Wimbledon and IBM giving fans an AI experience

Ready? Play! IBM and the All England Lawn Tennis Club announced the launch of a new generative AI feature that will personalize fan engagement further during the Wimbledon Championships, which start this week.

The “Catch Me Up” feature will be available on both the Wimbledon app and website. It will give AI-generated summaries for every singles player, describing details from their last match and a preview to their next tie, as per an IBM blog. Users can personalize their “Catch Me Up” list by choosing favorite players. It factors in recency, geolocation data and player rankings to show users more relevant content—like a summary card, which will capture the major highlights of the day, storylines and previews.

Behind the scenes, this new feature is powered by IBM’s watsonx generative AI platform and built using the company’s Granite large language model, which creates huge amounts of data on player performance and rankings to generate the stories, the blog explains. IBM will also be adding generative AI layers to its SlamTracker software, which will now provide bullet point-based match previews and post-match reviews for all singles matches.