For more than 3,000 years, the Olympic Games have been a showcase of human ambition—not just on the field of play, but in the tools used to capture, measure and share it. Radio brought the Games into living rooms, television turned athletes into global icons, and digital timekeeping shaved doubt from the stopwatch. Milano Cortina 2026 marks another inflection point: the arrival of the “Intelligent Olympics,” where cloud computing and artificial intelligence are not just hidden infrastructure, but visible protagonists in the Olympic story.

At the heart of this shift is a move from passive viewing to active, AI‑driven participation. Earlier editions of the “Olympics on the Cloud” were largely engineering feats, focused on migrating vast, fragile IT systems from temporary on‑premise servers to scalable cloud platforms. That work quietly laid the foundations. In Milan and Cortina, those foundations have been repurposed to serve something more tangible: human connection. 

From broadcast to conversation

The clearest symbol of that change is the Olympic AI Assistant, deployed on the official Olympic website and powered by Alibaba’s Qwen large language models. It is the first LLM‑based technology formally integrated into an Olympic Games, and it functions less like a search bar and more like a multilingual concierge.

Instead of scrolling through dense schedules and PDFs, fans can simply ask: “When is the women’s downhill?” or “Which events is this snowboarder competing in?” and receive answers in their own language, in a natural chat interface. For a teenager in São Paulo or a family in Seoul, the Games no longer feel like a distant, Eurocentric spectacle; they become something navigable, personal and conversational.

Cloud and AI, in other words, are being used to translate the Olympics—culturally and linguistically—so that more people can see themselves in the story.

Bringing winter sports to life

The same pattern is visible in the way athletic performance is captured and explained. AI is breathing new life into winter sports broadcasting, turning what once looked like a blur of snow and speed into something intelligible and, crucially, replayable.

Upgraded real‑time 360‑degree replay systems, running on Alibaba Cloud, can now separate athletes from visually noisy backgrounds—ice shavings, snow spray, crowds—and rebuild their movements as three‑dimensional reconstructions within 15–20 seconds. That is fast enough to be used in live broadcasts across 17 sports, from figure skating to freestyle skiing, giving viewers camera angles that would be impossible in the physical world.

A feature known as “Spacetime Slices” takes this one step further. By layering multiple phases of an athlete’s motion into a single composite image, it allows audiences to see, at a glance, the micro‑adjustments in a skater’s jump or a skier’s turn that normally only coaches and specialists appreciate. What was once described in jargon can now be seen in a single frame.

Behind the scenes, AI is also rewriting how Olympic media is produced. An instant livestream processing system, powered by Qwen and an Automatic Media Description (AMD) engine, automatically identifies athletes, recognises key moments, generates event descriptions and tags video assets in real time. Tasks that previously demanded teams of editors now happen in seconds. Broadcasters and digital teams can search for “Gold‑medal run, men’s halfpipe, Italian athlete” in plain language and retrieve exactly the right clip so editors can spend less time on researching and more time on curating content creatively.

This is not just about efficiency; it is about making vast archives of content accessible and searchable in human terms, rather than forcing people to think like machines.

A smarter route to sustainability

The intelligent Games are not only changing what fans see on screen; they are also reshaping how organisers manage what happens out of sight. Milano Cortina 2026 was billed as a greener Games, but unlike previous efforts built on high‑level pledges and end‑of‑event reporting, this edition used AI and cloud to treat sustainability as a live operational discipline.

Alibaba Cloud’s Enhanced Energy Data Management System allowed organisers to monitor energy use and carbon emissions across competition venues in real time, rather than waiting for monthly summaries. When a sudden spike in electricity usage appeared at a venue, staff could immediately ask a Qwen‑powered sustainability chatbot: “Which area is driving the increase?” or “How does today’s power consumption compare to last week?” and receive precise, data‑driven answers.

Once an issue was spotted, an Energy Issue Tracking System digitalised the response process, from logging and assigning tasks to confirming resolution. The result is an approach to sustainability that looks far more like continuous improvement in a modern factory than a one‑off auditing exercise.

Beyond operations, a co‑developed Sustainability Platform gave organisers visibility over the full lifecycle footprint of the Games—from construction and logistics to legacy use of venues—helping ensure that today’s technology investments translate into long‑term benefits for local communities after the flame goes out.

Reimagining Olympic traditions

Even the Games’ most cherished rituals are being quietly reimagined with AI as a playful collaborator rather than an intrusive presence.

Pin trading, a beloved Olympic pastime, is a case in point. In the Milano Olympic Village, an Intelligent Pin Trading Station invited athletes to guide a robotic arm to select a pin left by someone who competed before them. What could have been a simple vending machine became a small act of storytelling—a moment where a skier from Canada might leave a piece of their journey for a speed skater from Japan to discover.

Outside the athlete village, the public experienced similar fusions of tradition and technology. The “Alibaba Wonder on Ice” campaign at Milan’s Sforza Castle used cloud‑based AI to power interactive installations that responded to visitor movements and preferences, turning a historic landmark into an exploration of winter sports. At the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, personalised AI audio guides adapted to each visitor’s interests, whether they cared more about the biomechanics of a jump or the history of the flame.

In each case, cloud and AI worked in the background to tailor experiences, but what visitors noticed was something simpler: that the Games felt more like their Games.

An architecture for future events

What Milano Cortina 2026 demonstrates is that cloud and AI, when thoughtfully deployed, can form a new engagement architecture for major events. Instead of bolting on isolated apps or gimmicks, the organising committee and its partners stitched LLMs, analytics and automation into the core systems that power broadcasting, operations, sustainability and fan interaction.

This architecture has three defining characteristics.

• It is conversational. From fans talking to an AI assistant to staff querying energy dashboards in plain language, the interface to the Games is increasingly human speech, not technical menus. 
• It is adaptive. Whether adjusting replays in real time or re‑routing operational teams to fix an energy anomaly, AI systems respond to what is happening in the moment, not just to pre‑written scripts. 
• It is inclusive. Multilingual support, tailored museum guides and accessible digital experiences help broaden who feels invited into the Olympic story, across borders and demographics.

These qualities are not unique to sport. The same cloud‑and‑AI stack that underpins the Intelligent Olympics can be applied to World Expos, global summits, large‑scale festivals and even city‑wide celebrations, where organisers face similar challenges: heterogeneous audiences, complex operations, and intense scrutiny over cost and carbon.

The long game

Alibaba Cloud’s role at Milano Cortina 2026 was not to dazzle audiences with technology for its own sake, but to weave intelligence into the fabric of the Games so seamlessly that it feels like a natural extension of the Olympic spirit. A freestyle skier finding a rare pin through a robotic exchange, a volunteer resolving an energy issue before anyone notices, or a fan in a different time zone receiving real‑time updates in their native language: each moment is small, but together they signal a shift in what the Olympics can be.

In the Italian Alps, the Intelligent Olympics have taken shape not as a futuristic spectacle, but as a more human one—more understandable, more sustainable and more accessible to people far beyond the host nation. By integrating LLM technologies, real‑time analytics and cloud‑native systems across the Olympic ecosystem, Milano Cortina 2026 has offered a preview of how global events might evolve.

If previous eras of the Games were defined by what audiences could see, this one may be defined by what they can understand, influence and share. The torch still burns in the stadium, but increasingly, the Olympic spirit lives in the billions of personalised, intelligent interactions that surround it.