The 19th season of the Indian Premier League is colossal, amassing 515 million viewers in the opening weekend alone and a 26% year-over-year increase in watchtime. But between overs, curious ads are stealing the attention.
A rookie badminton player is unable to figure out how to properly grip a racquet. A diligent student is troubled by her noisy environment. Both take the help of Google Gemini to make their lives easier.
During the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, Jemimah Rodrigues and Ravi Shastri turned ambassadors for Google Gemini, using the AI app’s interactive features to help fans with cricket knowledge, insights, and engagement.
This is part of a larger trend playing out on our TV screens. AI companies are actively becoming sponsors of cricket tournaments, defining mega deals and booking ad slots.
AI Ads Strategy
In March, Google India and the Board of Control for Cricket in India partnered to name Google Search’s AI Mode an Official Premier Partner for IPL. The search giant has reportedly signed a three-year IPL deal till 2028, valued at around ₹270 crore.
The deal brings AI-powered insights into live IPL broadcasts and Google Search, giving viewers access to real-time analysis, tactical breakdowns, and historical comparisons. Fans can ask questions about ongoing matches, player strategies, and past performances, and receive contextual responses.
“AI companies have spent years telling people they exist. Now they need to prove what they can actually do, in real situations, under real pressure. Cricket is one of the few places that gives them that,” says Nikhil Bardia, Head of RISE Worldwide, a sports, lifestyle, and entertainment company, in a conversation with AIM.
He adds that cricket offers a massive, real-time audience hungry for stats, insights, and context to help them understand what’s happening on the field, making it a natural large-scale use case for AI.
Meanwhile, India is home to a growing and maturing digitally-native audience, with 700–750 million mobile users, according to BofA, making it opportune for AI companies to make inroads.
During the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, when Gemini was the tournament’s Official AI Fan Companion, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, a known cricket fan, appeared in the commentary box during India’s match against South Africa. He also met Indian batter Shubman Gill at Google’s Gurugram office during his India visit.
Like Google, OpenAI also saw an opportunity in a sport followed religiously in the country. ChatGPT tested the cricket ads field with a significant sponsorship with the Women’s Premier League for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, in a deal estimated at around ₹16 crore.
The WPL, though smaller than IPL, is one of the fastest-growing sports properties in India, with rising viewership and increasing brand interest each season. The season drew 37.1 million viewers for the eliminator and final matches, according to YouGov.
OpenAI created several ads featuring Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur using ChatGPT for everyday tasks like learning and communication. The idea is to position ChatGPT as something people can use in their daily lives, not just a tech product.
Why Cricket
Cricket remains India’s biggest cultural platform, watched by hundreds of millions. For AI companies, sponsoring the sport is not just about visibility, but about becoming part of everyday conversations at scale.
India is one of the fastest-growing AI markets. Sam Altman has said the country now has around 100 million weekly ChatGPT users.
Sponsoring cricket allows these companies to tap into this expanding user base, especially younger audiences. In the OpenAI case, the WPL sponsorship aligns with its broader push in India, including local presence and lower-cost offerings like ChatGPT Go.
Google, too, has been aggressive on pricing and distribution. It launched a low-cost AI Plus plan specifically for India to drive Gemini adoption among price-sensitive users. The plan is priced at ₹399 per month, with an introductory offer of ₹199 for the first six months.
Last year, Google also partnered with Reliance Jio, offering free access to its higher-tier AI Pro plan for up to 18 months, a package otherwise valued at over ₹35,000.
“Every major AI platform today is grappling with the same fundamental challenge of adoption and habit formation at scale,” says Abhishek Mukherjee, Chief Business Officer at The Media Ant, a marketplace for media options.
“These companies have invested enormously in building data centres, compute infrastructure, and bandwidth, but daily active users across most AI platforms remain in the low-to-mid range,” he adds.
As of December 2025, Gemini had approximately 105 million monthly active users in India. This represented over 30% of its global user base at the time.
Mukherjee asserts that IPL has emerged as one of India’s most effective platforms for advertisers. “The IPL is India’s most proven reach-and-frequency builder with an estimated reach of 700 million viewers and roughly 15% of that audience tuning in consistently across every match. No other media property in India comes close to that kind of sustained, repeated attention across such a vast and diverse demographic,” he adds.
He explains that when someone sees an AI brand repeatedly during their favourite cricket matches, they are more likely to search for it, try it, and recommend it.
“Cricket also offers diverse ad formats across three distinct screen types: linear television for broad reach, mobile for reach combined with performance and consideration, and Connected TV for premium, high-intent audiences,” Mukherjee comments, adding that this allows AI brands to tailor messaging across the full funnel within a single sponsorship investment.
The IPL winner is hard to predict. The AI winner? Probably the one you end up using between overs.
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