Wimbledon is the latest sports
entity to find creative uses for AI.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM are planning digital fan features.
When first round matches begin Monday,
viewers can experience AI-powered fan experiences and a modernized digital platform.
Highlights include an enhanced Match Chat assistant that enables fans to ask natural-language
questions and receive contextual responses, as well as Key Moments, a new AI-powered feature that helps explain the pivotal plays and momentum shifts that shape a match.
The Key
Moments tool builds on the Likelihood to Win feature, which continually calculates each player's probability of victory based on a comprehensive, AI-powered analysis of current and historical
statistics, expert opinion and match momentum.
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The enhanced Match Chat is an AI assistant that acts as an interactive companion for fans during a match. Rather than searching
through statistics or navigating multiple screens, fans can use natural language to ask a question, such as: “What has happened in the match so far?”
Match Chat provides
instant, conversational responses. Some replies will include relevant photos and video for added context, sourced from an expanded set of live match data, analysis and historical performance
information.
Built on watsonx Orchestrate, the AI-powered capabilities are available on the Wimbledon app and wimbledon.com.
The innovations are powered by a comprehensive modernization of Wimbledon's digital platforms. Among the most significant outcomes was the extraction of Wimbledon's content archive to a new
architecture, including more than 15,000 digital assets such as articles, videos, photographs, and the metadata relationships connecting them.
The tournament concludes with the
men’s singles final on July 12.