Intel Edge AI Turns Football Crowd Data Into Revenue and Shorter Lines

Rand Harris, Alabama's chief technology officer and associate athletic director, first saw the technology in practice at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, during the 2019 National College Football Championship.

"The first thing I noticed was that the lines were shorter than what I'm accustomed to on a typical game day here. Right after that was signage, arrows and times and red, yellow and green lights that just made sense visually of like, wait a minute, what are they doing here?" Harris said. "We then deployed the WaitTime system last summer (2025) and within the first two games immediately started seeing we have some operational issues we would love to fix."

Benefits of Processing AI at the Edge

Alabama's network includes more than 100 sensors across concession stands and entrance gates in the football stadium, plus 20 more recently added sensors in the basketball arena. For real-time analytics, the university processes the visual data locally on six Dell servers powered by 12 Intel Xeon processors.

Processing AI at the edge like this delivers three key benefits for a venue: lower latency, faster operational decisions and greater data privacy. Instead of sending raw video to a data center via the cloud, the system analyzes it at the stadium.

"There's no time budget for a round trip to a distant data center and back. Processing locally at the edge means the decision to open a gate or add staff happens in the same moment as the problem. Processing at the edge means the raw video never has to leave the stadium," said Renu Navale, vice president of the Edge Computing Group at Intel.