Boosting fan engagement with AI-powered insights

To deliver faster, smarter and more engaging content, UFC partnered with IBM to build the UFC Insights Engine—an AI-powered platform that creates automated insights for fights and fighters. At the core of the solution is IBM® watsonx Orchestrate®, which begins with a pre-fight insights agent that facilitates the process, allowing UFC editors to mine insights using natural language. Through a unified conversational interface, UFC researchers can ask complex questions, analyze trends and generate tailored insights, all routed to the most suitable AI component through watsonx Orchestrate. This orchestration integrates advanced tools, such as text-to-SQL pipelines for structured data queries and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines powered by leading open-source large language models (LLMs), including IBM Granite® and Llama. These LLMs help generate high-quality, contextual responses by retrieving and grounding information in domain-specific content. IBM watsonx allows flexibility in model choice, enabling UFC researchers to select the model best suited for each task.

IBM Build Engineering collaborated closely with UFC to architect, develop and deploy the UFC Insights Engine to improve the experience for fans. This technical partnership involved building numerous data analytics pipelines, developing advanced generative AI narration capabilities, implementing data querying systems and creating agentic capabilities to translate UFC’s rich history into production-grade insights. By combining fight statistics and biographical context with these data and AI workflows, IBM Build Engineering helped unlock previously inaccessible insights, transforming how UFC captures and communicates the story of each fight.

Trained on a vast library of UFC historical data—including fight stats, athlete profiles and event outcomes—IBM watsonx.ai® extracts insights by identifying the key performance indicators that influence fight results. The IBM solution helps highlight the critical stats that shape each matchup, delivering a deeper understanding before the fighters even throw their first punch. The watsonx.ai solution helps generate compelling data visualizations and statistical insights that deepen understanding of fighter performance and event dynamics. IBM watsonx.governance® helps ensure explainability, relevance scoring and transparency in each AI-generated response, and IBM watsonx.data® supports scalable, vectorized data management and retrieval. Additionally, to ensure consistent, repeatable and scalable infrastructure management, UFC leverages Terraform in their deployment pipeline, helping automate cloud infrastructure provisioning to deploy the UI and API components of the UFC Insights Engine. This automation helps streamline updates, reduce manual configuration errors and accelerate time-to-value across environments.

The implementation of the UFC Insights Engine has delivered measurable and transformative outcomes for UFC’s content and broadcast teams. Time to generate insights was reduced by an estimated 40%, enabling teams to redirect their focus from labor-intensive data analysis to high-impact, creative storytelling. At the same time, the volume of insights has almost tripled, with the system now capable of generating hundreds of contextual, data-driven insights across fighters, matchups and events. The solution has enabled UFC to scale content creation efficiently across broadcast, digital and social media platforms—all from a single, unified interface.

The Insights Engine significantly enhances the UFC experience for all stakeholders. For fans, it offers personalized content recommendations, real-time analysis during broadcasts and intriguing, data-driven storylines. Response times to stakeholder content requests have also improved, particularly during the critical period of fight week, enabling faster, more agile decision-making. Every insight includes explainability features and quality scores, reinforcing trust in AI-generated outputs and supporting editorial confidence. These results, though based on early usage patterns, point to a scalable foundation for continued innovation, with the orchestration layer setting the stage for real-time in-fight and post-fight insight capabilities as UFC advances toward their vision of a fully conversational, AI-driven intelligence platform.

UFC® is the world’s premier mixed martial arts (MMA) organization, with more than 700 million fans and approximately 300 million social media followers. The organization produces more than 40 live events annually in some of the most prestigious arenas around the world while broadcasting to over 950 million households across more than 170 countries. UFC’s roster features the world’s best MMA athletes representing more than 80 countries.  UFC is part of TKO Group Holdings (NYSE: TKO) and is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada.