Kraft Group CIO: Training facility revamp brings VR to the gridiron

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A new training facility for the New England Patriots football team introduced virtual reality, expanded networking resources and furthered a pragmatic AI strategy for the team and company.

For Michael Israel, CIO of The Kraft Group, which owns the football team, stadium and other businesses, this is the second part of a major IT overhaul for the professional football team, the first of which included networking upgrades made at Gillette Stadium as well as across Kraft's other operations.

In late summer, the company officially opened the $95 million, 160,000-square-foot New Balance Athletics Center, the team's new training facility in Foxborough, Mass.

Overall, the stadium has four 10-gig circuits, two for the stadium and two for the business, with Cisco firewalls and networking, Israel said. Coaches and scouts rely on the system daily, even during the offseason, as the team prepares for the draft and preseason. That includes pulling in footage from a multitude of sources to assess players and potential picks.

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Building for big plays

Israel said the new tech at the training facility, done with technology infrastructure provider NWN, could attract prospective team members who want to see how the team can support them beyond game day.

"When a player is evaluating, 'Gee, do I want to play for one team or another,' and they're looking at getting traded … it's not just about the money," he said.

An update to the legacy training facility was needed, Israel said, given it was built some 30 years ago, along with the stadium. "It was getting long in the tooth, falling behind at times," he said.

Part of the challenge was to create more space for not just training activity, but also modernized technology resources. That included facial-recognition door access for players and employees instead of badges, and expanding from a half-dozen meeting rooms in the prior facility to 32 meeting rooms, all equipped with Cisco Webex, Wi-Fi and connectivity.

The new facility also includes a professional-grade broadcast network, and support for network media teams with separate, distinct Wi-Fi and hardwire connections.

Virtual training day

The training facility includes a virtual reality space. Israel said the VR resources draw on video footage recorded at the practice fields. That lets coaches and players review performance from an on-field perspective.

"Players can see what happened … this is what you did right; this is what you missed," he said. It offers a near-real view of their performance as opposed to sitting in classrooms for theoretical discussions about their training.

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The VR room is meant to provide a life-size experience of the field, with a screen the width of the field and 100-inch screens along the sides for PowerPoint presentations to mark up plays, Israel said.

This includes dedicated hardware for storing video, along with a combination of on-site and cloud-based resources, such as NFL video.

"We have an excess of three petabytes of video and photo data on our network," Israel said.

A grounded game for AI

New training facility features bring challenges of finding balance in the use of AI.

"I'm fighting against AI in terms of, how do I put effective controls around it that don't hamper innovation?" Israel said.

He brought in training for staff and other guardrails as AI became part of their operations. For example, Israel said an AI-based system was introduced to assess food consumption at the facility, better forecast future needs and reduce waste.

"We're also evaluating right now a video-based AI system that's in pilot that allows us to ingest all the video from the league," he said. Coaches can then pose questions to the AI about footage from games. Scouts could also use AI for queries about prospects they are vetting.

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Getting these AI systems in play requires robust network support and GPU enhancements to servers, Israel said, which may have been inevitable to remain competitive regardless.

"That would have happened with or without the facility, but the facility is built with technology that can support whatever we are looking to do," he said.

There are restrictions on how and for what purposes AI is used at the facility.

"The NFL has very specific rules about the use of AI. Anytime we're using AI, either for the team or for the stadium, we actually have to go and register that with the league itself and go through a process for approving that adoption," Israel said.

The NFL retains strict ownership of game footage and certain related media from the games, and how they are used.

Israel also said The Kraft Group locked down AI use within its internal network a little more than one year ago, blocking the use of personal AI.

"If we are using Copilot or OpenAI or Claude, we will only use enterprise versions," he said.

Blocking the token blitz

Israel said he has fought the battle of tokenomics to ensure that AI tokens are spent efficiently. His goal was to prevent the overuse of AI models that devour tokens for access, putting controls in place on who is permitted to make extensive use of these resources.

"The users who actually need it — my developers, my high-end users — we issue them a different level of access to tokens," he said.

Token usage still gets audited and monitored to ensure staff members are trained to prompt AI effectively. "Ultimately, the OpenAIs of the world — they don't care. They want you to use as many tokens as possible, so they'll default you to the highest model," Israel said.

The controls he put in place are meant to prevent tech bills from exploding while continuing to leverage AI — a need Israel said he believes other CIOs can relate to.

"My biggest challenge in all of this … whether in football or any other businesses that I support, my budgets are not elastic. I don't have the ability to just do whatever and give people a blank check," he said.

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