Expanded market presence to 1.6M sports fans in Brazil
Exchanged more than 120K chat messages
Lifted World Cup conversations per fan 2.2x month over month
Improved throughput 17% with Priority PayGo
Machina Sports uses Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to deliver live-sports experiences for 1.6 million fans
Machina Sports uses Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to deliver live-sports experiences for 1.6 million fans
Connecting fans to live sports with Gemini
When a soccer fan pulls out a phone during a World Cup match to check live match predictions or instant player news, every second counts. Delivering instant, accurate data turns fans from passive viewers into active participants. Machina Sports built its platform around this vision, using AI to let fans interact directly with live games as they unfold.
To create a fluid chat assistant for a leading sport media platform in Brazil, Machina Sports wanted to go far beyond simple chatbots that only answer basic questions like "What's the score?" or "Who scored the goal?" This intelligent agent would connect live events, real-time statistics, odds and game history to provide immediate, actionable insights. The combination of trusted facts and personal engagement would boost overall fan participation and confidence.
Achieving this level of real-time interaction during fast-paced, constantly changing events like the World Cup meant solving complex data and latency challenges. For the chat assistant to feel synchronous with live broadcasts, its architecture had to process match events instantly without losing context or sacrificing accuracy.
True fan engagement requires more than just raw scores: it's about connecting stats, news, and social sentiment in real time. We chose Google Cloud as our foundation to organize and verify this diverse, shifting context so our models stay accurate.
André Antonelli
Founder and CEO, Machina Sports
Machina Sports selected Gemini for its combination of response speed, perceived intelligence, and access to Grounding with Google Search. In Machina’s benchmarks, Gemini Flash models delivered first responses faster than competing commercial models while maintaining comparable perceived intelligence. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform also gave the team one interface for accessing Gemini and evaluating supported partner models.
"During a live match, a few milliseconds make all the difference in keeping fans engaged," notes André Antonelli, Founder and CEO of Machina Sports. "Gemini models were over 30% faster in delivering that first response compared to competing options, with no trade-off in intelligence. Having all of Google's models accessible through one platform meant we could deploy our entire multimodal pipeline without stitching together disparate tools."
Scaling for World Cup traffic surges with Gemini models and Priority PayGo
Machina Sports created SportingBOT for its Brazilian sports media partner using Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The technology turns complex fan questions into immediate action. For example, if a fan asks, "What is the win probability if the home team scores next?", Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite processes the request in milliseconds. Using Gemini’s Structured Outputs, the platform dynamically renders interactive statistics directly inside the chat window rather than plan text.
Model Garden on Google Cloud gives us more flexibility to respond to changing business needs. Swapping models takes minutes to help us always ensure the best performance. We can adapt instantly to changing needs without adding to engineering overhead.
Mateus Pinheiro
Platform Engineering Lead, Machina Sports
Machina Sports added Grounding with Google Search to keep responses fresh and accurate. If a fan asks minutes before kickoff whether a star midfielder is starting, the bot automatically scans live web sources to incorporate real-time news, such as a warmup injury update.
"One of the greatest benefits of the Google Cloud ecosystem is the single, unified integration," comments Antonelli. "Whether we are leveraging Gemini for live chat, Grounding with Google Search for fresh updates, or generating images for match previews, we can easily call diverse models through one interface without stitching together multiple vendors."
To handle World Cup traffic spikes without connection drops or performance lag, the engineering team used Priority PayGo on Google Cloud. The service reserves high-speed server capacity on demand, ensuring responses stay instant and reliable when usage peaks.
Additionally, Model Garden on Google Cloud allows engineers to test and swap out AI models by changing simple settings instead of rewriting code from scratch. Meanwhile, Gemini's Context Caching prevents the AI from re-processing long background prompts on every reply, keeping operational workloads and running costs low.
Driving business growth and creating interactive sports features
Since January, SportingBOT has reached 1.6 million sports fans and exchanged more than 120,000 chat messages. During the World Cup, conversations per fan increased 2.2 times compared with the prior month.
To support high fan concurrency without sacrificing performance, Gemini Flash Lite delivered answers over 30% faster than alternative industry models while Priority Pay-As-You-Go endpoints shaved up to 17% off response wait times. At the same time, Gemini’s Context Caching prevented the AI from re-reading background instructions on every turn.
"For long match-day chats, context window costs can escalate quickly," explains Antonelli. "Context Caching cut our processing workload per chat from over 66,000 tokens down to just 144, keeping our running costs low while preserving context."
During the World Cup, Google Cloud powered more than 50,000 chats. Our 13% widget click rate proved that when AI delivers answers directly, fans get the exact information they need. The customer saw fan participation double and revenue increase.
Rodrigo Albert
Product Lead, Machina Sports
Providing smart, relevant answers right in the chat drove clear business results. In-chat widgets achieved a 13% click rate, more than double the rate of standard app banners. The result showed how interactive answers can help fans move from passive consumption to deeper engagement with live matches.
Looking ahead, Machina Sports is expanding its platform on Google Cloud. Using Google Kubernetes Engine, the company is building custom open models alongside Gemini. Future features include personalized AI audio commentary tailored to fantasy rosters and interactive "what if" match simulations that let fans explore alternate game scenarios in real time.
Machina Sports is an AI agent platform for sports: teams, media entertainment providers, and broadcasters use it to build and run sports-native AI agents grounded in live sports data through SDK and published APIs.
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Location: United States
Products: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Grounding with Google Search, Priority PayGo, Model Garden, Cloud Storage
