The NFL's Surface tablets get an AI upgrade
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The National Football League's ubiquitous — and oft-maligned — Surface tablets are getting an AI-infused upgrade, officials from the league and Microsoft tell Axios.
Why it matters: The league is trying to give coaches faster access to the data they want, while stopping short of letting the AI make decisions.
Driving the news: The NFL and Microsoft on Wednesday announced an expanded, multiyear extension to their longtime partnership.
- As part of the upgrade, Microsoft is providing teams 2,500 new Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ tablets leaguewide.
- The tablets, which arrived before the start of the 2025 preseason, allow coaches and players to use Copilot to quickly pull up video clips from specific scenarios such as scoring plays or those on a certain down.
Zoom in: Coaches up in the booth will have access to AI copilots that help them navigate massive Excel spreadsheets to track things like personnel groupings and snap counts.
- In the past, coaches would track everything in the game using Excel, but often resorted to pen and paper to do their analysis of the data.
- The league is also expanding its use of Microsoft devices to help folks on the business side with game-day operations.
- Some teams, such as the San Francisco 49ers, have already been using AI to help with tracking wait times at entrances and concessions. (The league has let teams experiment with AI for non-football operations on game day but has, until now, prohibited on-field use.)
Catch up quick: The NFL has been using Microsoft's tablets since 2014. There were initial glitches and frustrations — including a few memorable moments of players and coaches manhandling the tablets.
- "Whatever's in their hand is going to be the receiving end of the displeasure of the results," NFL deputy CIO Aaron Amendolia told Axios.
- Adding insult to injury, the Microsoft-branded tablets were regularly referred to as "iPad-like tools."
The big picture: Harnessing massive amounts of data to make better decisions has been a trend in sports for some time. The key is to ensure the technology is reliable and equitable, Amendolia said.
- The NFL is also using AI to help identify unsafe plays and develop better protective gear and practices, in partnership with Amazon, as Axios showed off at last year's AI+ Summit in New York.
Yes, but: The league — at least for now — is using AI to allow coaches and players to get to the information they want faster, but not allowing the technology to offer its own play call suggestions.
Between the lines: The league hopes that the new devices relieve frustrations rather than adding to them. The primary goal of the tablets has always been to get teams more information faster.
- Coaches only have about 40 seconds between plays. Before the Surface, it used to take several minutes to see data on what worked and what didn't in a play.
- "There was this time lag that was preventing coaches and players from making faster decisions," Microsoft corporate VP Bryson Gordon told Axios.
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