AI on the pitch at The World Cup

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1:23Think of it as the brain and the nerves of how FIFA run the World Cup. Because they can't have any downtime. Can you imagine if you are in the middle of a match and suddenly the broadcast feed cuts out, right? Or the replay system doesn't work, right? We can't have that. And so we have a lot of unsung heroes delivering that both to the fans in the stadium as well as online. Our partnership with FIFA is about helping bring the right technology into the game. Lenovo are not referees. We don't make the rules. So it's not like an AI referee that's going to take over making these decisions. FIFA have been very clear they want this to be an augmentation.

2:07The star is not the system. The star is not the replay. The star is the competition on the pitch and what the players are doing. R2 is the chief information officer of Lenovo. You might know Lenovo as the world's largest PC manufacturer. Well, this summer, they are the official technology partner of the 2026 Men's World Cup. And Art and his team are responsible for deploying AI during live games inside the stadiums and to enhance the fan experience. To do that, Lenovo is working very closely with all 48 teams, all 16 cities hosting games across three countries, and the media companies that are bringing the World Cup to an estimated 6 billion viewers.

2:51Lenovo is basically defining a moment in history that will separate pre-AI sporting events and post-AI sporting events at an international scale. And I have so many questions. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:18Hi, Art. Nice to be connected. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Rana. Pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. Okay. So before we start, are we going to call this soccer or football? I think we need to agree on terminology here. Yeah. I struggle with this because I grew up in the US and so I used to call it soccer, but it's weird. I call it football now because I've walked into the FIFA headquarters enough times where calling it soccer just feels weird. So I'm off to football. Okay, maybe we'll go with football. And if we slip, that'll be okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I grew up in Egypt, and I have the fondest memories of our family kind of huddling around in the living room and watching the Egyptian team play.

3:58We weren't very good. But it's the country team. You have to root for them. It's the country team, totally. And my most vivid memories are of all like my dad and my uncles like yelling at the TV and all the women like sitting and like praying, like there was a lot of praying. How about you? Did you grow up watching a lot of football? Well, I grew up watching the American football, but I think it's always been on the radar. And since in the last few years, as Lenovo has worked with FIFA, I've gotten to have a much deeper appreciation for the game and all aspects of that, right? Including the beauty of the competition on the pitch, but now a much deeper knowledge of what it takes to actually pull off one of these events.

4:37Yeah. So this is the largest World Cup ever, right? And as we're recording this conversation just a week or so before it launches, how are you feeling? Yeah, so excited and terrified at the same time. We're T-minus six days from the opening match. We are locked and loaded on making the preparations so that we can make it as smooth as possible. How will you be watching the games and who are you backing? Yes. Well, I did mention I grew up in the U.S. And so just as if you grew up in Egypt, you're going to root for the home team. I'll be doing the same. I will actually be doing most of the watching from the other side.

5:17And this is because Lenovo as the technology partner, we are with FIFA a lot behind the scenes. And so my team are the ones who help deliver everything behind the curtain. So around the broadcast center, in the stadiums, in headquarters. So I'll have a unique vantage point heading into this World Cup. What is different about this World Cup specifically in terms of how AI is going to impact everything at the stadium, in the field, for fans that are watching live or at home? Like, can you just kind of bring it to life for us? So we've got more than 17 ,000 Lenovo and Motorola devices. We've got more than 200 engineers who are behind the scenes.

6:02For example, we've got ThinkSystem servers at their international broadcast center. I was at the kickoff, President Infantino and the Dallas mayor and the city council to see that kickoff. And so there we're feeding thousands of screens. We're working on their IPTV latency so that it can be much more real time at all the sites that are relevant for them. We have also got a command center in Miami, which is the tournament operations as well as the technical command center, which are, think of it as the brain and the nerves of how FIFA run the World Cup because they can't have any downtime. Can you imagine if you are in the middle of a match and suddenly the broadcast feed cuts out or the replay system doesn't work?

6:47We can't have that. And so all of the preparation and the discipline, we have a lot of unsung heroes who are going to be behind the scenes end to end to provide them what they need as they are moving the production of the match and delivering that both to the fans in the stadium as well as online. Yeah. How did Lenovo get involved in this? Yeah, so this one actually goes back to some discussions several years ago. Lenovo is a very different company than we were 10 years ago. People often remember us as, oh, we sell wonderful laptops, ThinkPads, and those are world famous. And we have so much more now.

7:26And so we are a full pocket cloud. We have Motorola Mobility. We have servers. We have storage. We have services that are managed and as well as professional services. So we do all of the things that you need for an enterprise to run. And so we were thinking, how do we get our story out there? And we really hit upon FIFA. And there was a high resonance of, wow, they really are literally the world's biggest stage, closest you'll get to an event where everyone's eyes in the world are on them. And then as we started discussions with them, we found that there was a real shared ambition. When you walk into the Zurich headquarters, they have football unites the world.

8:04And they really mean it. Of course, it's around the World Cup, but they have youth leagues, they're always scouting, they have member federations from all the countries around the world that they're trying to support and promote soccer. They are highly ambitious about that mission. And a huge part of that is using technology to improve access, to improve the quality of competition and make that available to more and more people. And the high resonance with Lenovo is we want to have smarter AI for all, right? So we also have an ambition to bring AI to all parts of the world. And as we got into that, we saw that it would really be interesting because they were very interested in using technology to advance the level of play.

8:44That matches very well with Lenovo's wanting to apply AI and the latest technologies to the cutting edge. Because I think once you find that common ground, the rest follows very easily. And then you can start to ideate and you can talk about what are some of the possibilities. And so we found a lot of interesting shared ground that we could work on. And that really formed the basis of the partnership. It's not just a sponsorship, right? This is actually about deeply integrating and partnering with FIFA in all aspects of what they think of as the football family. So in prep for this interview, I reached out to Bebo, my brother-in-law.

9:18He lives in Cairo, and he is a super diehard soccer, you know, football fan. He's actually part of a group called the Football Freaks. And they watch all, you know, all the games together, and they kind of ideate and ponvocate. And so he was so excited that you and I were having this conversation, and he kind of shared all the things that they're wondering about. I would love for you to like step back and tell us where are all the different places where AI will show up this year at the World Cup. And then we can unpack each of them separately. But let's start high level. Yeah, absolutely. I try to give the bird's eye view and then we can pick which ones to go into.

9:57One of the things that we are doing is actually around 3D avatars where we will be. And right now, literally as we speak in the run up to the opening match, we are in the process of scanning each and every one of the 1 ,248 players who will be participating on the official roster. And that's really interesting because it has multiple uses. On one hand, it's going to be something that feeds the officiating and analytic systems so that we can support the referees with better data than they've ever had to make their calls. And what I mean by that is, if you think about the video assistant referee, the VAR, and the semi-automated offsides, that historically, when you see it on the screen, it has kind of a generic avatar of a player, relative to the offside line and how that's going in a play.

10:49But that has limited accuracy because it's a generic avatar. With the scans, we're going to be able to provide data for the officiating and analytic systems that are true to the actual person. as scanned. So things like what size uniform do they wear? What is their boot size, right? And how will that show up? So that increased level of accuracy will really help that part of the system. The other aspect is it's actually a better experience for fans, right? So you can actually be able to see. And there is a replay or when the system comes on and is used to see that additional accuracy and level of realism.

11:31So that's one example. Another one of the things that's very important is something we've built with FIFA called the FIFA AI Pro. It's built on Lenovo's AI factory. But the point of it is think about having elite match analytics and having elite access to the best coaching can offer because FIFA are the football experts. We're bringing that football expertise and knowledge and training a model that's going to be available and is already available for all 48 teams who are participating. This really democratizes access to elite coaching, right? And it really raises the floor and provides the ability of every team who's participating, regardless of budgeting or resource or how many coaches and assistants that you have on a team to get access to more than 2000 metrics for every match.

12:21So cool. And it does really interesting stuff. It really is access to coaching and that can be match strategies, that can be tactics, it can be 3D visualizations, it can be simulation. And so that one was really exciting to build because it's not just functionality, it's actually fundamentally different in terms of providing capability that we think democratizes access to elite analytics and AI-driven coaching. And that's exciting ultimately because the better that the teams have access to this, then hopefully we have better matches. And that's really what's exciting. That's what we're here for.

12:57I'll pick one more. As a technologist, I like doing things that are first. Some sports have kind of an action view, but you can think of it as, right, it's relatively fixed camera view, right? But when you put a camera on a referee, they might be looking at the sky, they might be looking at fans, they might be looking at the ball, maybe they've tripped over something and they're on the ground with the players, right? And so the ability to stabilize that and provide a better sense of what it's actually like on the ground. It's going to be so immersive and we're doing it in a way that is going to be available for broadcast in real time.

13:29So exciting. Okay. So let's take each of these one by one and to kind of dig in a little deeper. The first one is around the AI refereeing and the officiating. So VAR, the video assisted reviews has been around since I think it was 2010 when it was first introduced or - Yeah, it's been more than a decade. Yes, it is. VAR by itself is not new. Yeah. Is AI going to change this process this time around? So I want to be very clear. Our partnership with FIFA is about helping bring the right technology into the game. Lenovo are not referees. We don't make the rules. The original video assistant referee, it didn't replace anything, right?

14:08But it was an enhancement that provided more context and more ability for the referees to do their jobs as laid out by the rules. And I think the latest enhancements in terms of having the 3D avatars follows in that lineage. We are not looking to, and by no means, are we changing the rules or are the referees doing anything different because of the technology itself? But it's really much more of AI as an augmentation of their intelligence, that they can have more fidelity, that they can have more granularity, that they have the additional context so that they can make the most accurate call and the most fair call as described by the rules.

14:47Yeah. OK, so it's not like an AI referee that's going to take over making these decisions. FIFA have been very mindful of that, right? I think I can't speak on their behalf, but they've always been very clear. They want this to be an augmentation to the capabilities that they do have. And the reason they do that is then we want the fans' attention to be on the competition, right? The star is not the system, right? The star is not the replay. The star is the competition on the pitch and what the players are doing. Yeah, this is actually something we talk a lot about on this podcast. a lot of my kind of perspective on AI is that it should augment human abilities and not replace what we do or replace us as humans.

15:28So I really do appreciate the approach where the AI is a tool that augments the decision-making of the experts who have been doing this forever and they know what to look for. It's just helping them do it in a better way. Yeah, I think the passion is really fun to watch, right? Because there is nothing that can replace that. making sure we continue to have the human element at the heart of that, including the referee, but making sure that they're at the pinnacle of what they can do, right, is really, I think, our North Star. Yeah. That's another thing that's come up a lot on the show, this idea of cognitive offloading, right?

16:05Like, so the more you offload to AI to make a decision on your behalf, the less capable you are of making that decision yourself. Is that something you guys have thought about? Yeah, definitely. So I think both as a technologist and also with FIFA, I think they're very mindful, right? I would make a slight amendment to your statement, which is if you are mindlessly doing cognitive offloading, then I think that is a very real risk that your own skills may not be as sharp, that they may deteriorate. If you just offload everything, whatever you offload may atrophy. And so you really have to be thoughtful that, well, it's okay because I still know how to do that and I will be able to spend my time on the next most important thing that either I couldn't do before or I didn't have as much time.

16:58And so this goes back to how we are supporting the referees. This is not a replacement, as we said, but this provides them even more context at better speeds so that they are able to make the call and by therefore, hopefully by doing so even more accurately, that they can do their jobs better, then it goes back to keeping the focus on the gameplay. We have to be cautious that we are not blindly offloading as much as we can, because that's not the thoughtful measured approach that leads to good outcomes. More with art in just a moment, after this short break.

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18:41I would love to like unpack the technology behind the semi-automated offside technology. And one of our producers is a soccer mom and she's very passionate. She basically said offside is the most common yelled thing at a soccer match. So now you've got these avatar scans or these 3D scans of each player. So you're able to track exactly where each player is. What's the technology that's doing that? Yeah, so there are as many cameras in the system. You can think of this as an add-on and an enhancement where the digital avatars are built on. So FIFA worked with Hawkeye to have the base system. That's not going to change.

19:21And so the core technology there of having cameras with higher resolutions to be able to track that, I think that core remains in place. We're bringing in an additional data stream so that they can overlay the higher fidelity avatars versus what is the generic model of a soccer player playing in the World Cup. So that is kind of the marriage of a core process and technology that's already existing. So I'm just thinking it through. Like, how would you know that it's player X that just crossed the offside line? Like, how do you marry the 3D avatar with the Hawkeye camera system? Yeah. And so this is a lot of the engineering that kind of goes into the background.

20:04to get from raw scan of the 3D models to be able to then re-render them in the right graphics pipeline, input it into the existing system so that it can be accurately displayed and that these are digital assets that also have a life cycle. So we have to make sure that they're properly secured because we talked about the high resolution raw scan, but it doesn't do us any good if when we re-render it, that it's going to have kind of a variance from what we scan. And so there's a lot of quality checks to make sure that we have the scan, we're able to process it, store it, secure it, and use it at the right time with the right accuracy.

20:45Because the core algorithm is already there, right? You can kind of look at what is the plane, right? According to the rules of what offsides would be. And this just makes sure that when we render the avatar, right, that it is as absolutely faithful to the high resolution scans that we've made. Yeah. And by the way, who owns all of this data? That's a treasure trove. Yeah, it is. FIFA are the ones who are the ones that are responsible for capturing. They're the ones who have access to the data. And that's also a good segue to what makes FIFA AI Pro so powerful. because as we talk about democratizing the game and providing elite level match strategies, match analytics to all the teams, that is what makes it unique.

21:31And so another way of asking the question, especially when we were building this of, oh, why can't I just go to pick your favorite LLM and just ask, who's gonna win? Analyze this match for me. And you can, but then you get problems where it's A, it's not accurate and it's not grounded in very expert football knowledge and language. And so all of that data that FIFA has access to uniquely from the highest level of competition in the world, right, they are capturing thousands of metrics per match. And many of those metrics, like around where is the ball? What force is it under? What's the spin rate?

22:05What is its position on the field? How high is it going? Just to name a few, right, they have thousands of metrics, many of which are being captured hundreds of times a second. And so they just have this explosion of data from the highest level of competition that we can use to then train the model supporting AI FIFA Pro. And what's nice about it is because everyone's moving towards more real time for FIFA AI Pro, these are things that are going to be updating as each match proceeds. And so there's no way that any kind of general consumer app can do that. So every match that gets played then helps the model get even more insightful for the teams that are using it.

22:46That is so cool. So let's talk about how are coaches and teams actually kind of using FIFA AI Pro? Are they using it during match play? Are they using it as they prep for a match? Are they using it to debrief on a match? Like what are some of the use cases? Yes. So all of the above, right? And because this is the first time this is being used at a World Cup, all of what you said and more are use cases because we make this available to all the teams. There are no restrictions, first of all, on when they can use it. And it supports strategic analysis. So if you want to prepare for a match, tell me about given these players and this coach, what is the likely strategy based on how they've played before?

23:27You can use it for player analysis of, hey, in which positions this player has been most effective. You can use it strategically as well or tactically. How compact do I want my defense to be if I'm trying to defend against three back versus four back? So you can basically ask it any question, and it's very tuned. As you can imagine, the way match analysts think about it versus fans is very different. They have very specific language around how they describe this. And so they can use it before the match, during the match, after the match, preparing. Any of those and all of those scenarios are ones we've kind of suggested to the teams as what's available.

24:04And the beauty of it is the rubber is meeting the road. They now have it for testing as each of the teams is landing and preparing because we see football strategy changes so quickly. Teams want to be very adaptive. So they'll be able to use this if there's something that's breaking about, hey, something has really been working well, we'll be able to tease that out and help teams analyze as well as the functionality, right? To your point, we're not restricting the teams because this is the first time we are trying this. We anticipate getting a lot of really interesting feedback about how to make the functionality better or support more scenarios maybe that we hadn't thought about.

24:38Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. You know, there's a lot at stake here. So how do you ensure that the model doesn't hallucinate in terms of its recommended strategies? Well, and this is back to our earlier point. This is why we don't have robots playing the matches with a robot coach and a large language model behind on a screen, kind of with a smiley face coaching. The human element has to be at the forefront. And so I think at this point, the technology is well understood enough. Even if you look at all the consumer and enterprise tools, every single thing says, and you kind of laugh when you think about it, because it's like may or may not be true.

25:11Please check, right? And this goes for the same thing. Now, we are very confident, right? No LLM-based system will be 100 % accurate. And this one, I always like to zoom out as well, which is, well, when's the last time a human was 100 % accurate? But culturally, we accept it, right? Sometimes I screw up spellings, Rana, you're not perfect. We accept it. It's okay if you're wrong 1 % of the time. But somehow we have in mind that because it's a machine, it should never be wrong. So we have a very high accuracy just from the testing we've done. So we think and are highly confident that it will be right most of the time, right in terms of delivering accurate information based on what it's been trained on.

25:46And at the same time, it still has the star, you know, please make sure you check, right? And so I think this is, you know, part of how it will be used. You know what would be fascinating? Because at the end of the day, these models are generative, right? So I wonder if they'll come up with like really creative strategies that a human coach would be willing to take a risk and try. And then we would see what the results are. So it absolutely could, right? And of course, and so I think that's one of the things to watch for. Let's see. So stay tuned. Part of the mystery and the excitement for this World Cup, it's another variable which could make match play more exciting.

26:22We're going to take a quick halftime break. Don't go anywhere.