Texas Athletics is building out a 25,000-square-foot sports intelligence hub inside Austin's Innovation Tower, powered by artificial intelligence. The university announced Friday that it has launched Bevo Lab, a sports intelligence platform combining technology, data analytics and AI, with plans to eventually expand across all 21 Longhorn varsity teams and more than 500 student-athletes.
The Texas athletic department teamed up with the Business of Sports Institute inside UT's McCombs School of Business to build the lab, which the university calls higher education's premier sports intelligence platform and living laboratory, according to texaslonghorns.com. Texas lined up Dell Technologies, Google Cloud and SHI International as partners, with Dell serving as premier founding sponsor and official technology infrastructure sponsor and SHI acting as the lab's strategic technology and solutions integrator. The Houston Chronicle also reported on the launch Friday.
Football Leads the Broader Rollout
The platform's expansion across varsity sports is set to start with football before reaching the other 20 varsity sports, per the university's announcement. At the center of the build is something Texas calls the Bevo Lakehouse, a data system meant to consolidate sports-specific information including game film and wearable-technology readouts in one place. The lab will lean on AI-driven research and data analytics to produce what the school describes as real-world solutions aimed at improving training and preparation efficiency for athletes and coaches.
Google Cloud is serving as Bevo Lab's official cloud provider and enterprise AI provider, deploying Google Cloud Platform and its Gemini models to help unify the athletic department's datasets. Texas says early work with Google Public Sector has already produced AI-driven workflows that save UT coaches more than 15 hours a week in game-planning time, though that figure comes from the university's own statement and has not been independently verified.
Grading Transfers and Shaping Player Pay
Per CBS Sports, the lab already has working tools in the field. One, called Football Scouting Intelligence, automates opponent data and video reports that coaches once compiled by hand. Another, dubbed Transfer AI, grades basketball transfer-portal prospects and projects how they would perform at Texas against an SEC schedule. The same outlet reports that Bevo Lab's data also feeds into decisions about how much Texas should pay players through revenue-sharing arrangements, folding roster economics directly into the AI pipeline alongside scouting and game strategy.
Texas isn't alone in wiring AI into its locker rooms. The same CBS Sports report notes that Arizona State's football program began using Intel AI-powered computers for recruiting and game preparation back in 2025, part of a broader scramble among college programs to automate the grunt work of scouting and roster building.
A Student Training Ground Inside the Lab
Texas is also pitching Bevo Lab as a classroom disguised as a tech company. The university says the program will develop a pipeline of students with hands-on experience for careers in technology and sports analytics, giving them the chance to gain AI skills and deploy live applications alongside the school's athletic teams. CBS Sports reports the lab has already hired 24 undergraduate students for its first team, with Google-led training set to begin the following week.
Texas projects the lab could engage as many as 40 student researchers in its first year, a figure the university's own announcement confirms, with CBS Sports adding that the program is designed to eventually scale to roughly 200 researchers annually. Construction on the Innovation Tower space is expected to wrap in about three months, with the facility targeted to be fully operational in 2027, according to the same CBS Sports report.
Del Conte Calls It a New Era
Texas Athletic Director Chris Del Conte framed the launch in sweeping terms, saying Bevo Lab is aimed at making Texas Athletics the most data-driven athletic program in the country. Del Conte separately told the Austin American-Statesman, “This is the new wave,” pointing to a shift already underway across college athletics as programs race to fold data science and AI into everything from scouting to roster pay. Del Conte also said he expects the lab to become a global benchmark for innovation in sports AI and data analytics, according to the university's statement.
For now, the lab's work includes football and basketball while the Innovation Tower buildout continues. But with Dell, Google Cloud and SHI International all attached and a pipeline of students set to begin training, Texas is positioning Bevo Lab as the infrastructure behind everything from Saturday game plans to the size of a player's paycheck.
