The football teams of Iraq and Morocco have an official AI platform of choice, Google's Gemini.
Google, owned by the US technology giant Alphabet, announced that Gemini would be a technology sponsor for the two national squads.
“This sponsorship will leverage our cutting-edge AI technology to celebrate the region’s rich sports culture and transform the fan experience,” Google said in a blog post.
“Together with the football federations, we will launch a series of fan-centric activations, powered by Google Gemini, over the next three months,” the blog post continued, referring to both teams' participation in the 2026 Fifa World Cup.
Google said Gemini's text-to-image AI feature, Nano Banana, could be used by fans to “create custom cheering visuals”, and that Gemini's text-to-music feature, Lyria, could help compose songs for the fans of the teams.
“This sponsorship underscores our commitment to supporting football enthusiasts in the Arab world, and making it inclusive and immersive for everyone,” Google said.
Adnan Dirjal, the Iraqi Football Association's president, said the Google partnership was the perfect way to mark Iraq's return to the World Cup after 40 years.
“This agreement will provide us with many advantages, foremost the use of the latest AI technologies to enhance the commercial and marketing value of the Iraq national team,” he said.
The partnership comes as countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa seek to become major players in the booming AI sector, which is at the centre of unprecedented investment and interest.
AI is also seen by many as a way to diversify economies currently focused on oil. Although not considered an AI leader in the Middle East, Iraq has made moves to punch above its weight in the rapidly growing industry.
The University of Baghdad in Iraq last year announced it would establish a college dedicated to AI focused on engineering, biomedical applications and big data. Estimates indicate that between 60,000 and 70,000 students are enrolled at the University of Baghdad.
AI projects and programmes throughout the Middle East have helped to place a greater emphasis on the inclusion of Arabic and other cultural aspects that might have otherwise been left out of AI development, which initially focused on English and Western data.
A study spearheaded by the UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence indicated that even amid those efforts to bolster Arabic's presence in AI, the learning abilities of multilingual AI language models are still skewed to perform better in English.
“Models had lower performance in low-resource languages like Amharic, Arabic and Yoruba on questions about science and technology,” the study stated.
Although Google is considered to be among the main contenders in the race for AI dominance, its efforts to advertise Gemini have sometimes been met with a backlash.
During the 2024 Summer Olympics, Google's ad showed a father using Gemini to assist in writing a letter that would get a response from an Olympic athlete. Some expressed dismay that AI was being promoted as a way to replace basic literacy, among other things.
That backlash also segued into other fears about AI potentially causing a major disruption in labour and, in turn, a spike in unemployment.
Adding to those collective fears about AI, Google's AI workers in the UK recently voted to seek union representation over concerns the company’s technology is being used by Israel and the US military.
