AI Commentary Enhances Wimbledon Fan Experience with IBM Watsonx

Jakarta, INTI - Wimbledon, the prestigious tennis tournament featuring hundreds of matches on 18 courts, continues to innovate to enhance its fan experience. Through a collaboration with IBM, Wimbledon has added AI-generated verbal commentary to video highlights of every singles match throughout the event. This initiative aims to increase fan engagement and understanding.

To achieve this, the IBM Consulting team built a generative AI solution based on foundational models developed using Watsonx. Watsonx is designed to manage the entire AI model lifecycle, from curating trusted data sources to governing responsible and trustworthy AI. The project started with IBM Watsonx.data, a data store that connects various sources and allows developers to filter data for inappropriate content, such as profanity, hate speech, or personally identifiable information. For AI Commentary, the team sourced material from nearly 130 million documents.

This data was used to train a large language model within IBM Watsonx.ai, a next-generation studio for building and training generative AI models for various business use cases. The IBM team then fine-tuned the model by incorporating Wimbledon-specific domain expertise, including the use of unique Wimbledon nomenclature such as "gentlemen's draw" instead of "men's draw." The final model has three billion parameters, and the team monitors ongoing performance using governance tools from IBM Watsonx.governance to ensure the model operates as expected.

As a result, fans can enjoy AI-generated verbal commentary on Wimbledon highlights via the Wimbledon app and website, listening to game-by-game narration for the beginning and end of each highlight, along with key points in a match. Fans can also enable captions to further enhance accessibility, which is a key consideration for the AELTC.

Continuous Innovation in Technology

To develop new capabilities like AI Commentary each year, the AELTC needs to move quickly and decisively. This requires the right blend of people, processes, and technology to facilitate rapid innovation.

A long-term collaboration between the Wimbledon team and experts at IBM Consulting is key to finding alignment in areas of mutual interest, generating a shared vision of how fans will interact with the product in the future. "We work together to find alignment in areas of interest, creating a shared vision of how fans will interact with our products in the future," said Clements. "The combined passion for delivering the best quality experience enhances our partnership and ensures we can capitalize on the opportunities ahead."

The teams used the IBM Garage Methodology to foster creativity and gain a deep understanding of tennis fans. As part of their biannual innovation workshops, the Wimbledon and IBM teams continue to tackle two main challenges: how to engage fans more deeply with Wimbledon and tennis year-round—since for many, the Championships are the only tennis event they watch all year—and how to encourage fans to follow emerging players who are not yet famous.

Through these workshops, the teams developed new concepts and features for the app and website. For example, Match Insights is AI-generated analysis of all singles matches in the tournament, designed to quickly bring fans up to date.

This analysis includes:

• IBM Power Index, which uses advanced data analytics and AI to analyze current player performance metrics and millions of expert opinions, creating a player momentum index that shifts from match to match.
• Win Probability Predictions, generated from comprehensive AI-powered analysis of player statistics, expert opinions, and momentum.
• IBM AI Draw Analysis, which uses AI models to assess the relative difficulty of each player's potential path to the final.

To turn new ideas into digital reality, IBM Consulting built an innovation platform for Wimbledon capable of processing structured and unstructured data and integrating technology from various sources. Automated workflows integrate and manage data flows through the multiple applications and AI models needed to deliver digital experiences.

These workflows are enabled by a hybrid cloud architecture and containerized applications running on Red Hat OpenShift. To keep operations running smoothly, the team uses IBM Instana Observability technology, which constantly monitors application performance and detects issues in less than three seconds, allowing the team to take quick action and avoid downtime.

Securing the platform begins months before the event. Using IBM Security Randori Recon solutions, the team performs a comprehensive attack surface analysis, scanning the entire network for vulnerabilities, including third-party or adjacent networks. Once the tournament begins, Wimbledon uses IBM Security QRadar Suite to assess the severity of security events, evaluate threats, ignore non-critical issues, and alert security analysts to the most urgent matters. This activity is then correlated with threat intelligence from external sources, such as IBM X-Force Exchange, to identify any activity that might be part of a more coordinated global attack. Finally, IBM Security QRadar Suite provides recommendations to IBM analysts on the best way to address the threats.

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