Satisfi Labs Powers Smarter Fan Engagement With Conversational AI

Satisfi Labs is the developer of an agentic AI platform powering interactive, two-way engagements between organizations and their customers. It specializes in building AI agents for the sports, entertainment, and tourism industries. The company’s core offering is a platform that uses artificial intelligence and agentic systems to automate customer interactions through chat experiences.

Satisfi’s AI and agentic architecture processes conversational inputs with contextual awareness. It handles large sources of data  from multiple feeds and repositories to generate accurate, policy-aligned responses. Specialized agents are configured for domain expertise across guest experience, ticketing, on-site operations, safety, and merchandise. The system includes analytics dashboards that capture engagement metrics, intent categorization, and outcome data, enabling organizations to evaluate performance at both the agent and campaign levels. 

Satisfi Labs has worked with major sports leagues including MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, and MiLB. The company offers an optional live chat feature that allows conversations to be routed to human agents when needed. The system is also capable of integrating with external live chat providers, ticketing platforms, and third-party systems, or data feeds such as CRM and CMS providers.

The company, a member of the 2025 cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, also focuses on analytics and insight, tracking conversational metrics, customer intents, conversion, and engagement to help their clients optimize operations, improve guest experiences, and deepen relationships.

Satisfi Co-Founder Donny White recently sat down with Tripp Baltz, Head of Research for Boomtown Innovation, which powers Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech. 

TRIPP: 

Thanks for joining us today.

DONNY: 

Happy to do it. 

TRIPP: 

Why don’t you begin with the arc of your career?

DONNY: 

My parents really did their best by me, they each worked two jobs to get me through my education. I needed to work so I could take care of my own expenses including school and ended up applying for what I thought was a receptionist position my third year of college. 120 phone calls an hour for 4 hours, $10 per hour. It was this company I had actually never heard of called Bloomberg. And so when I walked in, they said, can you do this? It is a lot of information to retain and memorize.

I grew up in Brooklyn. My father was a pastor, my mother was a teacher. For $10 an hour, I would do anything.

Once I got in there they introduced me to these technologies like network routing and data APIs, and I just absorbed it very quickly. So by the time I graduated college, I was managing a tech support team. 

My career at Bloomberg, 15 years, was just fantastic. I went from operations to head of product, head of sales for one of their divisions. When you’re at a company that long, it’s like, well, what’s next?

I started interviewing at startups in 2013, and one specifically I really wanted to work at which became hugely successful. In one of the final interviews the founders said, well, we don’t know if you’re good or Bloomberg is good. I had just finished my MBA at Cornell, which I thought gave me an edge. So it was kind of a polarizing statement to be like, wow, so you work at this fantastic, dominant, great company, which Bloomberg was. But what about you? Maybe you’re just part of a machine.

A couple of months later, I happened to go to a book signing from a friend of mine, and I met this Irish startup that he knew. Things worked out, and a couple weeks later, I was VP of sales for them. They were a Salesforce portfolio company called Datahug, now part of SAP. They were doing some very cool stuff in relationship intelligence, which meant it measured the relationship between two people through calendar and email.

I did that for a while, and then they said, oh, we’re moving to San Francisco. I said, “Oh, I live in New York. I thought you guys were staying in New York.” And right after that, the original Satisfi investors reached out to me on Linkedin. I listened to them, since my employer was moving to San Francisco. 

It was something quite different when we originally came together, but Randy Newman (cofounder) and I really saw a huge whitespace in sports and adjacent industries around search engines for physical locations. The first product focused on F&B. From there teams really took control as advisors and wrote our roadmap for us. We added fan experience, ticketing commerce, and numerous integrations from the sportstech ecosystem.. To look back and see the evolution of where teams have pushed us to innovate and develop is just incredible.

TRIPP: 

That’s how you met Randy? 

DONNY: 

Yes. At that point, we were both hired under a different product offering than what we have now. A couple of months after we were hired, we decided to start a new thing – Satisfi Labs. 

TRIPP: 

How would you describe the elevator pitch for Satisif Labs? 

DONNY: 

Satisfi Labs delivers a managed, outcome-driven AI platform that deploys specialized agents built and tuned by industry experts to help live experience businesses sell more, service faster, and gain real-time insights from every guest conversation.

We’ve always believed that guest-facing businesses deserve AI that works like an actual staff member. It’s always been about roles and functions and capabilities. For the last nine years we’ve partnered with the biggest names in sports, entertainment and tourism.

Our sales, customer success and implementation teams  have worked in the industries we focus on so they know what fans are like, and they know how sports entities or brands need to deliver that kind of information. They know what success looks like.

It makes us unique to be a trusted partner, not just because of our technology, but because of our people. Then we bring in as many integrations as possible from ticketing, CRM, CMS and POS so that the agents can actually achieve the results our clients want.

TRIPP: 

What is the problem that you solve?

DONNY: 

What’s unique about sports, entertainment and tourism is that what’s most valued is a personalized experience that could never be achieved with staff alone.

If you think about a sporting event, first time I looked at a sporting event from this point of view, I said, well, what would be the most optimized experience for me to find all the things I need or buy, all the things I need or get all the advice that I need, it would be a person sitting next to me.

So the problem we wanted to solve was how could I create a synthetic person in your pocket that knew about everything that was around you, how close it was to you, what you might like or dislike and deliver it to you in a really easy and functional way.

Now a fan or a visitor to an event can get the same experience or the same access as if they had a personal employee of that brand with them at all times. That’s the problem we’re solving. The outcome is higher sales: They spend more at an event. So the staff of the event or team can spend more time on higher revenue opportunities and less time on any non-revenue generating activities. 

It saves money for our teams and drives money for them. You can save money and make money. It’s the perfect storm. Right?

TRIPP:

Terrific. Who are your customers? 

DONNY: 

Leagues, teams, and venues, especially in entertainment. Those are the majority of the customers. Our umbrella is destinations and experiences.

Anytime you’re going to a physical place, that’s a major target market for us, and you are standing somewhere and all around you are things you could buy or do. Now destinations and experiences have started to find other applications for AI in how they run their businesses. 

So now we’re not just deploying agents that talk to fans, we’re deploying agents that talk to or advise employees. That’s one of the trajectory opportunities for the business: inward and outward facing agents.

TRIPP

Good. And who are your competitors?

DONNY: 

In the current landscape, “a lot” and “none” is the short answer. If you ask someone you know how much AI they have in their life, it spans from perhaps a robot that’s cooking for them right now, to “I use ChatGPT for writing emails.” Conversational AI has become so democratized.

There are a lot of people who might have access to the elements of the technology that would potentially create something competitive with us. I would also say I have not seen anything close to the actual tech stack that we’ve built, or the outcomes that we focus on, from anyone big or small in the space.

Theoretically we have many competitors, but practically there is not a single one who’s as focused at what we do. 

TRIPP:

It seems like at the moment nobody is using agentic AI as robustly as you guys are. Is that the main emphasis now for Satisfi Labs? 

DONNY:

Great question. If you look at our marketing for the past X number of years, we always sold a role-based product which was typically what we call assistance – AI assistance. There’s a ticketing assistant, parking assistant, on site assistant, etc.

We have always believed in role-based AI, and we always believed that it would take a team for one of our customers to actually deploy the right AI staff. But an assistant is reactive. It responds to user inputs, it answers questions, it performs predefined tasks. 

Agentic is more autonomous and proactive. It can make decisions, pursue objectives, interact with external systems and it’s actually designed to achieve a goal. So I guess there’s a lot of  misunderstanding about agentic … 

A lot of the companies that would be perceived as competitors to us are, in fact, partners because there are technologies that they offer that combined with ours are very powerful, and because the use case is very focused.

So the Agentic platform that customers are getting previews for and testing today is about letting the agent have a broader goal-oriented plan reason act component, which sounds amazing until I tell you that you’ve just handed the wheel of this conversation over to the agent.

So we’re in this hybrid approach of well, how much control do you want?

The positive is we have the assistant structure in place so we can move over as quickly or slowly as you want. Some who run at the word agentic, don’t fully grasp what some of those things do.

TRIPP: 

Okay, let’s talk about why you applied to the SportsTech program. 

DONNY: 

We got an outreach email from Geoffrey (Cheng, Boomtown Investment Manager), and my first thought was, “I have no idea why they’d want to work with us.” So I asked him, “How did you find me?” 

And then I looked at the [program’s] web site, and I could see there were partners we knew and partners we didn’t know. So in my first call with Geoffrey I said I was interested in learning more, but I thought we might be too grown up for an accelerator. And he explained that this wasn’t an accelerator. 

DONNY: 

Then I met Ken [Durand, head of program operations], Chris [Traeger, executive director], and Jenna [head of SportsTech], and I said, listen, I’m here to pitch you just to be a part of this, because there’s something about this network that seems interesting, and there’s something that I could learn from this. 

Rarely have I been in a room where I felt like there was alignment of all the people. They brought in NBC Local as an observe, and then they did something quite unique. A lot of people pitch investment concepts or partnerships, and they’ll say, ‘We have this network of people and brilliant minds, and once we invest, you’ll get access to them.’

And then you guys did something really phenomenal. I was on the phone with the PGA during the pitch process. You didn’t say, ‘You’re going to have access to all these people.’ They were there in the moment. And you didn’t stop us from potentially communicating with them after the pitch. 

You brought the product to the stage really fast. So then I was really hoping we’d get in. It exceeded my expectations from the start.

TRIPP:

What would you say has been your favorite thing?

DONNY: 

The Atlanta-Philly weeks. You come in, and you get your sponsor. You come up with an idea, work on the idea, then present the idea. The whole structure was fun, and it balanced camaraderie with work. 

And then I was shocked the most at the follow-up. In my experience, a program like this is a season – like you’re part of the family, and we’re going to be here with you for these 12 weeks or 20 weeks. After that, call us if you need us. 

Not this program. I’ve been more than impressed that it’s a consistent, persistent relationship because you know, no deal gets done with a company like [those in the consortium] in just four months. That’s been the most rewarding thing. And I feel like I can reach out now forever.

TRIPP: 

What do you see coming in the sports tech space over the next 12 to 24 months?

DONNY: 

In the early days of the company, I had to convince someone that an AI employee or function was necessary. So when we started, we were first movers. We were the first ones to launch anything like this in the market.

Over the last two years, it’s been more about, “Just tell me all the places were AI can go?” What I’m excited about now is, the third stage, which is “How do I deploy AI in a key result methodology so that I know exactly what problem I’m going to solve and I have multiple ways to do it?”

The honeymoon of AI everywhere is starting to taper off a little bit. There was a recent article that said enterprises have invested billions in AI, without any results to measure. So I’m excited about the way we’ve structured our business and our tech: We’re outcome focused. 

That means for ticketing and for F and B and for these very sports/entertainment-related categories for fandom, for every one of our partners who has a fan at the core of what they do, we’re answering: How do you reach a fan? Monetize a fan’s interest? Deliver engagement to a fan? 

That’s what we do. SBJ once called us the OG of AI. So now we’re just having much deeper, calculated, tactical conversations. Whereas earlier it was either “I don’t know if I need AI” or “AI is everywhere.” Now were at, “OK, what does it do?”

TRIPP: 

What startups or brands really excite you with their work in the sports tech landscape?

DONNY:

I’m really excited about the work Perplexity is doing in the sports tech space. Their approach to web content retrieval has the potential to transform how fans consume information in real time, particularly in a browser-based experience. 

For us, it represents a powerful capability that will help our agents focus on driving transactions and conversions, aligned directly with objectives and key results. As Perplexity grows in popularity as a primary search tool, it’s clear they’re reshaping the way sports information is discovered and acted upon.