Revolutionizing the UFC fan experience with IBM watsonx

It’s an iconic tradition in the spectacle of combat sports when a fighter makes their entrance, usually accompanied by a song and–certainly for the more than 700 million UFC fans worldwide—some key statistics on the fighter. For UFC 322 at Madison Square Garden on November 15, the energy radiating from the Octagon erupted as Valentina Shevchenko dominated Zhang Weili in the co-main event, retaining the UFC women’s flyweight title and hitting a new takedown record.

In October 2024, UFC partnered with IBM to increase real-time fan engagement through insights and storytelling. Together, IBM and UFC built the UFC Insights Engine, an AI-powered platform that creates automated insights about fights and fighters. The UFC stats production team works from a custom dashboard that pulls key data and interesting storylines from the UFC Insights Engine. Within that dashboard, they use an AI agent powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate to quickly verify relevant stats. Next, IBM’s generative AI Granite model generates draft copy in natural language, helping the stats production team shape the narrative angles quickly in real time.

This year, IBM and UFC are expanding the UFC Insights Engine insights experience to include in-fight insights. The first look at this new feature was at UFC 322 in Madison Square Garden in round one, when Shevchenko became the first woman in UFC history to land 60 career takedowns.  Viewers got to see this first-hand in a visual shown on the left of the screen with the very first in-fight insight statistic. This feature will be visible in other upcoming fight events as well.

“Until now we’ve just been doing just pre-fight insights, so live insight creation is a big switch for us,” said Jonathan Collins, IBM’s Principal Manager, Americas Build Engineering, in an interview with IBM Think.

The new insights pipeline will provide fans with interesting data points during the broadcast, such as updates to all-time records or critical stats. Imagine a fighter is on the verge of breaking an all-time record for knockouts. Using the new Insights Engine, the UFC stats production team will have already queued up relevant insights for if or when the record is broken in real-time. That insight is then provided to the UFC content and broadcasts team to share publicly on the broadcasts.

“UFC Insights Engine built with IBM watsonx is a complex AI package that goes deep to unearth new, real-time insights for fans in seconds,” said Alon Cohen, Executive Vice President of Innovation for TKO. “Anyone who uses AI tools knows they are normally able to go deep or fast, but not both. In collaborating with IBM for these new in-fight stats though, we have optimized Insights Engine to accomplish both, a true game-changer.”

“UFC fans are extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the sport. That’s been helpful for us because many of our published insights are fan-facing, with a lot of them going to social media,” said Anand Das, AI Solutions Architect at IBM, during an interview with IBM Think. “The fans let us know what types of insights they prefer, and we iterate from there.”

The Insights Engine is backed by AI products from across IBM’s portfolio. Each IBM product works together; watsonx.data streamlines raw UFC data, then watsonx.ai extracts insights from the raw data and finally, with the help of watsonx.governance, delivers them in an explainable, transparent manner.

The in-fight insights are part of the UFC’s goal to enhance the UFC experience for all stakeholders. UFC’s content and broadcast teams report having seen how successful the IBM solution is, as it has generated a threefold increase in insight volume, and since launch of the platform, it has reduced the time to generate insights by roughly 40%, freeing them up for more creative tasks.

“We’re always improving, even from a pre-fight standpoint,” said Collins. “We have a number of pipelines, and we’re always looking to innovate and improve the broadcast and the fan experience.”UFC Insights Engine is built with technologies on watsonx Orchestrate, including a unified conversational interface where UFC researchers can ask complex questions and analyze trends that are transformed into tailored fan-facing insights. The orchestration integrates advanced tools, such as text-to-SQL pipelines powered by leading open-source large language models (LLMs), including IBM Granite and Llama, trained on UFC’s rich historical data.

Fans across the globe who attended or tuned into UFC 322 at Madison Square Garden got the first look at the newest insights features. With more than 40 live events annually, broadcasting to over 950 million households, chances are UFC fans will get to see the solution in action very soon.