Heracles Almelo is a professional football club with strong ties to its region and a broad organisation behind the first team. Alongside sporting performance, commercial strength, communication and the supporter experience play an ever larger role.
The challenge
Heracles Almelo wanted to use AI in a way that really helps employees in their daily work, and at the same time improves the service to supporters. The need was in several places:
- support for Marketing & Communication;
- strengthening the commercial department;
- faster and better information for supporters.
AI would eventually touch the whole organisation. Even so, the club chose to start small, without drastically changing the way it works.
The approach
Artific introduced AI step by step, with one principle: start small and add practical value. Working in phases left room to test and then scale up in a targeted way.
The first applications went to the departments with the most direct need:
- Marketing & Communication and Commercial work with the AI ToolBox: one central environment to write and rewrite copy, analyse and summarise information, and come up with ideas.
- Commercial also has an AI assistant as a digital colleague. It helps with preparing sales conversations, with customer strategy and with drafting proposals.
- Supporters get help from Sammy, the web assistant on heracles.nl. Sammy answers questions day and night about tickets, merchandise and the club, among other things. It handles frequently asked questions on its own.
By combining internal support with service to supporters, AI has become a practical, scalable part of the daily work at Heracles Almelo.
The result
Since the web assistant and the internal AI solutions went live, the impact is visible both inside and outside the club:
- Sammy handles more than 1,000 chats a month, across seven different topics;
- the most common questions are about tickets and opening hours;
- 55 employees actively use AI in their work;
- the commercial department uses it to produce more than 20 concrete sales proposals every month.
Supporters get answers faster, and employees spend less time on frequently asked questions. Less manual work, faster work and better availability, without the club having changed the way it works.
