Riddell sales reps lacked real-time access to pricing, delivery, and order status in the field.
Riddell and Saxon AI built RIA on Azure—using Fabric, Azure Data Lake, and Semantic Kernel—so reps can query SAP ECC inside Microsoft Teams with natural language.
With answers available on the spot, reps spend less time chasing data and more time building relationships with customers.
When you picture American football (the state-of-the-art helmets, shoulder pads, and players suited up on the sidelines), most of what you're visualizing was probably made by Riddell. For 96 years, the company has been synonymous with football player protection and performance. Riddell pioneered the plastic shell helmet in 1939 and has been credited with nearly every major innovation in football head protection since. Today, Riddell proudly designs and develops protective equipment for athletes at every level, from youth leagues to the NFL.
But the company's latest innovation isn't on the playing field. It's in the hands of its nearly 200-person sales team.
Sales representatives at Riddell approached leadership with three big problems. First, they were spending too much of their day on computers and not enough time with customers. Second, they couldn't provide relevant information to coaches on the spot because pricing, delivery dates, and order status all required calling back-office support or running reports. And, lastly, they had too many places to find the same information, which created what Aravind Kashyap, Chief Information Officer at Riddell, calls information overload.
"We had a choice," Kashyap says. "We could have added more sales support team members. That wouldn't have solved the problem.”
Instead, working with Microsoft and partner Saxon AI, a systems integrator specializing in enterprise AI solutions on Azure, Riddell created RIA: the Riddell Intelligent Assistant. RIA is an AI-powered sales assistant designed to bring critical information directly into the flow of a sale rep’s day. Built on Microsoft Azure using Azure Data Lake, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Semantic Kernel, RIA is accessible through Microsoft Teams and pulls real-time data from SAP ECC, Riddell's enterprise resource planning system, to deliver real-time insights through natural language queries. All of this makes information that once lived deep inside ERP systems instantly usable in the field.
The implementation followed what Kashyap calls a "day in the life" approach.
"We went to them, we looked at all the day-in-the-life," Kashyap explains. "I call a coach, I meet a coach, I create an order, I follow up on an order, I confirm the delivery, I do customer service. Fifty tasks that they do."
The team observed sales reps across different geographies, ranked those tasks by priority and time requirements, and then engineered solutions around the most critical data points.
Saxon AI developed the entire AI stack, from Teams integration to semantic kernel implementation, while Riddell's team handled data extraction and governance.
“We had a choice. We could have added more sales support team members. That wouldn't have solved the problem.”
Aravind Kashyap, Chief Information Officer, Riddell
The transformation happened quickly, taking just seven months from conception to rollout. Riddell deployed RIA in waves, starting with tech-savvy super users, then expanding through regional teams. The company invested heavily in change management, providing step-by-step training, collecting feedback through surveys, and even gathering video testimonials from early adopters to share with colleagues. This phased rollout helped ensure adoption wasn’t just fast, but meaningful and for the long game.
Sales reps using RIA report a fundamentally different experience. Standing on practice fields, they can now pull up delivery tracking instantly when coaches ask about orders.
RIA doesn't just answer questions; it provides context-aware insights. When a rep asks about helmet sales for a customer, RIA can provide this season's numbers alongside last season's, revealing growth opportunities. It can share what neighboring schools are buying. Pricing information that once required calls to multiple departments is available immediately. And RIA suggests next actions such as generating email drafts, creating promotional materials, or flagging payment issues. It even sends proactive "nudges" each morning, alerting reps to deliveries happening that day or pending invoices that need attention. Since rollout, adoption has been strong: 73% of sales reps now use RIA at least once or twice a week. Across the organization, the time saved adds up to more than 21,000 hours annually—hours that would have otherwise been spent searching systems or waiting for back-office support.
59% of reps report responding to customer questions faster, and more than a third now use RIA instead of contacting sales support. Early signals show that roughly 20% of reps are making one to five additional customer calls per day because of reclaimed time.
The impact goes beyond convenience.
"We want our sales organization to focus more on long-term relationship building and the ability to cross-sell and upsell," Kashyap says. "Can they sell other products and services that they have instead of all helmets, shoulder pads, and reconditioning? Can they look at smart helmet technologies like InSite Analytics’, uniforms and custom/stock apparel, or the tackling and training equipment, that we have?"
RIA's evolution continues. The team plans to integrate Outlook calendar access for proactive meeting briefs. Future versions will connect with additional enterprise applications, enabling RIA to generate pricing quotes directly in SAP Hybris, their commerce platform, or create custom designs in Riddell's art locker system. As Riddell migrates from ECC to SAP S/4HANA on Azure later this year, RIA will evolve alongside the platform, preserving continuity for sales teams while unlocking faster data access and more advanced automation.
Other departments are taking notice. Finance and R&D have approached Kashyap about creating their own intelligent assistants. For now, RIA remains focused on its original mission: giving sales teams time back and confidence to be present with customers, building lasting relationships with the coaches and organizations that trust Riddell to protect players at every level.
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