How the Bulls Rebuilt Their Digital Approach with Squid AI
Like many pro sports teams, the Chicago Bulls initially relied on an outside vendor to power their mobile app. That approach ensured a stable product for fans, but it left the Bulls’ digital team with little flexibility to make updates themselves.
“The main frustration from our team is that we had limited control,” says Bryson Alef, Director of Digital Product. “Even minor tweaks or reported issues could take three months to fix.”
From a fan perspective, the app worked well. But behind the scenes, the Bulls team saw much more potential for better fan experiences that they couldn’t easily realize. New features often had to be added in clunky ways, like embedding them as web views instead of building them directly into the app, which limited flexibility and slowed experimentation.
Moving From Vendor to In-House
The Bulls had long wanted to build and manage their own app, but the idea felt out of reach.
“We would not have been able to move to our own in-house application without Squid,” Alef explains. “We’re resource and bandwidth constrained, and setting up the infrastructure ourselves would have required more people, more time, and more budget than we had.”
By using Squid AI, the Bulls avoided the need to hire a full DevOps team or stand up middleware from scratch. Instead, they could focus on building features for fans while Squid handled infrastructure, integrations, and deployment.
“Really what Squid did was it just gave us control back over our mobile application,” Alef says.
From Limitations to Agility
Once Squid AI was in place, the Bulls’ were able to hire a lean product team of two developers and a UX designer so they could finally move at their own pace.
“We definitely couldn’t have built all this without Squid,” Alef says. “Things that previously took three months now take two weeks.”
When the new app launched, the team kept fan-facing changes minimal to ensure stability. “We embraced a do-no-harm mindset,” Alef notes. “Functionality was similar at first, but now we can build new features, align design with our own language, and release updates faster.”
New Capabilities for Fans
With more direct control, the Bulls can deliver new experiences that pull data from multiple systems and bring it into a single view.
“One of the most significant upcoming features is a season ticket holder portal,” Alef explains. “That’s a major new surface we’ve built, and Squid AI enables us to do that. We can take data from a lot of different sources and aggregate it into one experience.”
Why Squid AI Was the Right Choice
Alef says the decision ultimately came down to platform capability and engineering strength.
“The main reason we went with you was because of the platform… there isn’t anything else that’s comparable,” he says. “We needed uptime, extensibility, the ability to write our own code, make our own decisions around integrations, and access developer-friendly tools and documentation.”
Knowing the Squid AI engineering team included people with backgrounds at companies like Google and Meta also gave him confidence.
Thoughtful AI Integration
The Bulls are exploring ways to use AI that stay behind the scenes rather than relying on public-facing chatbots.
“Most people tack AI onto a site as a chatbot… We’re looking at use cases where we can use it selectively, like putting it behind an API, and having it return structured output,” Alef says. “You get the benefit without the risk of it saying something you wouldn’t want.”
Early ideas include improving username validation and enabling natural language search for the team’s schedule page.
Advice for Other NBA Teams
“For sports teams interested in owning more of their fan experiences, I’d recommend Squid AI,” Alef says. “It makes it easier to integrate and build at your own speed.”
For the Bulls, moving to Squid AI wasn’t about one dramatic change. It was about regaining control over their fan experience, moving faster, and laying the foundation for a more connected future.