TheBird.AI engineered an AI-driven ecosystem that carried the NBA Rising Stars Invitational, Australia Qualifiers 2026 — from sponsor sale and NBA approvals through to a live-broadcast Grand Final — in six weeks from contract.
Basketball Magic signed the NBA Promoter Agreement on 26 March 2026. That left six weeks to stand up an NBA-sanctioned high school tournament end to end: school invitations, sponsor acquisition, legal approvals, a public website, broadcast and streaming, court production, referees, NBA sign-offs and a full post-event reporting suite. The standard the NBA brand demands is unforgiving, and the window was a fraction of a normal event build. The brief, in effect, was to produce the output of a full agency and operations team, at NBA quality, in the time most projects spend on a kickoff.
TheBird.AI engineered an agentic ecosystem with Claude at the centre, then pointed it at every lane of the project at once. Claude Cowork ran as the operating layer for knowledge work: drafting, reporting, analysis and coordination. Claude Code handled the technical build and deployment. Model Context Protocol connectors wired the agents directly into the live toolstack, so the same intelligence that wrote a document could also file it, update the job ledger, publish the website or read a sponsor enquiry the moment it landed.
Each workstream got its own agentic workflow. On partnerships, agents built the tiered sponsorship package and sales materials, mapped the target list, drafted proposals, and produced the legal scaffolding: a Content License Agreement with the NBA, the ESPN sublicence path, and a Foot Locker structure built across an event sponsorship and a separate first-right-of-refusal deed. A single compliance matrix of 61 rows across 11 workstreams tracked every Promoter Agreement and Content License obligation in one place. On build and digital, Claude Code created and deployed the tournament website on Netlify, with live fixtures, a game centre and a sponsor expression-of-interest form whose submissions flowed straight back to the team. On delivery, the ecosystem coordinated ten concurrent court live streams, the ESPN on Disney+ Grand Final feed, and the post-event content and data pipelines, generating reports, decks and analytics on demand.
Humans stayed in the loop where it counted. Senior strategists set direction, owned the client and sponsor relationships, and held every NBA approval gate. The agents did the volume: the drafting, the data processing, the matrix-keeping, the file mirroring across SharePoint, the build and the reporting. Files were managed and mirrored so the desktop working set and the SharePoint system of record stayed aligned, and time was tracked against the job ledger in WorkflowMax. The result was a small senior team operating with the throughput of a much larger one.
The Qualifiers ran to plan across all three days: 14 teams, 30 games, and a live-streamed Grand Final on ESPN on Disney+, with roughly 24,000 digital audience touchpoints from a standing start. The website drew 19,608 pageviews, ten free 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. The broadcast partner endorsed the feed, the NBA approvals were cleared, and the full evidence trail — from the compliance matrix to the post-event master report — was produced by the ecosystem rather than assembled by hand. A six-week build, delivered at NBA standard, by a team that was mostly agents.
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 COLLIDE-AI pipeline.