New Orleans Turns to AI for Major Events Like Super Bowl

What do Taylor Swift concerts, the 59th edition of the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras have in common? That they were all held in New Orleans, yes, but also, that all of them had smart city technology deployed for safety and better management. Many challenges can arise during major events, which is why technology is being used to monitor them. Let's take the Super Bowl as an example. On the private side, the NFL have been using for some time the very feared AI facial recognition. From the authority perspective, the US Coast Guard uses the Team Awareness Kit for real time situational awareness. But there is a key player that during these events, faces many and sometimes new challenges that are eased thanks to smart city tech. The city. New Orleans hosted in only six months these three major events with all the risks and visitors they entail (Mardi Gras alone draws between 1 million and 1.5 million people each year). Great influx to a city means boost of tourism, job creation, media exposure, accelerated public works... Many benefits. But it also means hard work for city authorities as management, safety, infrastructure needs to be up to the task and coordinated with local, state and national actors. With these challenges in mind, New Orleans turned to smart solutions, launching a computer vision pilot in partnership with Ameresco to monitor mobility during events, as well as a platform to keep track of all agencies and safety in the city. To deploy the camera based AI solution, the city relied on streetlights. They deployed Vision AI sensors on 14 street lights in key areas close to the Caesar Superdome, the stadium where the concerts, the major sporting event and parts of Mardi Gras took place. The AI-equipped cameras do pedestrian counting to understand the flow of people and also traffic monitoring. With vision AI pedestrian counting solutions, AI identifies vehicles and people, counts them and keeps track of the direction each transport mode takes. This allows cities to understand movements within their territory to adapt to infrastructure as well as transit. better. Cameras are fed energy and connectivity through the streetlights, from which they can send data to their respective platforms. The city started testing the smart streetlights at the Taylor Swift concerts in October 2024, and were able to adjust some of its mobility to the new found traffic patterns. Well, we made dynamic adjustments to our rideshare locations in proximity to the Superdome. It helped our public safety teams reroute traffic. They understood better, what the intersection of public transit and rideshare and private transit would be in those spaces, and where we needed to keep our pedestrians more safe, where we needed to block the vehicular traffic and how our buses and our public transit system should operate during an event. To keep an eye on the technology and cyber health of all city agencies, New Orleans relied on a Critical Infrastructure Cyber Command. They brought together all the agencies and carriers, which also boosted connectivity in some of the key areas of the city, like the French Quarter, and set them up for communication as well as monitoring at the Emergency Support and Operations Center, which served as a sort of cyber hypervisor. So on Super Bowl day, we had about 40 agency participants in our center, real time monitoring our cyber landscape. The threats, and actively speaking with our event sponsors, which were the NFL and the Federal Security Agency, about the health of that game. So we knew real time who was there, how safe they were, if any threats were there. And we had partners in our command center that could respond to any issues that arose. The goal of the project was to show off the city's muscle. I'm not talking about those of American football players. Show how the city can manage big events to become THE host for future ones. But it also has to do with city policies. Across the U.S., we've seen cities like San Diego adapting local policies to better adapt to modern safety tech, like AI enabled cameras. New Orleans is able to assess if there's a need to follow in San Diego's footsteps with the test. The US is very sensitive to resident privacy, which can sometimes hinder safety tech deployment like AI cameras.