Artificial intelligence is reshaping the NFL by turning massive amounts of game footage and real-time data into actionable insights. At the heart of this transformation is AI-powered brainstorming, which enhances strategic decisions, optimizes player performance and accelerates game-day tactics, fundamentally elevating the game.

Amazon Web Services Inc. is pivotal to this evolution, providing the Seattle Seahawks with state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure and machine learning tools, including Amazon Personalize, which delivers highly tailored fan experiences based on detailed behavior analysis, according to Kenton Olson (pictured), vice president of digital and emerging media for the Seahawks.

TheCUBE’s John Furrier talks with the Seattle Seahawks’ Kenton Olson about how AI-powered brainstorming is transforming the NFL team.

“As for AWS, they’re our official cloud partner, and we work with them regularly to figure out how do we innovate, how do we raise the game — and making sure that we’re using the most innovative tools we can to kind of move things forward and help out our fans,” Olson said. “On the creativity side, there are certain tasks that even a creator has to do that maybe is not the most exciting thing in terms of resizing a video as an example or adding a caption file or doing some of that stuff. If they’re sitting down, trying to figure out a solution for a problem, they’re able to say, ‘Let’s use AI as a starting point to come up with ideas, determine what we want to do.’”

Olson spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how “AI-powered brainstorming” is changing stakes for Seattle Seahawks. 

Through the ‘AI-powered brainstorming’ lens

By using AI-powered brainstorming, the Seahawks creatively fuses archival footage with modern performance metrics, transforming raw archives into immersive, data-driven narratives. The result is rich, engaging historical content that deeply resonates with fans, according to Olson.

“There are random clips from the locker room that happened back in the day that may have been on local TV back in 1984 or whatever it is, but they’ve just never been there,” he said. “We’ve got some great dashboards internally. We’re able to monitor things day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, even year-over-year as we move forward. The team I get to work with, they’re looking at data, video to video … they’ll post a video, and they can just know within the first 10 minutes: Is this going to get 1 million views; is this not going to get 1 million views?”

Through the Seahawks’ partnership with AWS, the organization leverages Amazon Bedrock’s generative AI capabilities to streamline digital media operations and boost efficiency. Bedrock automates tasks, such as transcription and translation, enabling faster content creation and broader fan engagement, Olson pointed out.  

“We get this published video, how do we get it to all of these different places as much as we possibly can?” he said. “It immediately goes through a pipeline that we built that’s all based on AWS. The video gets in there, it gets transcoded in different sizes on media convert, and then from there, we really kick it over to Bedrock and say, ‘We need some information from this video. Give us a transcript.’ The NFL has a global markets program, and we were really excited last year to add the DACH region, so Germany, Austria and Switzerland to our mix. We’re also adding German translations as well to that. All these things are happening automatically.”

The Seahawks leverage AWS data analytics to extract insights from game stats, player performance, social media and fan sentiment. This enables data-driven storytelling, such as behind-the-scenes videos, player features and game previews that emotionally connect with fans, according to Olson. 

“You’ve got to put the metadata on, you’ve got to get a thumbnail for different platforms, you’ve got to resize it to four or five different ways, and you’ve got to put it on YouTube, X, Facebook, TikTok,” he said. “It’s really important for us to figure out how do we kind of get to all those places by making sure we’re being the most efficient. One of the projects we worked with AWS last year was really to try to figure out how do we take that time from our video C-level studios to produce a great video, how do we take the time from that video getting published to actually getting out to our fans and reducing that as much as we can and how to really find enough time.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit: 

Photo: Seattle Seahawks