Kate Clark had a solid piece in The Wall Street Journal this week about investors looking beyond the obvious winners of the AI boom. More of my fellow venture investors are putting capital into sport, travel, physical products and other parts of what Serena Ventures calls the “experience economy”. The reasoning is that, as AI becomes capable of doing more of what previously required human labour, businesses built around experiences that technology can improve but cannot replace begin to look different.
It is an argument that feels very familiar to me here at NJF. For some time, our Human Code (our “North Star”) has been based on the belief that technological progress and human value don’t have to compete. We’re interested in what technology makes possible, but also in what people continue to value as technology becomes more powerful.
Sport is one place where we can already see this happening.
The phrase “AI-proof” is useful, but I wouldn’t interpret it as meaning that sport can somehow sit outside the technological changes taking place around it. AI will change sport. It is already changing production, distribution, audience analysis and the economics of reaching fans. For smaller competitions in particular, these tools could make it possible to reach audiences that were simply too expensive or difficult to serve through traditional broadcasting.
This we have seen quite clearly ourselves. Through Gameday, our sports and media platform led by Kike Levy, we have been working on exactly this problem. One lesson from our work in women’s sport is that the underlying product often wasn’t the issue. The athletes were there, the competition was good, and there was an audience with the potential to become much larger. What was missing was often the media and commercial infrastructure connecting them.
Technology can improve that infrastructure enormously. It doesn’t need to change the reason people wanted to watch in the first place.
Kate’s article points to several characteristics attracting investors to established sports franchises, including scarcity, durable fan bases and valuable media rights. It also looks at investment in newer competitions such as the Professional Fighters League, Pro Padel League, Snow League and League One Volleyball.
For me, this is the more interesting question. A sporting event doesn’t have to involve entities as enormous as the Los Angeles Lakers or Liverpool Football Club to possess something genuinely difficult to replicate. A volleyball final also happens only once. Nobody knows the result beforehand. The players perform under real pressure, and the audience experiences the uncertainty with them.
There’s an authenticity to that which becomes interesting in an economy increasingly capable of generating convincing substitutes for other forms of content. AI can do an enormous amount around the event. It can help analyse a match, translate commentary, identify interesting moments and distribute content to people who might never previously have encountered the competition.
But the value begins with something that actually happened.
One comment in Kate’s piece particularly resonated with me. Beth Ferreira of Serena Ventures describes looking for businesses where technology can personalise and optimise an experience without replacing the experience itself. That is very close to how we think about technology at NJF.
The Human Code isn’t about protecting people from technological change. We invest in technology because we believe in its capacity to solve difficult problems and create new possibilities. But we also think investors need to understand where the underlying value comes from.
In sport, technology can make something fundamentally human more accessible. That principle has informed how we think about Gameday, CayoTV and LVF. Better tools can help competitions find audiences outside their traditional geography, allow rights holders to produce much more content and support commercial models around sports that conventional broadcasting struggled to serve.
Women’s sport is a really good example. For years, there was a gap between the quality of many competitions and the media attention they received. Better distribution is now helping to close it. The important point is that tech didn’t have to invent the sport or manufacture the emotion around it. It helped more people find something that was already there.
There is a wider investment question behind all of this. Digital economics rewarded scale, and AI is pushing that much further. Information, analysis, images, video and other digital output can now be produced in quantities that would have been impossible even a few years ago. The cost will continue to fall and the quality will continue to improve.
Against that backdrop, real experiences start to look interesting in a different way. A live match still happens at a particular moment. A restaurant has a finite number of tables. Travel still involves physically going somewhere. Live entertainment still depends on people deciding that being there matters.
None of these sectors will be untouched by AI. They shouldn’t be. Technology can improve how people discover, buy, share and experience them. But it doesn’t follow that technology becomes the source of their value.
That distinction matters to us because it sits very close to the thinking behind the Human Code. The question isn’t where we can hide from AI. It is where AI can create more value while leaving intact the human reason the product, service or experience mattered in the first place.
Sport gives us a particularly clear example. We can use far better technology to find the fan, reach the fan and understand the fan. We still need a real game for them to care about.
As AI makes more things abundant, investors may find themselves paying closer attention to what remains genuinely scarce.
Nicole Junkermann is an international entrepreneur and investor and the founder of NJF Holdings. Through NJF Capital and the wider NJF Holdings investment platform, she has invested in technology businesses across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthtech and other areas of emerging technology. Her Human Code framework explores how technological progress can strengthen human capability, resilience and agency.