ORLANDO, Fla. — For Michael Israel, chief information and technology officer of The Kraft Group, the technology the company deploys must be as diverse as its portfolio of sports, entertainment, manufacturing and real estate businesses.
AI is widely deployed within the organization from point of sale systems inside Gillette Stadium to AI measurement systems used on the field during New England Patriots games to predictive supply and demand tools used for its paper, packaging and real estate management ventures.
“When we talk about AI, our journey is multifactor,” Israel said during a session at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo Monday.
Israel’s tech team embed themselves into various aspects of the business to better understand how technology can serve them, he said.
Its internal AI use aims to re-engineer work to make their employees and businesses more efficient. But productivity and cost savings aren’t a major focus, Israel said. The company is instead aiming to use the technology to identify behavioral changes among employees.
That might mean using AI detection technology to see if manufacturing workers are wearing the correct safety gear, or to alert stadium staff when a bathroom line stretches on during a concert and might need attention.
“Anything that my team is coming to me with in terms of a new use case or I’m bringing forward, we are requiring: How are we going to action that use case?” Israel said. “How are we going to lead that to a behavior change?”
Facial recognition technology, which has proliferated across stadiums and event venues around the country, is also a key part of keeping workflows moving, Israel said. The technology is already being used on staff members, but it will be rolling out to visitors on an opt-in basis in 2027, he said.
Where Israel said he sees a lot of potential for AI is in information retention, synthesis and action. Algorithms could detect issues at the company’s manufacturing plants and alert someone, before a site manager has to be called off-hours, he said. Israel also hopes to use AI to help mitigate the impact of losing institutional knowledge as the company’s workforce ages.
“How much knowledge is in your head?” he said of retiring staffers. “Getting that knowledge into a knowledge base where I can train models to actually help make decisions — that’s the next challenge for my team.”
AI trust and changing roles
Israel said the company utilizes the same network infrastructure, same base laptops and base builds for all of its enterprise employees, but its AI uses will vary business to business.
As AI agent use increases and autonomy grows, Israel said the company is “very careful about what we’re using.” They have agreements with Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, but have secure firewalls around which agents and tools can be used.
“And then we got into the fun part of managing tokens and opening this up to our end-user community, and determining, OK, who just used tens of thousands of tokens last month?” he said. “But you’re really looking at how to educate the environment and then how do you start to open things up slowly.”
Deploying internal and visitor-facing technology is changing the job description for employees, Israel said. His team has begun meeting with human resources to ensure that roles reflect the new applications and tools used on the job.
“Ultimately, people need to be measured differently than they have before, or we need to provide additional training rather than just dumping a new application on their lap,” he said.
AI transformations across The Kraft Group’s various businesses have required Israel and other executives to keep lines of communication open. It’s important to listen to employees as part of tech overhauls, Israel said. Young developers fresh out of college will likely be more attuned to new technologies, and older, tenured employees will have insight into business processes.
AI’s evolution is transformative, akin only to the cloud or the internet, Israel said.
“We were all in the same boat together three years ago, and now we are learning so much,” he said.
