Acing the US Open digital experience

The US Open is a sprawling, two-week tournament, with hundreds of matches played on 22 different courts. Keeping up with all the action is a challenge, both for tennis fans and the USTA editorial team covering the event. So, the USTA asked IBM to design, develop, and deliver solutions that enhance the digital experience and help its team serve up more content, covering more matches throughout the tournament.

To do it, the IBM Consulting team built generative AI-powered features using the watsonx, a part of IBM's portfolio of AI products. For example, Match Reports are AI-generated post-match summaries that are designed to get fans quickly up to speed on the action from around the tournament. AI Commentary adds AI-generated, spoken commentary to match highlights. And SlamTracker–the premier scoring application for the US Open–features AI-generated match previews and recaps.

“The AI models built with watsonx do more than enhance the digital experience of the US Open,” says Kirsten Corio, Chief Commercial Officer, USTA. “They also scale the productivity of our editorial team by automating key workflows.”

The IBM team worked with multiple AI models to develop the new features, including the family of Granit AI models. These large language models already understand language, but they needed to be trained, or “tuned,” on tennis data in order to translate US Open action into sentences and summaries.

“Foundation models are incredibly powerful and are ushering in a new age of generative AI,” says Shannon Miller, a Partner at IBM Consulting. “But to generate meaningful business outcomes, they need to be trained on high-quality data and develop domain expertise. And that’s why an organization’s proprietary data is the key differentiator when it comes to AI.”

The team used watsonx.data to connect and curate the USTA’s trusted data sources. The curation process includes de-duping and filtering the foundational data that informs the large language model, as well as the USTA’s proprietary data. The process filters for things like profanity or abusive language and objectionable content.

The models were then trained to translate tennis data into cogent descriptions, summarizing entire matches in the case of Match Reports, or generating sentences that describe the action in highlight reels for AI Commentary. Over the course of the 2024 US Open, Match Reports and AI Commentary will be generated for all men’s and women’s singles matches; something the USTA editorial team has never done before. And the ongoing operation of the models is monitored and managed using elements of watsonx.governance, which ensures the AI is performant, compliant and operating as expected.

During the software development phase of the project, the team took advantage of a powerful generative AI assistant to increase the efficiency and accuracy of its code. IBM watsonx Code Assistant™ uses generative AI from a purpose-built Granite model to accelerate software development, helping developers generate code based on natural language prompts. The team used this tool to analyze and explain snippets of code, annotate code to facilitate better collaboration between developers, and auto-complete snippets of analyzed code.

To develop new capabilities every year, the USTA needs to move with speed and purpose. The process starts the week after the US Open concludes, when IBM Consulting kicks off work using the IBM Garage^™ Methodology, a highly collaborative approach to co-creation.

“When we engage with a client, it’s critical that we work closely together every step of the way, ideating, iterating and adapting as we drive toward the client’s desired end state,” says Miller.

In order to transform new ideas into digital reality, IBM Consulting designs, develops, and manages a powerful digital infrastructure capable of processing structured and unstructured data, and integrating technology from a variety of sources. This foundational infrastructure is advanced and improved upon every year.

“It used to be that innovation cycles were measured in years,” says the USTA’s Corio. “But now, innovation is measured in weeks and days, and it can come from anywhere. So, we needed a flexible platform that could handle all kinds of data, automate the process of turning data into insight, and do it all while protecting the entire digital environment.”

The raw material of any digital experience is data, and the US Open tournament produces a lot of it. For starters, each US Open consists of 128 men and 128 women singles players, and a total of seven rounds for each tournament. Each tennis player comes with his or her own data set, including world ranking and recent performance. But that’s just the beginning.

Over the course of the tournament, more than 125,000 points will be played. And each one of those points generates its own data set: serve direction, speed, return shot type, winner shot type, rally count and even ball position. All told, more than seven million data points are generated during the tournament.

To add more texture and context to the US Open digital experience, the team wanted to go beyond the numbers. So, they used AI to analyze the language and sentiment of millions of articles from hundreds of thousands of different sources to develop insights that are unique and informative, for instance, the likelihood to Win predictions for all singles matches. To help manage the collection, integration, and analysis of the data sets, IBM used IBM watsonx.data™, a purpose-built data store specifically designed to handle AI workloads.

“It’s a massive data management operation, incorporating multiple sources of data and a variety of partners,” says Miller. “But the magic happens when you combine hard data like stats and scores with unstructured data like media commentary. That is what gives tennis fans a more complete picture of each match.”

To streamline this process, during the years working with the UTSA, IBM Consulting built automated workflows that 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 the containerized apps running on Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud. The US Open hybrid multicloud architecture is made up of four public clouds, drawing on data from a variety of sources and integrating features and capability from a variety of partners. By containerizing the applications, the team can write them once and run them anywhere, ensuring that the right data gets to the right application on the right cloud.

“With this platform, we’re capable of doing things that were not possible just a few years ago,” says Corio. “Managing all that data, producing AI-generated insights, securing the environment … IBM just makes it all come together for us. And I can’t wait to see what the future of the partnership holds.”

Founded in 1881, the USTAis the national governing body for the sport of tennis in the US. The US Open s the association’s Grand Slam tournament, first held in 1968—the year that Arthur Ashe won the men’s singles title. The US Open is played each September at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, New York.