iSportConnect’s Taruka Srivastav sat down with Todd Harple, Program Lead for Olympic AI Innovation at Intel Lab, to discuss Intel’s partnership with the Olympic Games, highlighting their commitment to AI innovation and gender parity. Todd explained the complexity of the Olympic ecosystem and Intel’s development of systems to count people entering and exiting venues, predict their future location, and help the IOC with its long-term planning.
Tell us about your role at Intel.
I lead the AI innovation program for the Olympics. I led a lot of our pathfinding and roadmapping for our Olympics, with Intel’s Olympic sponsorship, which started in 2017. So it’s been really great to see the whole journey of things evolve from POC to real-world implementation as scalable products.
What does this partnership consist of?
When we signed this partnership, we signed deals in a number of different marketing categories. Of those, processing and AI are the two areas that are very important to us at Intel. And this year, we signed a deal that will allow us to bring AI everywhere. We did a great job at the Olympic Games in Paris that just ended, and we’re going to continue that momentum through to the Paralympics.
We have applications that help fans, athletes and organizers. And it’s really exciting to see how they’re coming to life. Some of them started as proofs of concept from our first Games in Pyeongchang and are now mature, scalable products available in the real world with our partners. One of the most exciting and high-profile applications here at the Games that we’re really proud of is called the AI platform experience, and it’s pretty exciting. It’s something that’s partly based on a technology that we’ve developed called 3D athlete tracking. And we’ve basically developed models to use computer vision to identify the form of elite athletes. And the first time we showed that to the public was in Tokyo.
If you remember the sprints, you saw runners with color streams behind them that changed based on acceleration and top speed and that were broadcast. And then this year, we went to Senegal with the International Olympic Committee, where we helped the Youth Olympic Committee, the host country of the Dakar 2026 Games, identify the talent of tomorrow. And we did that through our 3D athlete tracking combined with different types of drills that show athletic skills. And for the Games, we brought this experience of trying out different forms of athletic performance and assessing athletic talent at the Games so that fans could come, they could try out different things that use our AI to tell them which Olympic sport they’re best at.
What are some common challenges you face and how have you managed to overcome them?
The ecosystem of the Olympic Games is quite complex. You have to understand the interaction between the International Olympic Committee, the International Federations, the athletes themselves and the national organizing committees. You have to understand how they operate to know how to deploy things. We worked very closely with the International Olympic Committee on the operational aspects. For example, when a venue is used in a way that is not its normal use, when there are a lot more people and it is used by larger entourages who follow the athletes, their families, their coaches. You have to understand how to use the space. So it was always a tricky point for the IOC to try to figure out how do I properly size the space that I give to the press or the space that I give to the athletes and their entourages in the venues. So we developed systems that can actually count people as they come in and as they come out. Nothing personal about it to understand who it is. We just need to know how many people are coming in and out, where they’re congregating, and for how long. Then we can apply models to predict where they’re going to be in the future, which helps the IOC plan for the long term and allows future organizing committees to know, “Hey, was this the right size for a Summer Games? Was this the right size for our Winter Games?”
We managed all of that and helped them create the tools to have a more accurate representation. So that’s one example. And then, for example, on the athlete side, athletes come to these games, it’s a lifetime of work leading up to this, and they have to focus on their performance. But at the same time, it’s like a great opportunity for them to try to meet people, have a good time, and understand what their best partners are offering them, maybe special rules for the games. And until now, they had to rely on a chef de mission, their person, from their team, to manage all of these things. But in cooperation with the IOC, we actually created a chatbot for athletes only, so it’s not open to the general public, and it’s open only to athletes. They can go in and use six different languages, ask it questions, and it will say, “Can I take pictures at the opening ceremony? Can I post on social media?” “And it consolidates all of that information, which previously represented 10 touchpoints into one.
Are the Olympics and Paralympics the ideal platform to showcase technology?
The Olympics are really a benchmark. When we talk about the Summer Games, we’re talking about 11,000 to 15,000 athletes, and this year, over 11,000 hours of footage were captured. There are so many sports, and this platform has provided an opportunity to show so many different things, and even democratize access, both on the broadcaster side and the athlete side, to AI and tools that help people better enjoy the Games. For example, when we watch replays, when we watch highlights of our favorite athletes, it turns out that in the past, we had to rely on the broadcaster that had the rights for your region and what they were willing to give you. But now, we’ve developed an AI system that can get results faster for replays. So, for example, almost in real time, we could ask the system to show me every three-pointer that the Nigerian team made. And of course, we can get it right away, and we can also do it for lesser-known sports as well as smaller nations. So even the smallest nations can now see the highlights of their home heroes better than ever thanks to AI technology.
What kind of team or stakeholders do you have to help you deliver this technology?
In this environment, it’s always a team effort. We work with the full range of partners, both within the Olympic ecosystem, whether it’s the Olympic Broadcast Service (OBS) to deliver these highlights with the IOC to provide information about the Games, but also with an extended network of startups and partners and so on, all of which integrate into the larger Olympic brand for the Games. But after the Games, it ends up creating a scalable business, scalable outcomes and solutions for our ecosystem. We kind of build the recipes here at the Olympics of different technology solutions, we test them, and when they work, our partners roll them out more broadly. So it’s always a team effort. And even for us at Intel, we work with our entire company to deliver solutions to different business units and so on. It brings us even closer together as a team.
The Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games are the first to boast gender parity. What does this mean for Intel?
We’re very proud to partner not only with the IOC but also with the UN to promote gender parity, representation, acceptance and peace. These are values that the Olympic Movement stands for. And it’s an honour to be a part of it, to be at the heart of it, to stand up and say, “Look, this is equal representation. We’ve never seen this before at the Games.” It’s really exciting and just being in this environment makes our Intel employees proud as well.
