Wimbledon features hundreds of matches played across 18 courts. Wimbledon and IBM have collaborated to add spoken commentary to the video highlight reels that are produced for each of the singles matches that take place throughout the event with the ambition of fostering greater engagement and understanding among fans.

To achieve this, the IBM Consulting® team built a generative AI solution based on a foundation model developed using watsonx. Watsonx is designed to manage the entire lifecycle of AI models, from curating trusted data sources to governing responsible, trusted AI. Work began with IBM® watsonx.data™, a data store that connects disparate sources and allows developers to filter the data for things like profanity, hate speech or personally identifiable information. For AI Commentary, the team drew source material from nearly 130 million documents.

This data was used to train a large language model within IBM watsonx.ai™, a next-generation studio for building and training generative AI models for business use cases. The IBM team then fine-tuned the model, adding the specific domain expertise of Wimbledon, including the use of unique Wimbledon nomenclature such as “gentlemen’s draw” rather than “men’s draw.” The final model boasted three billion parameters, and the team monitored its ongoing performance using governance tools from IBM watsonx.governance™, ensuring the model performed as expected.

As a result, fans were able to experience AI-generated spoken commentary on Wimbledon highlight reels via the Wimbledon app and website, hearing play-by-play narration for the start and end of each reel, along with the key points of a match. Fans could also turn on closed captions to further enhance accessibility, a key consideration for the AELTC.

To develop new capabilities like AI Commentary every year, the AELTC needs to move with speed and purpose. That requires combining the right people, processes and technology to facilitate rapid innovation.

It starts with a long-standing collaboration between the Wimbledon team and the experts at IBM Consulting. “We work together to find alignment on areas of interest, generating a combined vision for how fans will interact with our products in the future,” says Clements. “The combined passion in delivering experiences of the highest quality supercharges our partnership and ensures we can make the most of the opportunities in front of us.”

The teams use the IBM Garage™ Methodology to foster creativity and gain a deep understanding of tennis fans. As part of their biannual innovation workshops, the Wimbledon and IBM teams continuously seek to address two key challenges: How to engage fans more deeply with Wimbledon and tennis on an ongoing basis—for many, The Championships is the only tennis event they watch all year—and how to encourage fans to follow up-and-coming players who aren’t famous yet.

Through these workshops, the team develops new concepts and features for the app and website. For example, Match Insights is an AI-generated analysis of all singles matches in the tournament, designed to get fans quickly up to speed.

It includes:

• The IBM Power Index, which uses advanced data analytics and AI to analyze recent player performance metrics and millions of expert opinions, creating an index of player momentum that changes from match to match.
• Likelihood to Win predictions, generated from a comprehensive, AI-powered analysis of player statistics, expert opinion and momentum.
• The IBM AI Draw Analysis, which uses AI models to assess the relative difficulty of each player’s potential path to the final.

In order to transform these new ideas into digital reality, IBM Consulting built a platform of innovation for Wimbledon, capable of processing structured and unstructured data, and integrating technology from a variety of sources. Automated workflows integrate and orchestrate the flow of data through the various applications and AI models needed to produce the digital experience.

These workflows are made possible by a hybrid cloud architecture and containerized apps running on Red Hat® OpenShift® (link resides outside of ibm.com). To keep the entire operation running smoothly, the team uses IBM Instana® Observability technology, which constantly monitors application performance and surfaces issues in less than three seconds, so the team can take swift action and avoid any downtime.

The securing of the platform starts months before the event begins. Using the IBM Security® Randori Recon solution, the team conducts a comprehensive attack surface analysis, scanning the entire network for vulnerabilities, including third-party or adjacent networks. Once the tournament begins, Wimbledon uses the IBM Security QRadar® Suite to assess the severity of each security event, evaluating threats, ignoring the insignificant ones and passing along only the most urgent issues to the security analysts. It then correlates that activity with threat intelligence from external sources, like the IBM X-Force® Exchange solution, looking for any activity that might be part of a more coordinated, global attack. Finally, the IBM Security QRadar Suite serves up recommendations to IBM analysts on how best to deal with the threat.

Known simply as “Wimbledon,” The Championships is the oldest of tennis’s four Grand Slams and one of the world’s highest-profile sporting events. Organized by the AELTC (link resides outside of ibm.com) and based in London, Wimbledon has been a global sporting and cultural institution since 1877.