IBM, Wimbledon and the AI capabilities of watsonx

Since the first Championships in 1877, Wimbledon has brought together fans spanning all walks of life—from members of the British royal family to business owners to armchair sports fans—to enjoy fresh strawberries, cream and champagne while watching the best tennis the world has to offer.

But not everyone can make the journey to The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) in southwest London. That is why more than 16 million people around the world follow the drama, beauty and excitement of the event through the official Wimbledon app and website. These world-class digital experiences have been developed and delivered through a partnership between Wimbledon and IBM that has spanned more than three decades.

“As an organization with heritage at its core, the innovation partnership with IBM is vital to ensure we evolve as the world around us changes,” says Chris Clements, Senior Manager of Digital Strategy and Products at the AELTC. “By utilizing the latest tools and world-leading expertise from IBM, we are able to innovate to ensure enduring relevance. There is a fantastic synergy between IBM and Wimbledon as organizations with rich histories that are constantly changing to ensure they are fit for the future.”

This year, Wimbledon once again tapped into the power of IBM® watsonx^®, a portfolio of AI and data products, to revamp the fan experience and introduce new features. “We’re always looking to see how we can improve fan engagement through the use of AI and other IBM technologies,” says Bill Jinks, Technology Director at the AELTC. “How do we bring the next level of data to the fan? How do we get Wimbledon front and center and use AI to bring insights to the fore that people might not see instantly? That’s exactly the sort of innovation that excites us.”

Wimbledon features hundreds of matches played across 18 courts. The action is fast-paced, and the competitive advantage can change in an instant. To help fans keep up, Wimbledon and IBM collaborated to develop Match Chat, an interactive AI assistant that can field questions from fans during and after ladies’ and gentlemen’s singles matches.

Fans can engage with the assistant using either prewritten prompts or their own questions, for example, “Who has converted more break points?” or “Who is performing better in the match?” Immediate responses and match analysis—delivered by AI—offer instant insights that enrich the fan experience.

To build Match Chat, the IBM team utilized the value of one of Wimbledon’s most precious assets: their data. Every game, set and match at The Championships generates datasets containing scores, speeds and other critical statistics. Millions of data points are generated throughout the tournament. To manage this massive and varied library of data, Wimbledon used IBM watsonx.data®, a hybrid data lakehouse that centralizes and integrates data from multiple sources and then unifies structured and unstructured data inputs and prepares them for processing by AI models.

To facilitate fan interaction with Match Chat, the team built an AI assistant using IBM watsonx Orchestrate® and included a collection of AI agents and large language models (LLMs), such as IBM Granite®, that were trained on the Wimbledon editorial style and the language of tennis.

The AI models that power Match Chat were trained using IBM watsonx.ai^®, a next-generation studio for building and developing generative AI (gen AI) models for business use cases. And the IBM team monitors the ongoing performance of the AI models using governance tools from IBM watsonx.governance^®.

As a result, the Wimbledon team is able to satisfy the curiosity of fans at scale, answering the questions of both existing and new tennis fans, both on the court and across the globe. “This would not be possible without IBM’s enterprise-grade AI,” says Jinks.

In addition to Match Chat, Wimbledon worked with IBM to enhance the beloved Likelihood to Win analysis on their app and website. Until this year, Likelihood to Win had been a pre-match, head-to-head match projection generated from a comprehensive, AI-powered analysis of player statistics, expert opinion and player momentum. This year, Live Likelihood to Win is updated throughout each match and is represented visually on a line graph that highlights the momentum shifts as a match unfolds.

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

AELTC’s brand of innovation 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 Wimbledon and IBM teams use the IBM Garage^™ Method to foster creativity and gain a deep understanding of tennis enthusiasts. As part of their innovation workshops, they seek to address two key challenges:

1. 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.
   
   
2. How to deliver personalized experiences that allow fans to explore stories that might otherwise go untold.

Through these workshops, the IBM team develops concepts and features for the app and website. For example, IBM SlamTracker has been the premier scoring application for Wimbledon for many years, providing real-time scores, projections, statistics and point-by-point analysis of every match. This year, Match Chat and Live Likelihood to Win have been added to SlamTracker.

In order to transform these new ideas into digital reality, IBM Consulting built a platform of innovation for Wimbledon that is 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^®. To keep the entire operation running smoothly, the team uses elements of the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (link resides outside of ibm.com) which unifies and secures the cloud infrastructure. To avoid unnecessary downtime that could affect the end-user experience, Wimbledon relies on IBM Instana® Observability technology, which monitors application performance and surfaces issues requiring resolution, so the team can take swift action.

Finally, the development team takes advantage of IBM watsonx Code Assistant®, a powerful gen AI assistant, to increase the efficiency and accuracy of their code. This solution uses gen AI to accelerate software development, helping developers generate code based on natural language prompts. The team is then able to analyze, annotate, communicate about and auto-complete snippets of code.

Wimbledon plans to continue collaborating with IBM to explore new ways of enhancing the fan experience through data, AI and ongoing digital innovation.

Known simply as "Wimbledon", The Championships is the oldest of tennis’ 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.