The NFL’s winning AI game plan

The National Football League is embracing AI across every aspect of its operations, from enhancing fan engagement to revolutionizing on-field measurements. Here, CIO Gary Brantley shares how the organization deploys AI to improve accuracy, speed up game play, personalize fan experiences, and streamline operations — all while building the governance structure needed to scale these innovations responsibly across the league and its 32 clubs.

How is the NFL using AI to improve the fan experience?

OnePass is a free mobile app that allows fans access to NFL events, including Combine, Draft, the Super Bowl and international games. OnePass has many functions, from managing your tickets to allowing fans to sign up for activities. Then there’s Ask Vince, a gen-AI powered agent that helps fans plan for the event in real time — like where to go and what time to get there — and explains policies like what you can take inside the stadium.

How is AI impacting action on the field?

One key area of advancement is our use of optical tracking technology. Traditionally, the league has relied on chain systems to measure field position. Now with the integration of AI and computer vision, we’re leveraging optical tracking to transform the process.

Speed and precision are also top priorities for the NFL. During the 2025 season, six 8K cameras will serve as primary tools to determine whether an offense has achieved a first down. This system enables the NFL to deliver fast precision measurements that reduce interruptions to the game, and provide more information to the teams, league officials, and fans.

And working closely with our broadcast partners and game presentation producers, we’ll showcase these results using animations and graphics across both television broadcasts and stadium displays. AI assist leads us to a faster and more seamless game.

Any other compelling use-cases?

We’re using AI in marketing campaign orchestration. Over the last two years, traffic through our digital channels has increased more than 300% just by attaching AI to the engine. AI also helps our creative work and shortens the time to orchestrate content from weeks to days.

For example, let’s look at trading cards. Producing a card takes a lot of quality assurance, which has always been a manual process. Every year there are new players in new positions, and the right content about that player needs to go on those cards. This includes the right photo with the right uniform and the right action shot appropriate to the player’s position on the field. Today, AI sifts through that data and increases the speed of producing the cards.

The globalization and localization efforts we’re making are also affected by AI. That means we can adapt our creative approach to the international market with automated language translation.

If we’re marketing to our 35 million fans in Brazil, it’s important the creative approach resonates with them, and that we reflect their interests, language, and some of their favorite players. AI lets us quickly gather the right data to understand the cultural aspects of our markets.

How have you changed your governance to generate and deploy these AI solutions?

We started with AI ethical guidelines, but not just for the NFL; we pushed the policy out to the clubs, as well. We then identified leaders across the organization who will help us expand the guidelines across our enterprise. For this, we created an AI steering committee with legal, marketing, security, technology, data and analytics, international, commercial sponsorship, and business development.

We thought a lot about how to level the governance structure and decided to put the AI steering committee at the EVP and SVP level, and our working groups beneath it. We felt the best way to move quickly was to get the strategy and vision people, the EVPs and SVPs, out of the way. The working groups are led by VPs and cover football technology, marketing, policy and legal, and sponsorships.

Those groups meet weekly on strategy, and the chairs report to the AI steering committee. This structure gives us the ability to connect the overarching strategy with individual work streams and keep everyone connected. We’re also able to push more decision making to the VP level.

A big part of AI leadership is storytelling. How do you tell the story of AI and the NFL?

I describe it the same way for fans, partners, and players. AI is an extension of your current capabilities. Think of it as a superpower. If you’re very good at tackling today, AI can enhance the angles you’re taking. If you’re a fast runner, AI can give you instant feedback to show you where you can improve.

And that’s just on the field. AI can help you break down the playbook for your comprehension style. Some people are visual learners, others like reading, and some people are listeners. Regardless of your style, AI will help you learn the plays. It’s an extension of how good you already are.

What have you been doing to prep your tech stack for AI?

The key to architecture is an integrated business. Years ago, many CIOs experienced shadow IT, with businesses buying their own technology, and creating a fragmented architecture. This era of shadow IT made it harder to use AI, because with AI, you need a technology stack that connects the business in the right ways.

At the NFL, about two years ago, we started bringing all IT systems and resources back into IT, and we established an architectural review board. By bringing historically siloed areas together, we’re now making decisions at the digital core, the architectural base of our organization.

Today, all parts of the business are linked. NFL Network, NFL Films, cyber, data and analytics, and MarTech. Our leaders know we can no longer make decisions that are best for our one business unit; we must look at the entire organization.

How would you describe all of this to Roger Goodell?

When we’re buying data storage, we don’t just buy it for one area. We think about how it affects every area. This is because end-user tooling like ChatGPT or Copilot needs a place with structured data to go to learn. If our environment isn’t integrated, and our data isn’t structured well, AI impact will be slow and we won’t be able to scale. Data just keeps on growing, and we have to put it in one place so you can see information about our large and complex business in one view. The NFL will have more impact on fans, employees, and players with the cyber controls to protect us.