Intel AI and the Olympics

Last week, Intel shared how its AI technology will be a significant part of the Olympics experience. If Intel pulls this off, it would be a huge boost to its AI efforts. If this doesn’t work, it will reflect poorly on Intel.

I’ve been involved with two prior Olympics tech efforts, one with IBM and the Winter Olympics and the other with Lenovo and the Summer Olympics.

While the Lenovo effort worked out reasonably well for Lenovo, the IBM effort was a train wreck that had little to do with IBM’s technology or services and everything to do with the complex nature of the Olympics held in the U.S. that year. France presents unique challenges given some venues’ locations, domestic and foreign efforts to disrupt the event, and the common committee approach to getting things done.

France also has a vastly different legal structure than much of Europe and the U.S., which can make doing a project like this uniquely difficult. However, if Intel succeeds, AI at the Olympics will make a huge difference to the attendee and athlete experience and make this the most enjoyable Olympics of all time. Though, given how new generative AI is and the complexity of this project, it won’t be a walk in the park.

Let’s discuss Intel, AI, and the Olympics. Then, I’ll close with my Product of the Week, a new Intel laptop from HP that pushes the envelope on sustainability, portability, and security.

Challenges Managing the Olympics With Technology

The Olympics is a frighteningly unique operation. It spans the world with many different and often unaligned organizations with varying connections to their own governments and only really comes together at scale every four years.

These groups have different cultural requirements and social protocols and speak different languages. During the interim time between events, people change, relationships between countries change, threats change, and the venue even changes. It is almost like building a large company from scratch over a very short time.

The first true test of whether most things will function at this scale is when the event goes live. As IBM found out, that is the wrong time to discover catastrophic problems with the implementation.

However, we’ve learned a lot since that IBM problem, and things have been going well with technology since then. However, unlike those prior events, two large wars are ongoing, which can lead to significant operational issues ranging from the ability to anticipate physical and electronic threats to politically motivated escalations intended to embarrass hosting or attending governments to the difficult-to-manage venues used for these games.

If the event goes badly, it likely won’t be Intel’s fault, though Intel will likely get the blame. If Intel is successful, it will be a massive showcase of Intel’s AI capabilities, capabilities that would seem to exceed where most think the company currently is. This success would have an extremely positive impact on the brand and its future.

The risk is in line with the reward, but neither is trivial.

AI Could Make a Unique Difference at the Olympics

As noted, Olympic gatherings include many people from different places, all arriving at one location that will be new to most of them, and both athletes and observers have to move efficiently between venues.

If there is a venue change, weather event, terrorist threat, operational problem, protest (France is infamous for these), or other major issue, many people will need to be notified and guided to safety.

In addition, resources will need to be redeployed rapidly to deal with the issue while mitigating athlete and attendee risk. AI is ideally suited for this, as it can, through training and simulation based on past practices included in the training sets, be ready to respond to any anticipated problem and provide timely advice and direction for any unanticipated issue.

This last is incredibly important given the typical staff changes from country to country where you don’t often have experienced decision-makers where you need them, leading to catastrophic mistakes. Done right, AI has the unique ability to come up with and provide a critical response to an unanticipated problem in real time.

In addition, AI can provide attendees and athletes with direction to events they might be interested in that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about, suggestions on where to get help if they need it, and automated alerting for injuries or activities that would require Olympic or police response.

AI can provide suggestions about useful applications for attendees and athletes, locations for affordable and memorable dining and recreational experiences, and souvenirs and other things people can buy to remember the event. This can push the revenue side of this effort more effectively and result in less financial loss to the host country and businesses (the Olympics are rarely profitable).

If used properly, AI could restore profitability to this event, though I doubt that will be the case this year, given that this is the first real use of AI at the Olympics.

Wrapping Up

AI could make a massive difference to those competing in and attending the Olympics. The question is whether that will be a positive or negative difference and how much a technology supplier like Intel will be hurt or benefit.

The good news for Intel is that this is hardly the first time the Olympics has used advanced tech, and the organization has become more experienced over time regarding how best to use new technologies. The bad news is that while it is maturing rapidly, AI is still new to events like this. The Olympics is unusually complex and challenging to manage, particularly when multiple wars create tensions between the athletes and attendees.

If Intel pulls this off, it will have hard-earned a significant amount of credit and immediately become a far more powerful AI vendor. But this is a high-risk event during a time of conflict, so the possibility this will go badly is unusually high this time. While I think the reward will justify the risk, the risk is anything but trivial.

Here’s to hoping Intel and France knock this year’s Summer Olympics out of the park.

HP EliteBook 1040 14” G11 Notebook PC Wolf Pro Security Edition

We live in an increasingly hostile environment. While companies like Panasonic and its Toughbook line focus on physical threats to hardware, HP’s latest notebook focuses on security exposures, making the HP EliteBook 1040 14” G11 Wolf Pro Security Edition likely the safest notebook to own.

One of the advantages of the new line of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite notebooks is a powerful NPU and great battery life. Still, one of the disadvantages is that security software doesn’t yet fully embrace that platform and doesn’t support vPro. Intel’s vPro is often a standard requirement for enterprise-class products.

This EliteBook is a purely business-focused product targeting those in vertical markets and governments with higher security requirements than most. But after watching the movie “The Beekeeper,” I was reminded just how exposed individuals are to security threats, particularly those that have senior corporate positions or extensive systems access — like CIOs, systems administrators, and support specialists.

Those classes of jobs are at higher risk because someone could use their permissions to gain access and steal a lot of sensitive data. Given security threats are increasingly AI-driven, having a notebook specifically designed to protect against threats like this could be a godsend for those who are highly likely to be compromised.

HP EliteBook 1040 14” G11 Notebook PC Wolf Pro Security Edition (Images Credit: HP)

This PC is also a showcase of sustainability using, when possible, ocean-born plastics that either came from the ocean or would have ended up in it, like fishing nets, recycled cooking oil for some of the plastics, and recycled metals for the frame and case. HP is more aggressive than most with its use of recycled materials.

At around $2,100, this isn’t an inexpensive notebook, but it is well-provisioned with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor with 14 cores and 22 threads. It comes with 16GB of memory, 512GB SSD, and Intel’s new ARC graphics system, which is significantly more powerful than its old integrated graphics solution.

This notebook also has an NPU, but it runs at 11 TOPS, making it an AI PC that doesn’t qualify for Microsoft Copilot+. Most AI deployments remain cloud-based, and HP’s AI apps should work within these 11 TOPS limits, so this isn’t as bad a disadvantage as it otherwise might be, though I expect once we can get vPro and a 40+ TOPS NPU, IT folks will be far happier.

The EliteBook 1040 comes in a silver-white finish that I haven’t seen before but is growing on me because it doesn’t seem to fingerprint or show dirt as much as some darker colors do. In the heat we are currently experiencing, I expect it will also perform far cooler than a darker product. It’ll also sense when it is on your lap, dialing back performance and heat so you don’t iron your privates. No one wants ironed privates.

For someone with a remarkably high-security requirement, who needs Intel vPro, and who can, for now, live without a higher-performance NPU, this could be your ideal product, so the HP EliteBook 1040 14” G11 Notebook Wolf Pro Security Edition is my Product of the Week.