Harnessing technology to drive fan engagement with efficiency, flexibility and innovation
Harnessing technology to drive fan engagement with efficiency, flexibility and innovation
For three weeks at the end of summer, more than one million people make the journey to Flushing, New York, to watch the best tennis players in the world compete in the US Open Tennis Championships.
14M
World-class digital experiences for more than 14 million fans around the globe
1.2 billion
IBM captures and analyzes more than 1.2 billion data points throughout the tournament
Year after year, it’s one of the most highly attended sporting events in the world. But more than 14 million global tennis fans follow the tournament through the US Open app and website.
And to keep them coming back for more, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) has partnered with IBM for more than three decades, designing, developing and delivering a world-class digital experience that constantly advances its features and functionality.
“The digital experience of the US Open is of enormous importance to our global fans and, therefore, to us,” says Kirsten Corio, Chief Commercial Officer at the USTA. “That means we need to constantly innovate to meet the modern demands of existing and emerging tennis fans, anticipating their needs, but also surprising them with new and unexpected experiences to grow affinity.”
To help the USTA stay on the cutting edge of customer experience, IBM works side by side with the USTA digital team to transform a massive volume and variety of US Open data into content and insight that informs and engages fans. They accomplish this feat with the help of a hybrid multicloud infrastructure, the AI of the IBM watsonx® portfolio of products and the automation of key IT operations. These technological capabilities are the hallmarks of a smarter business, providing the USTA with the ability to deliver a world-class digital experience with efficiency, flexibility and innovation.
The US Open is more than just a tennis tournament. It’s a global event, attracting the attention of a wide range of audiences, from hardcore tennis fans to A-list celebrities to casual observers. It’s also a massive digital operation that must adapt in real time to spikes in demand, shifting fan expectations and a relentless need for innovation. The experts from IBM Consulting® are helping the USTA meet these challenges by applying the four foundational elements of a smarter business.
- Hybrid Cloud: For scale, performance and flexibility
To support a global digital audience and ever-evolving feature set, the US Open relies on a hybrid multicloud infrastructure. With applications and workloads distributed across multiple clouds from multiple vendors—using the Red Hat® OpenShift® Platform for containerization—the USTA can write applications once and run them anywhere. This ability helps ensure both the agility to introduce new capabilities quickly and the scale to handle dramatic spikes in traffic— sometimes in excess of 5,000%—during high-interest matches.
The USTA can select the optimal environment for each workload using this hybrid approach, balancing performance, redundancy and cost. This level of flexibility is essential in a setting where uptime and responsiveness are paramount.
- Data: Maximizing value and fueling competitive differentiation
Each point played at the US Open generates more than 800 data points, including speeds, shot placement, rally length, winner type, and more. IBM even captures the precise x, y, and z coordinates of the ball, rackets, and physical movements of the players, tracking everything from wrist flex to the transfer of energy from legs to torsos. This data is collected 50 times every second, contributing to more than 1.2 billion data points collected and analyzed over the course of the tournament. This continuous stream of real-time event data is managed by IBM Confluent®, which routes each data stream to into the automated workflows that transform live match data into engaging digital experiences at scale.
To manage this vast and varied data landscape, the USTA uses the IBM® watsonx.data® data store, a hybrid, open data lakehouse built to support AI workloads. The system centralizes and curates data across structured and unstructured sources, enabling the development of AI models that can deliver real-time insights to fans.
By bringing AI to the data—rather than the other way around—the US Open team improves model accuracy and accelerates time to insight. It’s a strategic approach that turns raw data into differentiated digital experiences.
- AI: Driving productivity and generating insight at scale
The digital experience of the US Open is no longer just about scores and stats. Today’s fans expect context, prediction and narrative. To meet that demand, the USTA worked with IBM to embed AI directly into their editorial workflows.
Using IBM watsonx.ai® AI studio, the agentic AI of the IBM watsonx Orchestrate® platform, and the generative AI (gen AI) capabilities of IBM Granite® models, the USTA editorial team now produces AI-powered features at scale. For example, with the editorial team’s oversight, personalized updates are served up to every fan’s home page with the new Live Updates feature, dramatically scaling content production.
In addition, the IBM Consulting team relied heavily on IBM Bob®, an AI-powered coding assistant, to develop new features and enhance cybersecurity, completing formerly manual tasks that tooks weeks into just hours.
- Automation: Increasing resiliency, reducing costs
With millions of fans relying on the US Open app and website throughout the tournament, the digital platform that powers the experience must run flawlessly. That’s why the team automates key elements of the IT operation.
With application observability tools, such as the IBM Instana® platform, the USTA can monitor the health of their digital infrastructure in real time, identifying and resolving issues before they affect users. IBM Terraform® automates the provisioning of infrastructure resources across cloud environments, leading to an 80% reduction is manual cycle time for build and provisioning tasks. And IBM Apptio® software helps manage the cost of more than 5,000 resources spread across 11 different cloud accounts.
These tools help ensure the digital operations behind the US Open are efficient, resilient and cost-effective. In fact, the USTA achieves 99.999% uptime during tournament play—a testament to the stability and scalability of their automated systems.
“Together with IBM, we developed a technical roadmap that set us on the path to smarter business years ago. IBM took the time to understand our strategic goals, and through close collaboration, we identified the hybrid cloud and AI capabilities needed to bring them to life. The results of that work—greater insights, increased uptime, and more—are now being realized by everyone from fans to our own team.”
Brian Ryerson, Senior Director Digital Strategy, United States Tennis Association
The transformation of the US Open into a smarter business is not just about technology. It’s about delivering a more dynamic, immersive experience that brings fans closer to the game—and creating a digital foundation that can evolve and scale for years to come. The AI-powered features tennis fans will enjoy in the 2026 US Open app include:
- Live Updates is a new, dynamic home screen experience, featuring personalized, AI-curated content about the most exciting moments from the tournament and all your favorite players
- Match Chat is an AI-powered assistant that allows fans to deeply engage in specific matches with data-driven insight and instant answers
- Live Likelihood to Win gives fans real-time, point-by-point projections of each player’s chances of winning, based on scores, stats, and expert opinion
- Key Moments are AI-generated analyses that appear within the Likelihood to Win feature, identifying and articulating the precise turning points that shift the direction and momentum of a match
- Serve Quality is a new tennis metric that uses AI and advanced analytics to measure the quality of a player’s serve, analyzing massive quantities of ball, racquet, and limb tracking data from every point
The platform regularly delivers more than millions of AI-generated insights over the course of the tournament. More than 14 million unique users are expected to interact with the US Open digital properties in 2026. For some features, it’s not unusual to see more than 15 interactions per user.
From match predictions to AI-generated commentary, every feature of the US Open digital experience is grounded in strategic technology choices and collaborative innovation. It’s a model not just for sports, but for any enterprise looking to reinvent themselves for the digital age.
The USTA is the national governing body for the sport of tennis in the U.S. and the leader in promoting and developing the growth of tennis at every level -- from local communities to the highest level of the professional game. A not-for-profit organization, it invests 100 percent of its proceeds in growing the game. It owns and operates the US Open, one of the highest-attended annual sporting events in the world, along with more than 100 Pro Circuit events throughout the U.S., and selects the teams for Davis Cup, Billie Jean King Cup, and the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
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