Our Summer of Sport series connects what's happening on the pitch with what's happening in your organization: how teams perform under pressure, how technology earns trust, and how to move fast without falling apart.
The FIFA 2026 World Cup has the potential to be a masterclass in AI use case prioritization. That’s probably not a phrase you would have imagined being used to describe the tournament ten years ago, is it? But it’s true; from offside calls to online abuse, FIFA has been deploying AI with the goal of improving experiences for the people on the pitch, in the stands, and watching from home.
What really stands out across these use cases though, is that nearly every single one targets a problem that had been sitting in plain sight for years.
Football AI Pro is Finally Delivering the Same Data for Everyone
Football AI Pro, developed by Lenovo as FIFA's official technology partner, gives all 48 competing nations access to the same analytics platform for the first time in World Cup history. The system processes over 2,000 match metrics, generates tactical video breakdowns on demand, and allows coaching staff to query it in natural language rather than waiting for an analyst to compile a report overnight. In previous tournaments, that kind of infrastructure was the near-exclusive domain of wealthy federations with large technical departments. That means Honduras, ranked around 80th in the world and appearing at just their third World Cup, now has the same analytical starting point as Brazil, a five-time champion and the most decorated nation in the tournament’s history.
Of course, what the platform cannot distribute is the experience to use it well. Access to a sophisticated tool and the organizational capability to extract value from it are two different things, and the tournament will test that distinction across 48 squads with widely varying levels of data maturity. That gap, between access and capability, is something FIFA may need to address next, and it’s not a problem unique to the sport. Leaders in every industry are waking up to the new reality that tools alone don’t create competitive edge, it’s about knowing what to do with them.
The teams that make the most of Football AI Pro will likely be the ones that spent the preceding months preparing their people, not just selecting their models. It's a useful mirror for most organizations today.
An Intelligent Command Center is the Operating System Nobody Sees
The 2026 tournament is, logistically, unlike anything FIFA has attempted before.
The distances involved mean that a problem in Atlanta and a problem in Vancouver can be happening simultaneously, with no shared infrastructure connecting them and a global broadcast audience watching both. FIFA's response is an AI-powered command center that functions as the connective tissue across the entire operation, fed by digital twin models of all 16 stadiums that monitor crowd flow, security deployments, and technical systems in real time. If a bottleneck forms at a specific stadium gate before kick-off, the team managing the event sees it on a virtual map before it becomes a problem on the ground.
What FIFA has built here is an AI foundation. The command center works because the entire operation was designed around it, with crowd management, security, logistics, and broadcast all running through a single AI-powered system across nearly 2,800 miles of territory. That’s what being built for AI actually looks like: the infrastructure, the people, and the processes designed to run on AI from the start, rather than retrofitted around tools that were added later.
The View from the Middle
Ever seen a ruling and thought, “What was the ref thinking?” For the first time at a World Cup, referees are wearing AI-stabilized body cameras that broadcast their exact line of sight to stadiums and television screens simultaneously. The idea behind Referee View is straightforward: close the gap between what the official actually saw and what 80,000 people in the stands assumed they saw. When a foul is given, or not given, the audience now has access to the same information the referee had in the moment that the decision was made.
Whether it reduces complaints... well, that’s a separate question entirely. What it does, structurally, is introduce radical transparency into one of the most contested roles in sport. The referee's perspective has always been the source of friction; visible enough to be judged, obscured enough to be disputed. Putting a camera on it changes the accountability dynamic in ways that organizations deploying AI in high-stakes decision-making roles are beginning to reckon with. When the process is visible, the standard people hold it to tends to rise.
The Abuse That Never Arrives
FIFA's Social Media Protection Service has been running since the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and the numbers it has produced since then are striking. Across 33 million posts analyzed and more than 15,000 player and official accounts monitored, the service has hidden over ten million abusive comments before the intended recipients ever saw them. At the 2026 tournament, Meta is deploying additional AI moderation layered on top. Approximately 74 percent of hateful content is caught before anyone reports it. The system finds abuse upstream before it is ever flagged.
Now, players stepping off the pitch after a difficult match don’t have to brace for impact the way they used to. The psychological toll that social media has taken on professional athletes over the past decade is extensively documented, and this is one of the more straightforward applications of AI to exist in sport, using the technology to absorb something harmful before it ever lands. A lot of organizations are still using AI to improve what their people produce, but what if AI was used to improve how teams experience the work itself?
What the Pitch is Really Showing
Ask most people why organizations deploy AI and you’ll hear the same two answers: cut costs, stay competitive. None of the use cases outlined above fit that description. They were built because smaller nations had been arriving at World Cups analytically outgunned, or because an operation spanning multiple countries needed a better connective tissue.
That orientation, starting from the human outcome and working backwards to the technology, is what the 2026 World Cup is demonstrating in real time. The AI sits outside the game itself, making sure everything surrounding it is a little bit fairer, a little safer, and a little better understood. The brief is available to any organization willing to take it: find the problems that have been sitting in plain sight and build the technology around them.
