Wimbledon Serves Up AI Revolution with IBM for Live Match Insights

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) is enhancing Wimbledon's digital platforms with new AI-powered features, developed in collaboration with IBM. These updates, available via the Wimbledon app and wimbledon.com starting with the first-round matches on Monday, include an upgraded Match Chat assistant and an innovative new feature called Key Moments. These functionalities will also be integrated into IBM Slamtracker.

IBM's collaboration with Wimbledon is part of a five-year digital transformation initiative aimed at modernizing the digital platform, repatriating critical services and data, and reducing technical debt and cost of ownership. This effort is designed to foster an AI operating model and boost the productivity of the Wimbledon team. The AELTC reported significant engagement in the previous year, with approximately 730 million people interacting with Wimbledon, generating 18 billion impressions across its digital channels.

The enhanced Match Chat assistant allows fans to submit natural language questions about a match, receiving conversational responses based on live data, analysis, and historical performance information. Some responses will include relevant photos and videos. This feature, built on watsonx Orchestrate and utilizing AI agents and models trained in Wimbledon’s editorial style and tennis terminology, enables users to obtain information without navigating through multiple screens or statistics. Earlier deployments of Match Chat at Wimbledon and the US Open served about 1 million users, with an average response time of 6.25 seconds, and the current version expands data sources and incorporates visual content.

The new Key Moments feature identifies pivotal points and passages of play that significantly influence a match's direction. It provides AI-generated analysis to explain these crucial plays and shifts in momentum, building upon Wimbledon's existing Likelihood to Win tool. The Likelihood to Win feature continuously calculates each player's winning probability using current and historical statistics, expert input, and match momentum. Key Moments leverages this system to pinpoint specific instances, such as long rallies or double faults, that impact match dynamics or win probability. This feature will be available for all gentlemen’s and ladies’ singles matches, aiming to explain the 'why' behind pivotal plays rather than just showcasing selected points.

These digital advancements are part of a broader modernization of Wimbledon’s app and website. This project involved migrating Wimbledon’s content archive, comprising over 15,000 digital assets including articles, videos, photographs, and metadata links, to a new architecture. The platform utilizes watsonx Orchestrate for AI agents, IBM Bob for development, and watsonx.data for managing data across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. The redesigned app and website were developed based on extensive research into how various user groups interact with Wimbledon's digital services. IBM Bob played a crucial role in building a knowledge graph to map relationships within Wimbledon’s archive, supporting AI-driven workflows. This archive mapping, which traditionally might take multiple specialists months, was reportedly completed by one engineer in four weeks, with 15,000 assets extracted in 47 minutes. Furthermore, IBM Bob reportedly facilitated the completion of ten years' worth of development work in nine months during the rebuild of Wimbledon’s digital systems before The Championships 2026.

IBM and Wimbledon are also implementing robust governance controls for the AI features. These controls include human-led processes, explainability, confidence scoring, and checks designed to minimize inaccurate outputs during live operation. A watsonx governance layer, with transparency measures and confidence scores for underlying data, underscores this commitment. The AELTC has reported a 16% year-on-year increase in overall platform engagement in 2025 and a 39% rise in myWIMBLEDON registrations over the past year.

The partnership between IBM and the All England Club spans over 35 years, covering the evolution of Wimbledon's digital presence from the launch of its website in 1995 and mobile app in 2009, to the integration of advanced AI-powered solutions since 2017.