajectory to reach tens of billions of dollars globally, fueled by corporate hosting, luxury suites and “money-can’t-quite-buy” access at mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics.
And yet, for many guests, “VIP” still means a parking pass, a shorter line and a lanyard.
Jennifer Brisman thinks that definition is obsolete.
Brisman is the founder and CEO of Vow, an AI-driven operating system for the live experience economy. She’s produced more than $60 million in live event contracts over two decades, working across everything from high-end galas to NBC’s Saturday Night Live and PFL MMA. She describes herself as “nutty about live” and talks about “the smell of sweat, the rise of the crowd, the handshakes, the heartstrings, the hugs.”
Her central thesis: the industry has been thinking about VIPs far too narrowly, and about data far too transactionally.
The Same Person In Every Seat
Brisman starts with a simple but powerful idea:
The same person who’s a butt in a seat at a stadium is also a butt in a seat at South by Southwest, maybe Cannes, a trade show, a summit, an opening night on Broadway. It’s the same profile everywhere they go.
Today, most of the software around live events—especially in sports—clusters into four buckets: ticketing, fan engagement, analytics and event management. Each tends to see the guest through a narrow lens: a ticket buyer, a loyalty ID, a CRM contact, a badge.
Vow’s bet is that the real value lies in the macro view: recognizing that these are the same humans moving through multiple high-emotion moments across brands, venues and cities.
Brisman describes Vow as a B2B-to-VIP platform. On one side are organizers and stakeholders—teams, leagues, sponsors, agencies, hospitality providers, travel and lodging partners. On the other side are guests, attendees, fans, players and participants. Vow’s software sits between them as a “brain” that unifies data, workflows, communications, seating and guest coordination across private, invite-driven experiences, rather than open consumer marketplaces.
Every butt in a seat, she reminds me, is top-line revenue. But almost nobody treats that person’s behavior across events as a compounding asset.
AI On Offense, Not Just Defense
Most of the AI conversation in sports and entertainment has focused on defense: cost savings, automation and operational efficiency. There is real value there. But the next decade’s strategic advantage will go to brands that use AI on offense to engineer delight and loyalty at scale.
When I asked Brisman how she sees AI shaping emotional connection, she pushed back on the premise. Events are already emotional, she said. AI isn’t going to create the emotion. It’s going to be predictive.
In her view, AI’s job is to:
– Understand behavior across multiple events
– Predict needs and desires in real time
– Serve the right offer at the right moment, when emotion is highest
That might mean proactively arranging hotel and dining for a guest who has attended multiple sponsor events around a tentpole like the Super Bowl. Or understanding that a VIP who brings kids to MMA events may value family-friendly upgrades at a tennis tournament or NBA game.
Crucially, Brisman believes the industry must move beyond what she calls cannibalizing people’s data through endless outbound marketing. She expects the major gatekeepers—email providers and browsers—to keep tightening what reaches consumers’ inboxes.
Instead, she believes personalization will increasingly happen in the moment. Think streaming models where two fans watching the same game see completely different commercial breaks. Stadiums and live events, she argues, will mirror that logic—using in-venue tech, apps and screens to deliver hyper-relevant offers and services while the emotion is peaking, not in a follow-up email the next day.
When VIP Still Means Parking, A Gate And A Lanyard
Right now, Brisman thinks most of the industry’s VIP efforts are still in version one.
Looking at how major events sell hospitality, she sees a familiar pattern: better seats, a separate gate, open bar, a hotel bundle. The pricing has advanced faster than the experience design.
Corporate buyers and high-net-worth individuals pay a premium for suites, clubs, private lounges and bundled travel. Those offerings are growing fast, but in many cases the experience layer has not caught up with the expectations of guests who live on frictionless digital platforms in their daily lives.
For guests moving between multiple events in a compressed window—Super Bowl week, a multi-day festival or an Olympic cluster—the complexity often shows up as a steady stream of emails, PDFs, QR codes and instructions that force them to spend more time staring at their phones and less time in the moment.
Brisman’s description of a frequent VIP is familiar: go to five events and you might get 25 or 30 emails. You are constantly digging in your inbox for which gate, where to pick up your lanyard, who your contact is. Going to one event is easy. Going to eight can feel like work.
Vow’s goal is to orchestrate that entire journey in one place, with logic that anticipates needs and reduces friction rather than adding to it.
The Real Innovation Sandbox: Private Live Experiences
It is tempting to focus on the biggest public stages—the Super Bowl, World Cup, Olympics, Final Four. But Brisman believes the most interesting work in the next few years will be in private, invitation-only live experiences built around those tentpoles.
Those might be sponsor-hosted concerts, investor summits, VIP dinners, off-site showcases or team-hosted hospitality spaces adjacent to the main event. Vow is already powering experiences for properties like Saturday Night Live and PFL MMA, helping manage seating, corporate partners, fighters’ families and other stakeholders as a unified ecosystem rather than a series of disconnected guest lists.
Because these are curated groups—hundreds to low-tens-of-thousands of people—the bar for personalization is higher and the data signal is clearer. It is also where corporate sponsors can most clearly connect hospitality spend to relationship outcomes and, ultimately, revenue.
Brisman’s five-year vision is simple: whether a person is in an NBA suite, at an opening night premiere or in a VIP area at a fight night, at the end of the rainbow they are still the same person. The opportunity is to recognize them as that person across contexts, and to use AI to be predictive rather than repetitive.
2026 Will Look Familiar. 2028 May Not.
When I asked what she expects in 2026, as Italy hosts the Winter Games and North America gears up for the World Cup, her answer was conservative.
She predicts that 2026 will look a lot like 2025. Most organizers will still be figuring it out. Hospitality will continue to emphasize better seats, skip-the-line access and bundled hotels.
The more structural changes—the ones that truly give events a “brain”—may take until later in the decade to show up at scale. By the time Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Games, she expects broader use of AI and real-time data to solve very human problems: minimizing bathroom and concession lines, orchestrating flows so guests look up instead of down at their phones, and designing experiences that consciously bring kids and families into the live-event habit early.
She also worries aloud about over-reliance on betting as a growth engine and hopes it does not undermine trust in the broader ecosystem.
Betting On The Brain Behind The Experience
Vow recently closed a seed round led by KB Partners, a Chicago-based sports and media investor, with participation from Capitalize VC and others. It is a modest-sized seed by some standards, but a meaningful one in today’s funding climate and in a category where many traditional ticketing players flatten out at modest scale.
There is no shortage of companies chasing slices of the live events stack—ticketing, resale, fan engagement, analytics, CRM, streaming, betting. But as Brisman points out, tickets themselves are increasingly a commodity. The durable value lies in the relationship around the ticket: the context, the coordination and the cumulative story of where a guest has been and where they might want to go next.
If the last decade was about getting butts in seats, the next one may be about what happens before, after and between those moments. The brands that win will not just have a better suite or a pricier lounge. They will have a smarter brain behind the experience—and partners who know how to use it on offense, not just defense.