Key results
Result highlights
- Six-figure annual savings on external agencies
- 50+ custom GPTs in active daily use
The story
A Bundesliga football club with nearly three decades of continuous top-tier presence, managing men's, women's, and academy teams alongside a complex commercial ecosystem.
Repetitive tasks like drafting, translation, and documentation created bottlenecks, while high reliance on external agencies for routine work drove up costs. Critical domain knowledge remained siloed with individual specialists, making it difficult to scale operations without increasing headcount.
The organization deployed ChatGPT Enterprise to productize repeatable workflows into over 50 custom GPTs, covering tasks from turf disease analysis to automated invoicing. Teams assigned human names to these assistants to reduce psychological barriers and integrated them across marketing, HR, and strategy departments. A network of internal champions supports the rollout to ensure governance and consistent usage standards.
Quotes
“In football, tradition is an important value. Change isn’t always easy. But innovation is part of our DNA—and we couldn’t just keep adding people while the workload kept growing.”
“ChatGPT only creates sustainable advantages if it’s understandable and usable for everyone—not just experts.”
“We didn’t start with strategy decks—we started with learning what works, together with the people doing the work.”
The company
VfL Wolfsburg
vfl-wolfsburg.deProfessional German football club competing in the Bundesliga.
Scope & timeline
- AI access for ~350 employees