AI has been quietly powering developments in the digital offerings of many sports for some time now — but with the advent of generative AI, exciting new leaps are being made in personalised engagement and predictive analysis. Georgia Smith reports on the IBM press launch at Wimbledon this year to discover what’s being served up to tennis fans in 2023.
Every morning during the Wimbledon tournament, strawberry pickers rise before the sun to make sure fresh berries arrive on site, ready to eat with lashings of cream, by 10am every day. During the tournament, over 140,000 punnets of strawberries will be eaten; a staple image of the 136 year old event. Wimbledon is characterised by tradition, but it has never shied away from technological advancements. It embraced the Hawk-Eye in 2007, and centre court’s entirely tractable roof, added in 2009, enabled play to continue uninterrupted by fickle English weather.
AI already powers some key elements of Wimbledon’s digital platforms, but this year Wimbledon and IBM have announced some groundbreaking new features that will be available to tennis fans. Wimbledon Technology Director Bill Jinks and Digital Products Lead Chris Clements were joined by IBM’s Head of Sports Partnerships UK/Ireland, Kevin Farrar, to tell us what we can expect this year.
The existing role of AI in Wimbledon
AI has recently come to the forefront of the public imagination, but it already powers some of the features available through the Wimbledon digital offering. Over the past couple of years the app has made use of the IBM power index, which provides insights on players’ form and momentum in the lead up to the tournament, and features like ‘players to watch’ and ‘who’s up and coming’ were already available from last year, based on a mixture of structured (numerical) and unstructured (media and ‘buzz’) data. Match insights also already offered players’ win likelihoods per match, while personalised features such as daily highlight reels based on the user’s interests were a popular development.
As Bill Jinks puts it, Wimbledon’s focus on innovation and the expansion of the digital experience, underlined by their 34 year partnership with IBM, is what keeps them at the pinnacle of the sport. Kevin Farrar adds that technology has transformed the way fans engage and that though finding the right balance between tradition and innovation can be a challenge, ‘the digital experiences that we are creating together are really helping the club in their mission to grow their fanbase around the world and to engage with those fans effectively and meaningfully.’
Chris Clements further explained that the main change driven by tech is how people engage with sports – mobile based, always-on content is now the norm. This means fresh ways of connecting meaningfully with the audience have to be found, and providing an outstanding digital experience which brings the ‘magic and drama of Wimbledon to life’ is a key way of doing that. He explains that Wimbledon especially is an event which ‘transcends sport’, appealing to both die hard tennis fans and those who don’t even glance at the tennis outside of the two weeks of Wimbledon. The evolving tech enables the digital platforms to meet the varied needs of such an audience, essentially helping them to answer the key questions: who should I follow? What should I expect? How can I stay updated?
What are the new developments fans can expect to see this year?
Kevin explains that what’s new this year is the integration of some elements of LLMs and generative AI; having taken one of the IBM foundation models and trained it in the language of tennis and Wimbledon, fans will be able to enjoy AI generated commentary on their personalised daily highlights reels, making them more accessible and exciting. The new commentary will also offer context to the highlights featured on the reel, enabling users to understand their impact on the wider championship.
Additionally, explains Chris, we will see a first-of-its-kind draw analysis this year, a real innovation for tennis. Especially for casual fans, Wimbledon’s 128 player draw — which has many potential matchups and unpredictable consequences, especially in the early stages — can be baffling. But the new IBM AI powered draw analysis calculates how favourable the path to the final might be for any given player, and can identify potential matchups for future rounds. ‘This is going to offer fans a new level of insight into the draw, that goes beyond seed number and tour ranking,’ Chris explains.
Though draw predictions are a familiar feature already for many sports, the complexities of tennis make this an impressive achievement – while seed level and tournament data is still taken heavily into account, other factors such as prowess on grass, challenging pairings, and injury history also feed into the new IBM draw analysis. For example, if a highly seeded player is set to go up against a lower ranked opponent whose style they have found particularly challenging in the past, this would affect their favourability rating.
The analysis will also be updated within minutes after every match, changing players’ potential paths and favourability ratings accordingly. This not only enables the tech to offer confident insights as to which players might advance deeper into the draw, but such statistics also provide fans with a far more rounded understanding, increasing engagement and debate within the fan community.
What went into developing these new features?
A key theme of the Q&A element of the briefing was curiosity about how the new features were developed, especially the new AI generated commentary. Kevin explained that the commentary isn’t imitating a human, or any specific commentator’s style, but that the language used to train it was informed by tennis specialists, meaning it uses the correct language and terminology for tennis and for Wimbledon specifically.
For you
Be part of something bigger, join BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
Responding to questions about the decision making process behind developing new features, Chris also explained that the team goes through an extensive process of prioritising potential ideas, and that the decision is ultimately based on what developments can most effectively address users’ needs – for example, the new draw analysis helping casual fans understand the tournament more easily — as well as taking into account developments in the wider landscape of the industry.
Clarifying how users will be able to access the new features, the team explained that the integration of the new features has been designed around the user journey of the app and website, making them easy for users to access and enjoy.
One attendee also posed the question of whether the investment in technology was increasing Wimbledon’s carbon footprint, to which Bill quickly responded that in fact, the tournament’s energy usage is decreasing year on year even with the development and integration of new technology, keeping the championship in line with its commitment to sustainability goals.
What is on the cards for future developments?
Addressing the familiar concern that there may come a time where generative AI could make human broadcasters and commentators obsolete, Kevin responded that AI complements the human element, but there is no replacing it — and though in the future they would, for example, be hoping to provide AI commentary for whole matches this would apply to matches that currently have no commentary at all, rather than replacing a human. Furthermore, in response to questions about whether they might consider having AI commentary in the style of famous names like John McEnroe in the future, Kevin explained that while this would certainly be possible questions over intellectual property, morality and appropriateness would come first – essentially, that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Finally, one attendee questioned what languages the new AI commentary would be available in, and Chris explained that while in its first year the only language would be English, expanding into other languages for this international event was at the forefront of the technology’s continued development.
