AI amps up the Grammys for music fans

For nearly a decade, the Recording Academy has been working with IBM to redefine its digital future and create a smarter business, capable of driving innovation with efficiency and agility. The collaboration has yielded a steady stream of innovative solutions designed to attract, engage, and entertain music fans before, during, and after the Grammy Awards each year.

For the 2026 Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy asked IBM to develop a feature that takes advantage of its vast reserves of music data; decades of information about the art, craft, and industry of music. They were looking for a way to make that data accessible to music fans around the world. To do it, the team harnessed the power of IBM watsonx Orchestrate® to build agentic workflows and AI assistants, capable of instantly transforming Recording Academy data into more than 2,500 questions, clues, and explanations found in the GRAMMY IQ trivia game.

“There is so much value in that Recording Academy data,” says Monica Ellingson, Partner and Practice Lead for IBM Consulting. “We just needed to develop a creative way to mine that value and serve it up to fans in the most entertaining way possible.”

GRAMMY IQ is accessible on every page on Grammy.com, and capable of engaging millions of music lovers. An AI assistant serves as the interface, guiding participants through the game with simple, intuitive natural language prompts. Behind the scenes, AI agents coordinate the dynamic creation of questions and clues from multiple sources of data. And the Recording Academy editorial team has a custom-built dashboard to easily approve and manage content. Participants can play two rounds a day, track their progress on a global leaderboard, and share their results on social media. As a bonus, every registered user is automatically entered into a sweepstakes to win tickets to the 2027 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Inspired by the GRAMMY IQ solution, the Recording Academy also asked IBM to explore ways in which AI could leverage the same data sets to help music lovers identify connections and relationships across a variety of artists and genres, all while discovering new music that aligns with their preferences and tastes.

The result? Musical Crossroads, an interactive digital exhibit at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Music fans can use a touchscreen to see influences, identify sonic similarities between artists, and reveal unexpected pathways from one sound to another. Using generative AI models built and trained on watsonx, Musical Crossroads instantly produces a bespoke narrative, explaining the relationships and suggesting other artists that might be of interest. For the music lover, the benefit is a deeper understanding of the art form and the discovery of new tracks. For the Grammy Museum, Musical Crossroads is a unique way to honor the history of music and stoke the passions of music fans.

To better serve its members, the Recording Academy faced a different challenge. Four years ago, the Academy recognized a need to better engage its members over digital channels. They began the process of migrating their legacy CRM database to the cloud-based Salesforce platform. But the team quickly realized they needed help optimizing their use of the Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud platforms as part of their broader digital transformation.

“We wanted to improve the member experience and make our communications with them more efficient and meaningful,” says Kelley Purcell, Senior Vice President at the Recording Academy. “The team at IBM Consulting is helping us use Salesforce to do just that, really unlocking the full potential of the platform to simplify and personalize the experience.”

IBM Consulting worked with the Recording Academy to develop a roadmap focused on specific digital journeys for a variety of members, such as nominations, ticketing, voting and membership renewals. IBM Consulting used the IBM Garage® methodology to define the user journeys and develop customized, easy-to-follow digital experiences.

Since then, the Recording Academy has continued to advance its Salesforce capabilities in service of members. IBM helped transform the Recording Academy’s multi-member experience by redesigning the data model, site architecture, and audience framework to support future growth and expansion. They created a redesigned member portal that can be translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic in 20 percent of the time it previously took. Additionally, they modernized their marketing operations by connecting Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud, streamlining audience segmentation for greater speed, consistency and scale.

The primary benefits of GRAMMY IQ built with IBM watsonx and Grammy Crossroads are delivered directly to music fans, who can now engage and learn from Recording Academy data in unique and entertaining ways. For the Recording Academy, these innovations allow them to efficiently produce content at scale and foster deeper connections with music fans. All of which helps the Recording Academy fulfill its mission to ensure music remains an indelible part of our culture.

For Recording Academy members, the Salesforce customizations built by IBM offer an improved, personalized digital experience for members and greater visibility into that membership for the Academy. It has made ticketing 80% more efficient and reduced the time it takes to complete some maintenance tasks by as much as 70%. In addition, the solution even expanded their engagement capabilities to the Grammy app, extending marketing beyond email to reach members in more immediate, mobile first moments.

“The Recording Academy is undergoing a transformation, and technology is a big part of that transformation. That’s why IBM, our official AI, Cloud and Consulting partner, is helping us to modernize and map out our digital future.”

The Recording Academy represents the voices of performers, songwriters, producers, engineers, and all music professionals. Dedicated to ensuring the recording arts remain a thriving part of our shared cultural heritage, the Academy honors music’s history while investing in its future through the Grammy Museum®, advocates on behalf of music creators, supports music people in times of need through MusiCares®, and celebrates artistic excellence through the Grammy Awards— music’s only peer-recognized accolade and highest achievement. As the world’s leading society of music professionals, the Academy works year-round to foster a more inspiring world for creators.