Nfl Generative Ai Customer Story Aws Aws Amazon Com

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 18, 2025, 3:56 AM

nfl generative ai customer story aws aws amazon com

Discover how the NFL leverages AWS to drive innovative fan, player, and employee experiences powered by cutting-edge generative AI services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. Developed by the Next Gen Stats (NGS) team and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tackle Probability paints a more complete picture of the art of the tackle than previously possible, from both an offensive and... A new tackle probability model aims to capture the entire process of tackling, from pursuit angles to missed attempts, providing a wealth of deeper and more granular insights for teams, broadcasters, and fans alike. Explore how the NFL is using AWS to develop a unified view of its 77 million active fans, enabling personalized experiences and real-time insights. Discover the composable, cloud-based ecosystem that empowers the league to rapidly operationalize fan intelligence across consumer touchpoints. Discover how the NFL leverages AWS to build a cutting-edge data platform that unifies 90 billion rows of fan data, enabling personalized experiences and real-time insights at unprecedented scale.

In this video, Paul Bellew, Chief Data/Analytics Officer at NFL, explores the cloud-based ecosystem that allows the league to rapidly operationalize fan intelligence across consumer touchpoints. Learn how the NFL harness the power of AWS generative AI to enhance live sports broadcasts, player performance analysis, and fan engagement. Hear from industry leaders on the scalability, competitive advantages, and cultural considerations of adopting this transformative technology on AWS. 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.” See how NFL stars Maxx Crosby, Josh Allen, and DK Metcalf used AWS generative AI to design cause-focused cleats—and now you can too The National Football League’s (NFL) “My Cause My Cleats” initiative has fused sports and philanthropy since 2016, inviting fans to connect with players’ personal causes displayed on custom-designed cleats. This year, the initiative receives an upgrade, courtesy of generative AI tools.

During weeks 13 and 14 of this year’s NFL season, players like Maxx Crosby of the Las Vegas Raiders, Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills, and DK Metcalf of the Seattle Seahawks hit the... And, for the first time, fans are invited to join in the creative process, using a generative AI app from AWS to craft their own cleats in support of the causes they love. For NFL athletes, the My Cause My Cleats program offers more than a chance to make a fashion statement—it’s an opportunity to connect with communities and amplify causes close to their hearts. Each custom cleat sparks a narrative, bringing fans into the fold and boosting fundraising and volunteerism efforts across the nation. The NFL’s partnership with AWS takes this impact to a new level, merging generative AI with intuitive design features to offer fans an opportunity to create personalized, purpose-driven cleats. With AWS’s latest tech, the connection between players, fans, and causes feels more meaningful—and more immediate—than ever.

Here’s how the design process unfolds: to create a custom cleat, players first provide a short descriptive prompt, a powerful tool that guides the AI’s artistic direction. The prompt can be as simple as “ocean waves in blue” or “electric graffiti,” directing the AI to capture the essence of the player’s cause or message. After that, players choose an art style that aligns with their vision, whether that’s a bold, street-style Graffiti, an elegant Watercolor, or the edgy look of Pixelated and Grunge styles. With the aesthetics set, they select up to three primary colors to give the AI model a refined palette to work with. NFL games accounted for 46 of last year’s top 50 telecasts, averaging 15.8 million viewers over the season. For fans, the sport’s continued appeal may have a lot to do with the chess-like combination of strategy, preparation and instinct that goes into every play.

No factor can be overlooked for its potential impact on how those plays pan out: everything from changes in team rosters to the conditions on the field (i.e., indoor vs. outdoor, day vs. night, not to mention wind and precipitation). While the NFL has tracked a wide variety of statistics since its inception, for decades these metrics were relatively rudimentary—like simply counting statistics that didn’t necessarily reveal the full scope of what happened during... Recently, the NFL realized it needed a more advanced system to collect data and make sense of it. Such a system could reveal insights about game dynamics for both fans and players—for example, the results of particular player lineups or the factors that impacted a player’s performance.

The end goal: to create customer loyalty for the NFL and fuel diehard fans in their quest to better understand the game. Today, the NFL’s Next Gen Stats (NGS) program uses sophisticated tracking technology collected via RFID devices in the shoulder pads of every player and embedded at each of its stadiums. These devices capture data about which players are on the field at a given moment, their location within inches, and the speed and direction in which they move. This treasure trove of data represents a tremendous resource for the league’s 32 teams, multiple media partners and approximately 180 million fans worldwide. “Machine learning is unlocking potential for us to do more than we otherwise could, in a timely manner with a high degree of confidence.” Matt SwenssonVice President of Emerging Products and TechnologyNFL

NEW YORK – Sept. 10, 2024 – The National Football League and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced an extension of their long-term partnership. Since 2017, the NFL and AWS have been at the forefront of innovation, leveraging AWS's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) 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, at any given moment of a play, the likelihood that a given defender will make a tackle, 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 over 500 million data points each season. This wealth of 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... Additionally, 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. A key component of the partnership renewal is the implementation of generative AI to increase operational efficiency and drive additional value for the league and its fans. “Through our collaboration with AWS, we are continuously pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in football,” said Gary Brantley, chief information officer at the NFL.

“By harnessing the power of data and advanced technologies like generative AI, together we are accelerating the pace of innovation in important areas such as player safety, fan engagement and content production. This season we’ll see an increase in operational efficiency as we begin to leverage AWS’s generative AI capabilities at NFL Media.” Explore how customers are unlocking value with generative AI on AWS By combining Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker's capabilities, Clearwater Analytics built an intelligent system that doesn't just crunch numbers – it reimagines how investment management works. Their Clearwater Intelligent Console (CWIC) suite transformed from a simple chat interface into a sophisticated AI-powered platform. The results speak volumes: faster responses, fewer service tickets, and the ability to grow their business by 20% without adding headcount.

It's not just a technology upgrade; it's a glimpse into the future of financial services. AWS gives customers the most choice and flexibility, ensuring they can quickly build cost-friendly, transformative experiences with strong data foundations, security, and infrastructure. At Omnicom, creativity meets cutting-edge technology on a global scale. With 75,000 employees across hundreds of agencies producing award-winning campaigns, the company needed a technology infrastructure that could match their creative ambitions. That meant working with AWS to build a global infrastructure and data and analytics foundation that could support innovation and cutting-edge client services. Experian Data Office transformed its legacy application environment by modernizing seven .NET applications using AWS Transform, achieving a 40% reduction in developer effort and saving approximately 300 engineering days.

The modernization effort automated 6eight7,600 lines of code transformation from older .NET Framework versions to .NET 8.0, enabling improved performance, deployment automation, and enhanced DevOps processes. 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...

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2024, held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada, generative artificial intelligence (AI) was a prevailing theme—from technology demonstrations to speaking sessions, interactive installations, and more. On the NAB Main Stage, Thursday Night Football’s Kaylee Hartung led a lively generative AI-focused session comprising panelists Amazon Web Services (AWS) Vice President of AI Products Dr. Matt Wood, AWS Global Leader of Strategic Business Development for Sports Julie Souza, NFL Deputy CIO Aaron Amendolia, and PGA TOUR Senior Vice President of Digital Operations Scott Gutterman. Throughout the discussion, the group covered a broad range of topics. Wood and Hartung first took the stage for a one-on-one, where Wood described generative AI as the single most significant shift in how we interact with data and information since the internet. He noted energy, enthusiasm, invention, and investment around generative AI unlike anything he’s ever seen.

Wood also explained how organizations willing to invest in it now will see exponential ROI in the coming years, and that generative AI holds the potential to increase our productivity a hundred times. The other panelists then joined Wood and Hartung on stage to continue the conversation. Following are some key highlights and the session recording: While generative AI was the session’s primary focus, Hartung opened the panel with a discussion around cloud enablement. Gutterman shared how the PGA TOUR is developing a new tool with generative AI that will infuse all kinds of live stats into videos to help players better evaluate their performance. Amendolia credited a layered approach with AWS to National Football League (NFL) broadcast and storytelling capabilities like NFL Next Gen stats.

Nfl Generative Ai Customer Story Aws Aws Amazon Com

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