IBM Reveals New AI and Cloud Powered Fan Experiences for Wimbledon 2022 

LONDON, June 21, 2022 — IBM and the All England Lawn Tennis Club have unveiled new ways for Wimbledon fans around the world to experience The Championships digitally, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) running on IBM Cloud and hybrid cloud technologies.

Co-created by the All England Club and IBM for Wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon app, the new features join a comprehensive suite of digital fan experiences – including the award-winning¹ IBM Power Index with Watson, IBM Match Insights with Watson and Personalized Recommendations and Highlights Reels – all designed to help global audiences stay more informed and engaged with players, matches and the tournament.

New features for 2022 include:

• ‘Win Factors’ brings enhanced explainability to ‘Match Insights’: Building on the existing Match Insights feature of the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, IBM is providing an additional level of explainability into what factors are being analyzed by the AI system to determine match insights and predictions. Win Factors will provide fans with an increased understanding of the elements affecting player performance, such as the IBM Power Index, court surface, ATP/WTA rankings, head-to-head, ratio of games won, net of sets won, recent performance, yearly success, and media punditry.
• ‘Have Your Say’ with a new interactive fan predictions feature: For the first time, users can register their own predictions for match outcomes on the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, through the Have Your Say feature. They can then compare their prediction with the aggregated predictions of other fans and the AI-powered Likelihood to Win predictions generated by IBM.

The Wimbledon digital features are underpinned by IBM Watson and leverage a hybrid cloud approach – using a combination of on-premises systems, private clouds, and IBM Cloud – enabling increased flexibility and efficiency. IBM Cloud provides the foundation and scalability for these digital experiences. It hosts and processes data from matches that is fed into AI models built using IBM Watson Studio and IBM Watson Discovery to produce insights for fans, commentators and media.

As the Official Technology Partner of The Championships for the past 33-years, IBM has developed solutions to modernize and streamline workloads, and delivered innovative digital experiences to engage sports fans around the world through IBM iX, the experience design arm of IBM Consulting. Leveraging the same technologies IBM uses with businesses across industries and around the world, Wimbledon continues to accelerate innovation and improve the digital fan experience. The full suite of IBM-powered digital experiences on Wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon App includes:

• IBM Power Index with IBM Watson
  • An AI-powered analysis of player performance to help fans know who to follow beyond the most well-known, highly ranked players.
  • Uses IBM Watson Discovery and IBM Cloud to analyze performance data, mine media commentary, and measure player momentum.
  • Produces insights for fans including Ones to Watch and a Likelihood to Win probability.

• IBM Match Insights with IBM Watson
  • Uses AI to generate a player factsheet for main draw singles matches, surfacing player insights, presenting the IBM Power Index and winner predictions.
  • Features an ‘In the Media’ section that leverages IBM Watson Discovery to extract key insights about players from trusted news sources.
  • Includes a ‘By the Numbers’ section that uses open-source AI to translate historical match statistics into player insights.
  • New this year – users can register their own predictions for match outcomes on the Wimbledon app and Wimbledon.com, through the Have Your Say feature.

• Personalized Recommendations and Highlights Reels
  • Once a fan has decided who to follow via the IBM Power Index, they can stay updated through a series of personalized recommendations and highlights reels.
  • This enables fans to discover new players by making suggestions based on their current favorite players, the IBM Power Rankings, top players, country, and age.
  • Includes links to other features such as the IBM Power Index Leaderboard and Match Insights with Watson. If you are registered with myWimbledon, you will receive personalized highlights based on the players you are following.

The Championships, Wimbledon will run from June 27 to July 10, 2022.

¹ The All England Club and IBM were awarded ‘Best Fan Engagement by a Brand’ at the 2022 Sports Technology Awards.

Source: IBM