Working alongside Basketball Magic and the NBA, TheBird.AI delivered the partnerships, media, channel planning and digital implementation for the NBA Rising Stars Invitational, Australia Qualifiers 2026 — from sponsor sale to a live-broadcast Grand Final — in six weeks from contract.
Basketball Magic partnered with the NBA in March 2026 to bring the Rising Stars Invitational to Australia. With Basketball Magic and the NBA running the event itself, TheBird.AI took everything around it: partnerships and legal frameworks, the website, content strategy, paid media, channel planning and live-stream integration, plus post-event reporting. Six weeks from contract to opening tip, at the standard the NBA brand demands.
TheBird.AI engineered an agentic ecosystem with Claude at the centre and pointed it at every TheBird.AI lane at once. Claude Cowork ran knowledge work — drafting, reporting, analysis; Claude Code handled the build and deployment; and Model Context Protocol connectors wired the agents into the live toolstack, so the same intelligence that wrote a document could file it, publish the website or read a sponsor enquiry the moment it landed.
On partnerships, agents built the sponsorship package and sales materials, drafted proposals, and produced the legal scaffolding — a Content License Agreement with the NBA, the ESPN sublicence path and the Foot Locker structure — with a 61-row compliance matrix tracking every obligation. On digital, Claude Code built and deployed the tournament website on Netlify, with live fixtures, a game centre and a sponsor enquiry form. On delivery, the ecosystem handled channel planning and the digital integration of Double Take's live streams — ten court feeds and the ESPN on Disney+ Grand Final — plus the post-event content and reporting.
Basketball Magic and the NBA ran the event; Double Take produced the live stream. TheBird.AI's senior strategists set direction, owned the sponsor relationships and worked the NBA approval gates, while the agents did the volume — a small senior team with the throughput of a much larger one.
The Qualifiers ran to plan across three days: 14 teams, 30 games and a live-streamed Grand Final on ESPN on Disney+. On the media and digital side TheBird.AI owned, the website drew 19,608 pageviews, ten YouTube court streams added 4,416 views, social delivered 995,707 views, and a $6,000 paid burst returned 866,308 impressions in 72 hours. NBA approvals cleared and the full evidence trail was produced by the ecosystem rather than assembled by hand — partnerships, media and digital at NBA standard, in six weeks.
The public site at nbarisingstarsqualifiers.com.au was designed, built, deployed and managed end to end by Claude Code, hosted on Netlify with continuous deploy. Live fixtures, a game centre, a partners showcase and a sponsor expression-of-interest form whose submissions flowed straight back to the team, all stood up inside the six-week window.
The tools, selected for the brief and orchestrated through our custom AI pipeline and workflow orchestration layer.