Professional sports have never commanded a bigger stage—team valuations keep climbing, fan loyalty runs deep, and revenue across the industry is growing at its fastest pace yet. Bilt, the online rewards platform, now wants a night out at the ballpark to be about more than what happens inside the stadium.

On Tuesday, the company announced the expansion of what it calls a “neighborhood operating system,” a framework that lets sports teams and local businesses connect with fans through personalized rewards, loyalty programs, and artificial intelligence, according to a press release.

The move marks another step in Bilt's effort to grow beyond its origins as a rent-rewards platform and become an operating system for local commerce. Under the model, neighborhood restaurants and small businesses would use Bilt's platform to pair with professional sports teams and pull in local traffic through personalized rewards. It is the same playbook Bilt built on rent: capture spending fans are already doing and turn it into loyalty value. Bilt has already lined up partnerships with a string of professional franchises, including the Phoenix Mercury, Phoenix Suns, Houston Comets, Houston Rockets, Houston Texans, Sacramento Kings, and Chicago Bears. The roster spans the NBA, WNBA, and NFL, concentrated in four markets: Phoenix, Houston, Sacramento, and Chicago.

“We think of it as expanding game day into the neighborhood,” Bilt founder and CEO Ankur Jain told Fortune. Under the system, he said, teams could offer fans restaurant reservations before games, transportation to stadiums, and watch parties at nearby businesses, alongside exclusive discounts and other benefits.

Sponsors are being brought into the arrangement as well. Jain described a setup with Constellation Brands, the company behind Corona, in which fans enrolled in a team's loyalty program would receive a complimentary round of the beer at a local bar if their team wins. The sponsor funds the offer directly through Bilt and the bar's point-of-sale system, Jain explained, without gaining access to individual customers' private information.

A market built on fandom

In the modern era, professional sports have stretched well beyond television screens and become a source of community, with fans gathering at sports bars, stadium tailgates, and other shared rituals. Roughly 74% of Americans watch live sports, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence's 2026 Consumer Insights survey conducted in July. Among those fans, 53% watch the NFL or college football, 36% watch baseball or basketball, and 20% watch hockey.

That large fanbase translates into commercial opportunity well beyond ticket sales. Teams have built new ways to monetize their audiences through merchandise, sponsorships, memberships, and experiences that extend past game day. The global sports market generated an estimated $463 billion in revenue in 2024 and is projected to reach $610 billion by 2028, according to a 2024 study from investment bank Houlihan Lokey. Sports-related travel alone generated $111.2 billion in direct spending in the U.S. in 2025, as 339 million people traveled to attend sporting events, according to the Sports Events and Tourism Association's 2026 State of the Industry Report.

Deloitte's 2026 Global Sports Industry Outlook identified AI and changing ownership models as major forces converging with sports, media, and entertainment—an industry the firm described as “inclusive of leagues, teams, federations, mega-events, media partners, investors, and more.” The report also highlighted the growing importance of sports venues as year-round commercial destinations.

“AI has outgrown its role as a trick play,” the report read. “For many sports organizations, it's becoming a whole new game plan. Moving into 2026 and beyond, sports organizations looking to compete shouldn't ignore AI.”

Bilt's expansion lands squarely in that current: the report's venue-as-destination thesis, scaled down to the blocks around an arena, is essentially what the company is pitching to its franchise partners.

Putting AI to work for small businesses

The rollout carries consequences for small businesses as well, according to Bilt. Jain said AI is an integral part of making the system work, especially for operators that struggle to manage multiple software platforms.

Bilt's “Neighborhood OS” sits at the center of the new setup, rewarding users for visiting local businesses, while an AI-powered platform helps those businesses attract customers, build loyalty, and grow without replacing their existing systems. The company says the platform is “designed to unlock” a $6.6 trillion opportunity in “local commerce,” noting that roughly $6.6 trillion in annual U.S. retail and food-services spending occurs in person.

Bilt's AI Agents have completed more than 2 million real-world actions across more than 29,000 businesses, with 91% completed without human intervention over the past 30 days, according to the company. As one example, Jain described a restaurant using Bilt's system to recognize returning customers, identify previous orders, present special offers, and fold its existing software into a single app.

“To me, the way a lot of these technology companies are looking at AI, they're all talking about digitizing everything and taking away jobs and living online,” Jain said. “But our belief is that the biggest beneficiaries of it will be small businesses who can now use AI to help them run their fragmented business.”

Under the announced partnerships, Phoenix, Houston, Sacramento, and Chicago—the home markets of the seven franchises—are where win-triggered offers, pregame reservations, and watch parties would reach fans first.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.