NASCAR's live race apps show fans car positions, pit-stop details and driver radio, and keeping them correct used to mean people ticking through a long list of settings across a race weekend. AI tools, and software written with their help, now do about nine in ten of those jobs. They were put to work through NASCAR's partner Next League, a sports tech company, and keeping the feeds running is now closer to a part-time job than the full-time one it was.
The work that went away was remembering
If one setting was missed, the driver audio that premium subscribers pay for stayed silent and fans were disappointed. Nobody's skill was in that task. It was memory and attention, repeated every race, and costly when it failed. That is the kind of work AI takes first: many small steps, the same each time, with a penalty for skipping one.
The second change is quieter. When the upkeep is cheap, a team can build a working version of an idea quickly and show it to people, instead of arguing over a slide. One idea NASCAR has floated is a recorded pit-stop conversation that appears right after a car suddenly gets faster, and that is the kind of feature you only judge by seeing it.
The line between machine work and human work
For the first Cup Series race in Mexico, in June 2025, AI turned the English radio broadcast into a Spanish audio feed. The sound was fine, and some listeners probably never knew. NASCAR still expects to hire a Spanish-speaking broadcaster next time.
My read is that this is the useful test for any job. Where the customer only cares that the result is right, such as a data feed, the machine takes it. Where the customer cares who is speaking, such as a voice they want to trust, the person stays, even when the machine is good enough.
What it looks like in an ordinary business
Picture an online shop where one person spends about 15 hours a week updating prices, banners, stock counts and customer emails for each sale, across three systems. If nine in ten of those steps run by themselves, that person gets back close to two working days a week. The shop gains nothing from that unless someone decides what to do with the days: which sale to run, for which customers, with what message.
The bank branches show why that is where the money is. Cash machines made each branch cheaper to run, so banks opened more branches and needed more tellers in total. The machine only took part of the job. When mobile banking later replaced the trip to the branch altogether, teller numbers finally fell.
So the useful question for any team that runs something live is what it would add if keeping it running took a tenth of the effort. NASCAR's candidates are better fantasy products and audio highlights tied to what happens on track. The shop's answer, and a hospital group's, will be different, but each team has to have one.