One of the largest tech companies in the world is using artificial intelligence (AI) to transform one of the largest sports events in the world—the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England.
Key Details
- The Wimbledon Championships, one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world, began Monday and will be ongoing through July 16.
- The All-England Lawn Tennis Club is partnered with IBM to use generative AI technology to provide automated support for viewers through the Wimbledon app.
- Using its WatsonX AI, IBM is able to offer automated commentary, record highlights reels, play-by-play narration, and closed captioning.
- WatsonX AI collects disparate data sources and filters them, allowing the trained model to curate a user experience.
Why It’s Important
This year’s Wimbledon is not the first major sports event that IBM has worked it, nor is it its first Wimbledon. IBM has worked with the tennis tournament for three decades. Still, its continued push for technology innovation has drawn it to pull on some of the most innovative technologies of the moment in support of this year’s tournament.
“The WatsonX platform has allowed us to quickly leverage the power of generative AI without sacrificing trust or transparency. This is what we mean when we say ‘AI for Business.’ To use AI in a commercial setting, you need to have confidence that a model is scalable, reliable, and trusted,” writes IBM engineer Aaron Baughman.
As we previously reported, IBM also worked with the 2023 Masters Tournament in Georgia earlier this year. Its coordinated data collection and tracking technology, processed through the cloud, allowed the company to process golf coverage in real-time—providing near-instantaneous scoring predictions, highlight reels, and spoken commentary using large language AI models through its Masters Tournament app.
IBM’s iX team has worked since 2017 to develop AI-driven highlight reels—working year-round to adapt its technology to different sports events, including the FIFA World Cup and US Open.