Riddell Unlocks SAP Data for Sales Reps with Saxon’s AIssist
Riddell's nearly 200-person sales team lacked real-time access to critical pricing, delivery, and order status information while in the field. Teams spent more time at desk, than meeting with customers.
Riddell partnered with Saxon AI to build RIA, an AI-powered sales assistant on Azure that gives field reps instant access to pricing, order status, delivery updates, and customer insights—right inside Microsoft Teams.
The result: less time chasing data, more time building customer relationships.
21,000+
hours saved
annually
20%
reps make 1-5 additional calls/day
59%
reps now respond
to customer questions faster
than ever
34%
reps now use RIA instead of sales support
73%
reps use RIA regularly at work
The Challenge
For 96 years, the company has been synonymous with football player protection and performance. But their latest innovation isn’t on the playing field. It’s in the hands of their sales team.
Riddell’s sales reps came to leadership with three persistent problems:
They were spending too much of their day on computers and not enough time with customers.
They couldn't answer coaches' questions on the spot — pricing, delivery dates, and order status all required calling back-office support or running reports.
They had too many places to find the same information, creating what Riddell's CIO Aravind Kashyap described as "information overload."
Aravind Kashyap, Chief Information Officer, Riddell
Our Solution: RIA - The Riddell Intelligent Assistant
Saxon AI designed and built the entire AI stack for RIA in collaboration with Microsoft and Riddell’s internal team.
Built on our AIssist platform using Azure Data Lake, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Semantic Kernel, RIA integrates directly with Microsoft Teams and pulls real-time data from Riddell’s SAP ECC enterprise resource planning system — delivering instant insights through natural language queries.
Our team developed everything from the Teams integration layer to the Semantic Kernel implementation. Riddell’s internal team handled data extraction and governance, while Microsoft provided the cloud and AI infrastructure backbone.
We approached the build using a “day in the life” methodology — observing sales reps across different geographies and mapping out the approximately 50 tasks they perform daily.
We then ranked those tasks by priority and time requirements, and engineered solutions around the most critical data touchpoints.
Aravind Kashyap, Chief Information Officer, Riddell
Implementation & Rollout
Beyond efficiency, RIA delivers context-aware intelligence. When a rep asks about helmet sales for a customer, RIA surfaces this season’s numbers alongside last season’s — revealing upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It shows what neighbouring schools are buying, provides immediate pricing visibility, suggests next actions like email drafts or promotional materials, and even sends proactive morning nudges alerting reps to deliveries or pending invoices
Aravind Kashyap captures the bigger ambition behind RIA well:
Extending SAP into the sales workflow
Riddell’s story also shows how AI can extend the value of SAP beyond the back office. With RIA, built by Saxon AI on Azure, sales reps can access real-time SAP ECC data such as pricing, order status, delivery updates, and invoice details through natural language in Microsoft Teams. Instead of making teams go back into ERP systems for routine answers, the solution brings SAP data into the flow of work, making it easier for sellers to respond quickly with the right context.
What's Next
RIA’s evolution continues. Upcoming enhancements include Outlook calendar integration for proactive meeting briefs, connections to additional enterprise applications, and the ability to generate pricing quotes in SAP Hybris or create custom designs in Riddell’s art locker system. As Riddell migrates from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA on Azure, RIA will evolve alongside the platform — preserving continuity while unlocking faster data access and more advanced automation.
Following the success with the sales team, Riddell’s Finance and R&D departments have already expressed interest in building their own intelligent assistants on the same framework.
(Originally published on Microsoft Customer Stories.)
