How Amazon Web Services Ai Machine Learning Technology Is Shaping Nfl

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 8:55 AM

how amazon web services ai machine learning technology is shaping nfl

Check out what's clicking on FoxBusiness.com Getting an edge in the NFL, whether you're on the field or not, is what every player, coach and even fan tries to do. With the Super Bowl having come and gone, the 2023 NFL season comes to a close, and Amazon Web Services couldn't be happier with how it improved the game. AI and data science techniques are used by every team in the league. From breaking down plays during games and practice to knowing which players are subject to more injuries throughout a season, technology can be used by all 32 teams to make sure they’re maximizing every... The NFL and Amazon Web Services, Inc., an Amazon.com company, extended their long-term partnership.

Since 2017, the NFL and AWS have been at the forefront of innovation, leveraging AWS's artificial intelligence and machine learning services to shape the future of football. The global partnership will be on display during this week’s games with the debut of a new AI-powered Next Gen Stat that changes how we understand and analyze tackles in football. The Tackle Probability ML model predicts the likelihood that a given defender will make a tackle at any given moment of a play, helping to quantify which defenders are the most reliable tacklers and... Tackle Probability can be used to calculate various metrics that can be applied to both offensive and defensive analysis, such as missed tackle attempts by a defender and missed tackles forced by a ball... Powered by AWS, the Next Gen Stats platform collects more than 500 million data points each season. This data serves as the foundation for innovation throughout the NFL, from enhancing fan engagement through advanced statistics, to transforming the viewing experience by enabling alternate broadcasts and new ways of visualizing the action...

Data-driven insights have a direct impact on the game itself by informing rule changes to make the game safer and even more exciting, including the NFL’s new Dynamic Kickoff. The implementation of generative AI to increase operational efficiency and drive additional value for the league and its fans is key component of the partnership. NFL Media has implemented Amazon Q Business, a generative AI-powered assistant, so users can ask questions and get answers to a wide range of questions. NFL Media has also launched a generative AI-powered research tool built on Amazon Bedrock that enables the production team to use natural language prompts to retrieve insights and relevant footage from plays throughout the... Powered by AWS Machine Learning to create a better experience for fans, players, and teams. AWS powers the NFL's Digital Athlete, a injury prediction tool, that uses machine learning and AI to help identify when players are at an increased risk of injury.

The Seattle Seahawks and AWS have created a winning partnership using data-driven insights across the franchise to analyze information across player acquisition, team and opponent scouting, and player health. The NFL uses AWS technology to take real-time insights and transform fan engagement to offer personalized experiences and content curation. The NFL and AWS tackled the hidden dynamics of punt and kickoff with Expected Return Yards to estimate yards a return will gain when the ball is caught. The NFL and Amazon Web Services have extended the length and expanded the scope of their partnership, introducing generative AI functionality among their collaborative projects. The pair have co-developed two uses of gen AI for internal efficiency at NFL Media. The first uses Amazon Q Business, an automated assistant that facilitates access to business intelligence and production knowledge using natural language prompts.

The other relies on Amazon Bedrock for easy retrieval of insights and video footage storied in the Next Gen Stats dataset. “It's not replacing the decision-making process of people, but it's exposing these things much faster, so we can be much more responsive as a business,” said NFL Deputy CIO Aaron Amendolia, explaining that the... Both will be used to help employees produce more and better content across its properties, ranging from NFL Network and NFL Films to digital platforms such as the website, app and social media. Production assistants will be spared countless hours of manual tasks, such as watching video to tag plays, “freeing up that human time to spend it back on the most valuable activities,” Amendolia said. The gen AI will thus serve fans through a human intermediary, rather than be directly fan-facing -- but those types of projects are in development. Amendolia didn’t put a specific timetable other than to say it could be “soon” but also only “when it’s right for the brand.” Quality control is essential.

Plus: Fastbreak.AI's Big Acquisition & Former NBA Player Buys Into Team He Played For • This week, the NFL and Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, extended their long-term partnership. Since 2017, AWS has been powering and pioneering technology in the NFL to enhance the overall fan experience and bring innovative methods to teams across the league. One of the newest offerings is called Tackle Probability, a new AI-powered model that changes how we understand and analyze tackles in football. The partnership extension will also build upon several previous innovations including: Next Gen Stats: Next Gen Stats are used by the league, broadcasters, partners, teams, coaches, scouts, and players.

The NFL leverages AWS to help manage the scale, speed, and complexity of the enormous data set. The NFL also uses AWS’s machine learning capabilities to turn the tracking data into advanced statistics that help contextualize the action on the field. Digital Athlete: This cutting-edge injury recognition and analytics tool provides a complete view of an NFL player’s experience, using video and data from training, practice, and in-game action. AWS technology runs millions of simulations of specific in-game and practice scenarios to identify which players are at risk of injury, enabling coaches and training staff to develop individualized injury prevention, training, and recovery... NFL Big Data Bowl: The NFL annually hosts the Big Data Bowl powered by AWS, a crowd-sourced competition that challenges applicants to use data and technology to create new insights and make the game... Behind every gravity-defying catch and over-the-top tackle, a team of engineers and data scientists work tirelessly to bring National Football League (NLF) fans closer to the on-field action.

One of the latest NFL analytics implementations is a sophisticated generative AI system built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its creation and deployment is one of the most complex engineering accomplishments in sports media to streamline query and search of media assets to exacting specifications. How does the NFL take more than a century’s worth of football history, millions of video clips, and an ever-growing archive of statistics as inputs to a system that can respond to conversational queries... This is the puzzle that NFL’s technical team, in collaboration with AWS, set out to solve. From developing advanced machine learning models to creating intuitive user interfaces, the journey to build a system to provide this capability was as arduous and demanding as any fourth-quarter drive. In this blog post, we break down the X’s and O’s of this engineering achievement, demonstrating how the NFL tackles big data challenges head-on.

The NFL’s journey into a generative AI-powered content management didn’t start on a whim. It was born of necessity, driven by the sheer volume of data the league accumulated over its storied 100-year history. Imagine navigating a digital labyrinth containing millions of video clips, countless audio snippets, an ocean of statistics, and an ever-growing collection of fan-generated social media content. This is the reality of the NFL’s media asset management (MAM) system—a treasure trove of content that is both a goldmine and a challenge for content creators. The NFL has amassed an unimaginable volume of facts, stats, game day coverage, athlete press interviews, and media assets over the last 100 years, including millions of audio and video clips, as well as... Any play of substance merits capture from various viewing angles, such that the NFL’s impressive asset library continues to grow rapidly.

It even includes social media clips generated by fans. If roughly half of a game’s plays are consequential, that’s around 75 plays per game, and the average NFL season encompasses 272 games. This means the NFL feeds more than 20,000 plays captured from multiple angles into its library each season. Matt Swensson, SVP Product and Technology at the NFL, paints a vivid picture of the challenge: “Until now, our teams needed to perform extensive pre-research to find the media assets they needed. It was like trying to find a specific play in a hundred years’ worth of game footage—which is time-consuming and often challenging.” Getting an edge in the NFL, whether you're on the field or not, is what every player, coach and even fan tries to do.

With the Super Bowl having come and gone, the 2023 NFL season comes to a close, and Amazon Web Services couldn't be happier with how it improved the game. AI and data science techniques are used by every team in the league. From breaking down plays during games and practice to knowing which players are subject to more injuries throughout a season, technology can be used by all 32 teams to make sure they’re maximizing every... CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXBUSINESS.COM Just in time for the 2024 season, the National Football League and Amazon Web Services Inc. continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning in football.

Through a partnership that began in 2017, the NFL has used AWS technology to improve player performance analysis, game strategies and fan experiences. Upcoming NFL games will showcase a new AI-powered tool, Tackle Probability, that analyzes and predicts the likelihood of a defender making a tackle in real time. The tool identifies the most dependable defenders and the hardest-to-catch ball carriers. It also provides data on key performance metrics, such as missed tackles and successful attempts, offering teams valuable insights for offensive and defensive strategies. More specifically, Tackle Probability looks at 20 different factors, including the position and speed of each defender, every 10th of a second. Using these data points, an AI model, trained on five years of past game data, calculates the likelihood of a tackle happening at any given moment in a play.

From this data, the model creates new stats like how often defenders attempt tackles without missing or how frequently running backs force missed tackles. This helps coaches see which players are the most reliable at tackling or avoiding tackles. Tackle Probability is a feature within Next Gen Stats, the NFL’s player and ball tracking platform, which relies heavily on AWS to process an enormous amount of data collected from games. The platform gathers over 500 million data points each season, providing the NFL with advanced statistics that improve the viewing experience and aid gameplay decisions. This includes rule changes such as the new Dynamic Kickoff to minimize high-speed collisions and injuries during kickoffs by adjusting player positioning and movement. Digital Athlete is another tool developed using AWS to improve player safety.

The tool simulates game and practice scenarios to help coaches and medical staff assess injury risks so they can develop prevention and recovery plans for each player. One could think of this as building a digital twin of players and then running them through various scenarios to better understand when and how injuries occur. Teams can use that data to avoid those situations and keep the players on the field longer. The National Football League (NFL) has further cemented its alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS), heralding a new era of technological innovation in the sport. Their recently expanded partnership promises to reshape the way football is experienced both on and off the field, leveraging AWS's cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. As part of this enhanced collaboration, AWS will significantly bolster its role in supporting the NFL's operations through a range of advanced AI tools and data analytics services.

The goal is to enrich the fan experience and provide teams with deeper insights into game strategies and player performance. This initiative will see the integration of sophisticated predictive models that aim to offer real-time analyses and predictions, thereby transforming the traditional viewing experience. The partnership has led to Amazon introducing a new AI-powered feature for its Thursday Night Football broadcasts. This innovation will enable viewers to predict game plays and outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. By employing AWS's advanced algorithms, fans can now engage more deeply with the game, testing their predictions against real-time data and enhancing their overall enjoyment of the sport. The NFL’s partnership with AWS and the launch of new AI-driven features are set to revolutionise the football viewing , not only by elevating the viewing experience but also by enhancing team strategies and...

AI’s impact on fan experience looks set to be further enhanced following the launch of a new startup founded by former NFL agent and Nike executive, Scott Bouska. Using their proprietary AI prediction model, Field Vision aims to provide betting enthusiasts with cutting-edge tools to gain a competitive edge in their game predictions.

How Amazon Web Services Ai Machine Learning Technology Is Shaping Nfl

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