How Vivid Seats is elevating customer experience for millions of fans with AI.

Live events are an emotional business. Fans don't buy tickets the way they buy most things online. With events, they're chasing a moment: A playoff game they'll remember forever. A concert they planned a milestone trip around. A show they promised their kid they'd make happen. The stakes feel personal because they are.

But the experience of getting to that moment — buying tickets online, tracking delivery across multiple systems, troubleshooting when something isn't quite right — can sometimes feel like the opposite of fun. For an industry built on the thrill of being there, the customer experience hasn't always matched.

Vivid Seats is changing that, using AI to further ensure every fan interaction is as exciting and effortless as the events themselves.

Turning anxiety into confidence

"A lot of times, the first time customers are using our platform is for something huge — like Harry Styles, BTS, or a playoff football game," says Janelle Pacheco, Director of Product at Vivid Seats. "It's a big emotional decision that fans are trusting us with."

In a live marketplace with buyers and sellers, hundreds of ticket sources, and constantly shifting inventory, even simple questions can feel overwhelming. Vivid Seats' AI agent, powered by Sierra, is designed to strengthen Vivid Seats’ award-winning customer service team and meet fans in that moment of uncertainty and turn it into confidence.

As part of its differentiated value proposition, Vivid Seats prides itself on delivering more value at every step of the customer journey, from offering a Lowest Price Guarantee and meaningful rewards through its Vivid Seats Rewards program, to creating a seamless, stress-free shopping experience.

"Great customer service is about creating trust, confidence, and excitement for our fans, where there's usually a lot of anxiety and hesitancy," says Katy Smith, Director of CX Agent Experience. "We want to remind them that this is a fun process."

The AI agent is deeply integrated into Vivid Seats' backend systems. It recognizes logged-in fans, pulls up their specific order details, and resolves the most common scenarios — locating tickets, explaining delivery timelines, walking through troubleshooting — instantly and personally, without a queue or redundant verification steps.

And it carries the brand's energy. Smith recalls a moment in the chat logs where a fan wrote in with a smiley face emoji and the agent mirrored it back. "I've never seen it do that," she says. "I just thought that was charming." She also noticed the agent developing what she calls good customer service instincts, defaulting to "let me check on that for you" rather than guessing at an answer. "We hadn't told it to say that. That was its instinct."

Results that compound

Vivid Seats went from kickoff to live in under four weeks. "Once we made our decision, we went 100% in," Pacheco says. "Product, customer experience, engineering — we were all hands on deck, heavy in testing. We all take this responsibility very seriously."

Since launch, containment has increased by 40% and customer satisfaction has risen by 35%. But the numbers only tell part of the story. With routine inquiries handled, Smith's CX team has shifted from working through queues to tackling root-cause fixes, process improvements, and fan-favorite programs like surprise ticket upgrades through the Vivid Seats Rewards program.

"We're able to think really big about what's possible," Smith says. "Things we would have said were pie-in-the-sky a couple of years ago. We're on the other side of that now."

Real-time data from AI-powered conversations is also reshaping the product itself. "If we're seeing people ask us 10,000 times a month about a specific feature, we're able to prioritize that at scale, quickly," Pacheco says. “The best moments are when a pattern leads to a change that eliminates the need for support entirely and a better experience before a fan ever opens a chat.”

The fan comes first

As Vivid Seats expands its AI capabilities, the team remains anchored to a simple principle.

"We are focused on innovation while being thoughtful about where we use emerging technology, making sure that at the end of the day, the fan is who we're serving," Pacheco says. "Making sure it's still a very personal, empathetic experience."

Live events are supposed to be fun. Now, every step of getting there is, too.