{"id":294517,"date":"2026-02-21T03:41:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T03:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294517\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T03:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T03:41:12","slug":"official-chelsea-agree-short-term-front-of-shirt-sponsorship-with-industrial-ai-provider-ifs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294517\/","title":{"rendered":"Official: Chelsea agree short-term front-of-shirt sponsorship with Industrial AI provider IFS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">AI is all the rage these days \u2014 everything with even just a hint of a generative algorithm being hailed as the next biggest productivity booster \u2014 so it\u2019s perhaps no surprise that Chelsea have found an AI company willing to splurge some cash and become our front-of-shirt sponsor, at least for the rest of the season.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">The club have announced a multi-year official partnership with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ifs.com\/en\/about\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">IFS<\/a>, \u201cthe world\u2019s leading provider of Industrial AI\u201d, where \u201cIndustrial AI\u201d is actually a catch-all trademarked term by IFS, which itself stands for the incredibly generic \u201cIndustrial and Financial Systems\u201d. The only reason we\u2019re sure that name wasn\u2019t AI-generated is because this Swedish company was in business well before the AI bubble was even a twinkle in the stock market\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">If you want to read big words with generic promises, I encourage you to check out the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chelseafc.com\/en\/news\/article\/chelsea-football-club-selects-ifs-as-principal-partner\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Chelsea\u2019s official announcement<\/a>. My eyes glazed over in paragraph two. We\u2019re now positioned at the \u201cforefront of football\u2019s technological evolution\u201d, don\u2019t you know!? \u201cBy harnessing the power of IFS AI to connect people, assets and intelligence in real time, the club is sharpening our competitive edge on the pitch while elevating the experience for millions of fans worldwide.\u201d Ugh.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">The funny part is that this only solves the front-of-shirt sponsorship conundrum for the next few months. The partnership with IFS may be for many years (it\u2019s not specified for how long), but their name will appear on the front of the shirt only for the rest of the season \u2014 similar to deals with Infinite Athlete and DAMAC the last couple years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI is all the rage these days \u2014 everything with even just a hint of a generative algorithm&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,162615,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-294517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chelsea-fc-finances","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}