How Intel is helping IOC with AI innovations, fan engagement and long-term planning

iSportConnect’s Taruka Srivastav spoke with Todd Harple, Olympics AI Innovation Program Lead for Intel Lab to discuss Intel’s partnership with the Olympics, highlighting their commitment to AI innovation and gender parity. Todd explained the complexity of the Olympics ecosystem and Intel’s development of systems to count people in and out of venues, predict their future locations, and help the IOC with long-term planning.

Tell us about your role with Intel.

I am the Olympics AI innovation program lead. I’ve led a lot of our path finding and road mapping for our Olympic Games, with Olympic sponsorship at Intel, which began in 2017 so it’s been really great to see the whole pathway of things develop from POC to being out there in the real world as scalable products.

What does this partnership entail?

When we signed this partnership, we signed on across a number of different marketing categories. Chief among them is processing and AI, which are certainly the two things near and dear to the heart of what we do at Intel. And this year, we’ve got a number we’re bringing AI everywhere. We did a great job at the recently concluded Paris Olympics and will continue the momentum for till the Paralympics.

We have applications that are helping fans, helping athletes and helping the organizers. And it’s been really exciting to see how these come to life, and some of them, they’ve started out as proofs of concept all the way back as far as our first games in Pyeongchang and now our mature scaling products out there in the real world with our partners. One of the ones that is pretty exciting and high profile here at the games that we really are proud of, is called AI platform experience, and it’s pretty exciting. So this is something that’s based in part on technology we developed called 3D athlete tracking. And basically we developed models to use computer vision to identify elite athletic form. And the first time we showed this to the public was in Tokyo.

If you recall watching the sprints, you saw runners with color streams behind them that would change with acceleration and top speed and that made it to the broadcast. And then this year, we actually went along with the International Olympic Committee to Senegal, where we helped the host the Dakar 2026, Youth Olympic Committee, to identify talent for the future. And we did this through our 3D athlete tracking combined with different sorts of exercises that show athletic competency. And for the games, we brought that experience of trying out different forms of athletic performance and assessing athletic talent at the game so among the fans, so the fans can come through, they can try out different things that use our AI to tell them which Olympic sport they be best at.

What are the frequent challenges which you face and how have you been able to overcome those?

The Olympics ecosystem is quite complicated. Understanding the interplay between the International Olympic Committee, the International Federations, the athletes themselves, the National organizing committees, it’s a complicated matrices of sort of overlaps where you need to understand how they all work in order to navigate how you’re going to deploy something. We’ve been working closely with the International Olympic Committee on operational things. So for instance, when you have a venue that is being used in a way that’s not its normal use, you have significantly more people, and it’s used by larger entourages that follow the athletes and so forth, their families, their coaches. You need to understand how to use space. And so this was always a pain point for the IOC to try to figure out, how do I right size the amount of space I’m giving for press or the amount of space I’m giving for the athletes and their entourages within venues. So we developed systems that can actually count people as they come in and out. Nothing personal about it in terms of understanding who it is. We just need to know how many people are coming in and out, where are they congregating, and for how long? And then we can apply models to predict where they’ll be in the future, which helps the IOC for long term planning and helps future organizing committees to know, “Hey, this was the right size for a summer games. This was the right size for our winter games?”

We’ve navigated that and help them build the tools to have more accurate representation. So that’s one example. And then, for instance, on the athletes side, the athletes come to these games, it’s a lifetime of work that leads up to this, and they need to be focused on their performance. But at the same time, this is like a great opportunity for them to try to meet people, have a good time understand what is being on offer to them from their top partners, maybe special rules for the games. And until now, they had to rely on a Chef de Mission, their person, from their team, to navigate all these things. But in cooperation with the IOC, we actually built a chatbot for the athletes alone, so it’s not open to the wide public, and it’s only open to athletes. They can go in there and use six different languages, ask it questions, and it will tell them, “Can I take photographs at opening ceremony? Can I post to social media?” And this consolidates all this information, which used to be 10 points of contact into one.

Is the Olympics/Paralympics the ultimate platform to show off technology?

The Olympics really sets the bar. When we talk about the Summer Games, we’re talking anywhere from 11 to 15,000 athletes, and this year, over 11,000 hours of footage are captured. It’s so much, so many sports, and at this platform, it’s provided an opportunity to show so many different things, even sort of democratizing access, both on the broadcast side and on the athlete side to AI, and the tools that help people enjoy the games more has been a lot of fun. So for instance, when we watch the replays, when we watch highlights of our favorite athletes, it turns out, in the past, you had to rely on whichever broadcaster owned the rights for your area and what they were willing to give you. But now we’ve developed an AI system that actually helps to both turn around results faster for replays. So for instance, almost in near real time, we could ask the system, show me every three point basketball shot by the Nigerian team. And sure enough, we can get it right away, and we can also do this for more obscure sports as well as for smaller nations. So now even smaller nations get the highlights of their heroes at home better than we ever have in the past due to AI technology

What is the kind of team you have, or stakeholders you have which are helping you deliver this technology?

In this environment, it’s always teamwork. We work through the whole gamut of partners, both within the Olympic ecosystem whether we’re working with the Olympic Broadcast Service (OBS) to deliver those highlights with the IOC to deliver the insights at the games, but also an extended network of startups and partners and so forth that all fold into the bigger Olympic brand for the games, but after the games, it ends up creating scalable activity, scalable results and solutions for our ecosystem. We make, sort of the recipes here at the Olympic Games of different technology solutions, we try them out, and when they’re successful, our partners roll them out more broadly. So it’s always teamwork. And even for us at Intel, we work across our entire company to deliver solutions different business units and so forth. It even brings us together better as a team.

Paris Olympics/Paralympics are the first games to boast of gender parity. What does this mean for Intel?

We are super proud to be aligned not just with the IOC but the UN in pushing for gender parity, representation, acceptance and peace. These are things that the Olympic Movement stands for. And it is an honor to be part of it, and be at the center of it, to stand tall and say, “Hey, look, this is equal representation. We’ve never seen this before at the games.” This is really exciting and just being in that environment; I know it makes our Intel employees proud as well.