LBA, Infront, Microsoft Italia and Impresoft 4ward team up to change the way fans and media will experience sports data through AI
Lega Basket Serie A (LBA) and Infront, Official Advisor LBA, announce a strategic collaboration with Microsoft Italia and Impresoft 4ward and present LUCA, the new AI Agent that aims to transform the league’s vast statistical heritage into a continuous stream of insights and original content, enriching the experience of professionals and fans alike. The project — born within the Microsoft AI L.A.B. acceleration programme — leverages the latest frontiers of artificial intelligence to translate data into analysis for the benefit of basketball fans, who will have access to additional statistics, curiosities, comparisons, and hidden records as an integral part of the sporting experience.
Thanks to Agentic Artificial Intelligence, it will now be possible to have broader and more complete access to all the statistics and data relating to Italy’s top basketball league. LUCA suggests insights, identifies invisible patterns and brings new content to light. This is where technology makes the difference: the AI analyses thousands of matches simultaneously, observes every event in its context and over time, and is able to identify relationships between data in innovative ways.
The project will enable the creation of multifaceted content for distribution across the League’s various digital channels: pre- and post-match insights and curiosities, data-driven articles and storytelling, original social media content. A continuous editorial ecosystem that fuels dialogue with the audience, turning every basketball match into an inexhaustible source of material and resources.
“Our goal is simple: to offer fans exactly what they are looking for – and also what they don’t yet know they want to discover” declares Massimo Cortinovis, Head of Digital at LBA. “Statistics become stories, and stories become engagement.”
Thanks to Microsoft’s Agentic AI, the editorial production of Lega Basket Serie A will allow the distribution of an increasing number of personalised contents across its website, social media channels, and in the future also on LBATV and reserved channels, and — looking ahead — to create a premium offering for stakeholders and advanced users.
The goal is to improve interaction on platforms and engagement with basketball fans. Looking ahead, the vitality of the digital ecosystem could also translate into new monetisation and business opportunities for the League, fuelling a virtuous cycle for the development of basketball in Italy.
“This project represents a paradigm shift in the way we narrate sport,” states Stefano Deantoni, Marketing Director Infront Italy. “Lega Basket Serie A is the first partner to have genuinely believed in and concretely invested in this vision, bringing to life an idea developed by Infront and transforming it into a real and already operational project. Thanks to AI, we can amplify the value of statistics by turning them into engaging and continuous narratives, capable of strengthening the bond between fans and the competition. We are convinced that this model can be successfully adopted by other leagues and federations, both in Italy and abroad, offering an innovative and effective tool to evolve fan engagement.”
At the heart of LUCA’s “magic” lies an advanced computing architecture developed by Impresoft 4ward on Microsoft technologies, combining generative AI, specialised multi-agent systems, and self-monitoring and validation mechanisms. LUCA is not in fact a single agent, but a sum of AI agents that collaborate with each other: some identify the insights, some verify them, some transform them into narrative. This approach guarantees quality and reliability, making the AI not only more powerful but also more controlled.
In particular, LUCA was developed leveraging Microsoft Foundry, the integrated platform for the conception, creation and management of agents, which enabled the system to be trained, its first applications to be tested, and continuous monitoring to be enabled with important security guarantees. The models of Azure OpenAI were specifically exploited, primarily the most advanced gpt-5.1/5.2/5.3 models by virtue of the built-in reasoning capabilities. The data heritage of Lega Basket remains safe, thanks to the use of Microsoft technology, which guarantees that the data processed in input and output with the LLMs remains on Azure and within the organisation’s perimeter.
“The value of AI lies not only in its ability to generate content, but in the possibility of doing so with control, coherence and reliability,” explains Daniele Grandini, Chief Innovation Officer at Impresoft 4ward. “With LUCA we have created a system that connects data, specialised agents and continuous validation, transforming the league’s statistics into valuable insights and narratives.”
“This project makes us proud because it was born within our AI L.A.B. acceleration programme and represents a concrete example of how Microsoft platforms can enable new models of innovation and how our partner ecosystem can guide the digital transformation of Italian organisations,” adds Annamaria Bottero, Global Partner Solutions Lead at Microsoft Italia. “In sport, data is essential, but it is often not easily accessible; now thanks to AI it is possible not only to find correlations and insights but also to allow basketball fans to enjoy a richer sporting experience that keeps pace with the times.”
The project marks a decisive step in basketball’s evolution towards an increasingly data-driven model. The value lies not in the data itself, but in the ability to spark intuitions and develop stories and content, capable of offering fans a top-level sporting experience even after the final buzzer sounds.