From Fandom to Checkout: Artificial Intelligence and Immersive Commerce in Professional Sport

Abstract

Background: Professional sport clubs are adopting three-dimensional stores, augmented reality, conversational agents, personalization, gamification, and digitally co-present fan communities, while the evidence needed to evaluate these investments remains dispersed across research domains. Purpose: This review explains how immersive and AI-enabled interfaces may generate commercial and relational value in professional sport. Method: A theory-building integrative review synthesizes an 80-source corpus across electronic commerce, immersive technology, AI-enabled service, consumer psychology, and sport management. Source roles and author-developed propositions are distinguished. Findings: The reviewed studies support particular experiential and relational mechanisms, but do not validate an integrated professional-club commerce chain. The Immersive Sport Commerce Conversion Framework proposes a functional route from fan experience to access and transaction outcomes and a relational route through identification, belonging, authenticity, trust, and psychological ownership to relationship and community outcomes. Responsible data exchange is assessed across these outcome domains. Usability, AI accuracy, privacy, accessibility, autonomy, and novelty condition the proposed pathways. Contribution: The framework integrates mechanisms examined across different research domanin, specifies eight testable propositions, and distinguishes governance as a trust pathway, a moderator, and a boundary on implementation.