New international research from Lenovo reveals that technological advancements are fundamentally changing how fans experience the FIFA World Cup 2026, making viewers feel closer to the action than ever before. According to a survey of football fans across Australia, Canada, India, the U.K., and the U.S., 87% say technology is improving their viewing experience, and 84% report that close-to-action camera perspectives help them feel like they are right there on the pitch.

Accelerating this unprecedented view of the game is Referee View, powered by Lenovo AI, which gives viewers a first-person look at the match from the referee’s point of view. The research found that 76% of FIFA World Cup viewers have seen or heard about Referee View, and 91% say the close-to-action perspective is appealing. Furthermore, 88% say that smooth, stable footage is an important part of viewing sports footage, and nearly all fans (98%) say clear picture quality has been important when watching this tournament.

Referee View gives FIFA World Cup viewers a first-person perspective from the center of the action through a lightweight camera mounted on the match official. While the raw footage is fast-moving and sometimes unstable, Lenovo's AI-powered video analytics platform automatically transforms it into smooth, broadcast-quality video in real time. The platform reduces camera jitter by up to 60%, creating a stable viewing experience while preserving the speed and intensity of the match.

Key Survey Findings

The online survey, conducted June 24–27, 2026, among 2,514 adults aged 18+ across the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, and Australia, highlighted the following statistics:

"Referee View is giving fans a perspective that's never before been possible, just in time for the world's biggest sporting event," said Art Hu, Chief Information Officer, Lenovo and Chief Technology & Delivery Officer, Solutions and Services Group. "By combining AI with advanced video analytics, we're transforming fast-moving footage into a seamless broadcast experience. Building on Lenovo's work in F1, where cameras operate in some of sport's toughest conditions, we're applying that expertise at the World Cup to help make a referee's point of view broadcast-ready in real time."

As FIFA's Official Technology Partner, Lenovo is delivering AI-powered innovations across the tournament that support fans, players, coaches, and tournament operations. In addition to Referee View, these include AI-enabled 3D player avatars, the FIFA AI Pro platform, and an intelligent command center.

Lenovo today announced the expansion of the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with a portfolio of AI inferencing and agentic AI innovations designed to help organizations deploy AI agents faster, reduce token costs, and run AI economically from device to AI factory. As AI moves from model training to continuous inference and autonomous execution, enterprises face a new challenge: how to deliver intelligence at scale while achieving sustainable costs. Organizations need the flexibility to run AI where data is created and decisions are made—on AI PCs, devices, and workstations; in the data center; or in the cloud. Lenovo's hybrid AI factory enables inference everywhere, helping customers place AI closer to their data, users, and business processes while optimizing performance, cost, security, and governance.

As hybrid AI inferencing becomes the primary driver of enterprise AI spending, Lenovo is expanding its Hybrid AI portfolio with new inference-optimized platforms. Through collaboration with ecosystem leaders including NVIDIA, Intel, Red Hat, and Canonical, Lenovo is delivering open, scalable solutions that simplify AI deployment with only a few clicks, accelerate time-to-value, and improve AI economics across hybrid environments.

New Hybrid AI Platforms

Lenovo introduced several new platforms to advance AI inferencing capabilities:

Industry research shows that 92% of organizations deploying agentic AI report costs exceeding expectations. Lenovo's inference-optimized architecture helps address these challenges by delivering high-performance CPU-based inferencing, scalable infrastructure, and improved token economics. For AI workloads requiring sustained CPU and GPU utilization, Lenovo solutions can deliver up to 8X lower cost per token than cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service environments and up to 18X lower cost per million tokens compared with model-as-a-service APIs.

Agentic AI Adoption

Building on this inferencing foundation, Lenovo is introducing new agentic AI capabilities designed to help organizations increase productivity and reduce operational complexity. With one-click deployment of autonomous and long-running agents, Lenovo ensures customers have everything they need from the desktop to the data center to start harnessing value with agentic AI and realize measurable business outcomes.

Lenovo is expanding these capabilities across a growing range of enterprise use cases, including helping employees find information faster using Knowledge Super Agent use cases and reducing the burden on IT teams by automating routine operational tasks. The company is also co-developing autonomous AI agents, skills, and solutions for NVIDIA NemoClaw with customers around the globe. New personal AI Factory environments on Lenovo ThinkStation PGX provide a simplified environment for development, including NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints.

Trust by Design

As organizations confront increasing concerns around data privacy, governance, and AI security, Lenovo’s AI infrastructure portfolio continues to advance a trust-by-design approach to AI deployment. New capabilities include Nutanix Compute only Cluster on Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers, a CPU-only, enterprise-grade virtualization platform with greater flexibility and simplicity. Lenovo XClarity One delivers unified zero-trust management, visibility, control, and automation across hybrid infrastructures. Additionally, supply chain and hardware root-of-trust protections help organizations maintain compliance and governance requirements.