How Milano Cortina 2026 handled 1M+ messages at the biggest Winter Games

The customer

An Olympic volunteer takes time off, travels, signs up months ahead to be part of the Games once in their life. So when 130,000 apply, 18,000 make it through, and everyone wants to know when their shift starts, where to report, whether their accreditation is sorted, a slow answer costs more than a support metric. It's someone outside a venue in the cold in the morning that can't be redone.

That was the problem in front of Leonardo Cohen, who led volunteer support systems for Milano Cortina 2026. He'd run workforce systems for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, so this was familiar territory, and it still gave him pause. 

A record-setting Winter Games, two cities, 116 events, two languages, a deadline that doesn't move, and nowhere near a call center's worth of people to absorb it.

The challenge

The questions never stopped. Applications, role assignments, schedules, health and safety, accessibility, and then the live ones during the Games, when someone needs an answer in ten minutes, not tomorrow. In Italian and English, across a country, against a clock that doesn't move.

Adding people wasn't on the table. So whatever Leonardo's team built had to clear the bulk of that volume by itself and pass only the cases that truly needed a person to the right person, first time. Get the routing wrong at this scale and you're not annoying a customer, you're stranding a volunteer who showed up to help.

The audit

Leonardo had one rule going in: everything in one place. A volunteer's first application and their panicked question mid-shift had to live in the same system, instead of split across a chat widget, an inbox, and in a ticketing tool that didn't connect. At Games scale, every seam between tools is a place a request goes missing.

He also wanted something his teams could stand up fast and run themselves, in the languages volunteers were writing in. One system for automation, live agents, and email tickets, not three vendors stitched together. Text did all of it on one platform.

The solution

The AI met nearly every volunteer first. Across nearly 49,000 conversations it cleared the routine volume on its own, sorting Italian and non-Italian volunteers into the right flow without anyone managing it. 448,000 answers later, the queue still hadn't piled up.

What it couldn't resolve, it handed off cleanly: the sensitive, complicated cases became tracked tickets with a full history and a clear path to the right department. More than 72,000 of those.

What Leonardo braced for was onboarding, two languages and dozens of volunteer roles. A half-hour walkthrough, and agents were live the same day.

The result

130,000 applicants, 18,000 volunteers, one system from first application to closing shift. Of the conversations that came in, only about 650 ever reached a human. Text handled the rest.

And the volunteers were happy with it. Leonardo built his own reporting on Text's APIs and scored sentiment across 73,000 interactions: 67% positive, 9% negative. Not what you'd expect from a support operation under that kind of pressure.

What he keeps coming back to isn't a feature, it's the partnership, and he's already applying it to what's next: the World Cup, LA28, the Games after that.