The 2026 World Cup is rolling out two layers of technology that most of its 10 million visitors will actually touch: a consumer-AI layer led by Google, and a biometric-identity layer that turns a fan’s face into a ticket. This is the quieter half of the tournament’s tech, the half aimed at fans rather than threats.
Across 16 host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico, neither layer comes with a robot dog attached. Both, though, are likely to outlast the final.
Google’s Gemini goes to the World Cup
Google has made Gemini and its Pixel phones official sponsors of several national teams, among them France, Argentina, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, and the United States. Pixel is the official phone of the French squad, which is also using Gemini for team communications.
For fans, Google is pushing tournament features across Search, Maps, Waze, and the Gemini app: live score tracking, AI-generated tactical diagrams, and match highlights the app assembles on demand. It is also making its AI Mode Pro visuals free over the summer, timed to the tournament. For Google, the World Cup is a global launchpad for Gemini, dressed as fan service.
Your face is the ticket
At the gate, the bigger change is biometric. At Gillette Stadium near Boston, fans can opt into facial recognition that links their face to a digital wallet, so they enter and pay without a ticket or card. Several venues are testing similar face-based entry.
Around the stadiums, cities are wiring up wider surveillance. In Seattle, officials connected stadium-district CCTV and automatic licence-plate readers to a Real-Time Crime Center, after a public fight over when the cameras switch on and whether they would track immigration status. None of this is unprecedented: Qatar ran the 2022 World Cup with around 22,000 cameras across eight venues. The new element is the consumer-facing pitch, that handing over your face is simply faster.
This biometric layer sits alongside the more visible security hardware TNW has already covered, the robot dogs, hunter drones, and AI cameras, but it is the part fans will queue up and opt into themselves. And the core technology is fallible: facial recognition is something independent studies have shown misidentifies women and people of colour more often than white men, and which TNW has long flagged as a civil-liberties risk once it scales.
Even the referee is now a camera
The AI reaches the pitch too. FIFA’s body-worn ‘Ref Cam’, trialled at the 2025 Club World Cup, is now written into the Laws of the Game and will be available in every match, with selected moments fed to broadcasters and stadium screens. FIFA’s partner Lenovo is using AI to clean up the footage, claiming up to 50 per cent less motion blur from a sprinting referee.
The pitch is transparency. The effect is one more live, AI-processed feed in the broadcast.
The bill falls on the fans
More than 120 civil-society groups, including the ACLU and Amnesty International, have issued a travel advisory for the tournament. They warn of racial profiling, device searches, social-media screening, and facial recognition, and advise some travellers to remove face-unlock from their phones before flying.
In February, ICE said its agents would play a ‘key part’ in tournament security.
The face-payment systems are, for now, opt-in. The question the tournament leaves open is what happens on 20 July, the day after the final. Stadium facial recognition, licence-plate networks, and AI video analytics rarely disappear when the crowds do.
The World Cup is where the softer half of this infrastructure gets normalised, in front of 10 million people, as the price of getting through the gate.
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