After years of planning, the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games are here.
The safety and security challenges at this year’s Games—including crime, terrorism, public disruption and cyber attacks—are well documented, and France is deploying unprecedented levels of security to safeguard the events.
Paris 2024 will be the largest event ever held in France and marks a century since Paris last hosted the competition. The 1924 Summer Olympics were a Games of firsts. The first Olympic Village, the first official closing ceremony, and the first to be broadcast on radio—a new medium that brought live updates into people’s homes.
Looking back to France’s previous Games (1900 and 1924) shows how much society and in particular real-time information flows have changed. But also—somewhat surprisingly—how many of the challenges in securing sporting events remain the same today.
Field incursions, fan violence, and crowd management issues all occurred at Paris 1924. In one of the most notable incidents, a riot broke out after the U.S. rugby team pulled off a stunning victory against France in the gold-medal rugby match. The U.S. team needed police protection to leave the stadium, and American fans were assaulted in the stands by the hostile crowd. Fifteen-a-side rugby has not been seen at the Olympics since.
Event coverage: Paris 1924 to today
The 1924 Summer Olympics experienced unparalleled interest and media attention. Nearly 1,000 journalists from all over the world attended and kept audiences updated through newspaper articles, magazine features, and black-and-white photographs.
Aside from the radio coverage—which was focused solely on sporting events—there was no ‘real-time’ information. The Games were also covered exclusively by reporters, unlike this year’s event, which will see unprecedented online engagement by spectators, local residents and digital audiences globally.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will also play a critical role. Officials from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) estimate there will be more than 500 million social media posts during this summer’s Olympics, which are primed to be the most digital Games in history. The IOC, which released its first Olympic AI agenda in April, will deploy AI in a number of ways, including to protect athletes and officials from online abuse.
Discovering high-impact events and critical information in real time from public digital signals is near impossible in 2024 without AI. Social media is highly fragmented, and too much data is generated every day for manual review.
Dataminr has created the world’s leading AI-powered event and information discovery platform, which combines advanced AI techniques with over a million data sources to discover events from within public data. Dataminr’s system will be detecting the earliest indications of any public safety or disruptive incidents before, during and after this year’s Games; like it does daily in over 190 countries.
AI event detection: Paris 2024
Eyewitnesses, rather than journalists, are likely to share the first updates on any safety or security incidents at Olympic venues, fan zones, or public spaces during this year’s competition. Details about these events will be recorded and shared instantly as public data—across various sources, languages and data formats including text, image, video and audio—in real time from mobile devices.
Dataminr’s powerful AI models, which have been explicitly trained to predict when complex public data patterns indicate nascent risk events, will detect and then immediately describe these events in real time using generative AI and send concise, actionable alerts to customers around the world who need to immediately know when a safety or security event is occurring.
For the first time at the Olympic Games, Dataminr’s groundbreaking new regenerative AI (ReGenAI) technology will provide customers with continuously updating, AI-powered live event briefs as situations develop. This revolutionary new solution will enable organizations to not only speed up the identification of risks to their people and operations but enhance their ability to respond quickly and efficiently.
Video: ReGenAI briefs available on Dataminr’s web platform and mobile app
ReGenAI will ensure that global security leaders—irrespective of the time of day, day of week or size of team—have the most up-to-date information to make decisions and act with confidence.
Dataminr’s Paris 2024 Olympics support
To support corporate security teams over the coming weeks, Dataminr is providing complimentary access to its real-time safety and security AI alerting for the length of the Olympic Games. Security leaders can apply for email-only or full web platform access, and receive free Dataminr alerts in English, French or German when a security incident breaks.
Paris 2024 Olympics Alerting
Apply to get Dataminr’s real-time alerts during the Olympics
Learn MoreOrganizations and industries supported
Dataminr will assist nearly 250 corporate security teams with employees, facilities and core business operations in France over the Olympic period. This includes security leaders supporting major hotel chains and airlines, as well as those in the following industries: retail, food and beverage, energy, telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing—all of which are providing critical services to the expected 15 million Paris visitors.
Video: Corporate security teams can view their employees, travelers and facilities in a single-pane-of-glass
Dataminr’s end-to-end Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security solution will also be used by travel security managers and executive protection teams, as well as sponsors and official partners. At the same time, First Alert, Dataminr’s product for the public sector, will support multiple government agencies in ensuring public safety and timely first response to emerging incidents.
A series of Dataminr customer events in recent months have helped private and public organizations prepare and benchmark their security plans ahead of the opening ceremony. Continued upgrades to AI models and an expansion of data sources have ensured that Dataminr will provide the fastest, most actionable hyperlocal safety and security alerting to corporate and government clients across France during Paris 2024.
The world has come a long way since 1924. New technologies, primarily driven by advancements in AI, are helping organizations detect, respond, and recover from security and disruptive events faster than ever before.
