IBM has utilised generative AI to analyse over 62 million data points collected from an audience of over 1.2 billion people worldwide to create solutions for enhanced fan engagement. Kevin Farrar, Head of Sports Partnerships for IBM UK and Partnership Executive to Wimbledon/AELTC, discusses how generative AI and other technologies have transformed the Wimbledon experience in an interview with Dinis Guarda.
IBM is a trusted technological partner for Wimbledon, the biggest tennis competition worldwide. With it generative AI solutions, built on the foundational model of watsonx, and cloud computing hybrid solutions, IBM has been enhancing both the fan and player experiences for over three decades.
Kevin Farrar, Head of Sport Partnerships for IBM UK, and Partnership Executive to Wimbledon/AELTC, highlights this IBM Wimbledon partnership to Dinis:
"Wimbledon gives us an opportunity to really showcase IBM facilities in a number of areas. Data is, obviously, at the heart of it, but there's automation, security, AI, cloud computing, and on the consulting side, we work with Wimbledon to put together a team that uses the IBM Garage Methods, agile design thinking etc.”
Speaking about the AI-generated highlights for Wimbledon, a feature that was launched in 2017 by IBM, Kevin tells Dinis:
"We were creating AI highlights reals of matches, listening to the noise of the crowd, looking at gestures of the players. We see a couple of stats that are exciting points in the match, in terms of Break Points or Championship Point, Match Point. We combine all those factors to give an excitement level to each of the rallies.”
Catch Me Up: An innovative Wimbledon fan engagement feature by IBM
IBM introduced the ‘Catch Me Up’ feature for the 2024 Wimbledon Championships. This feature is designed to keep fans informed about their favourite players through short-form stories and match summaries. As Kevin elaborates for Dinis:
“What we wanted to do was create an experience where fans, when they come into the app or the website and can read stories about their favourite players. Short form stories that give a bit of a preview ahead of matches and then also a post match summary of what's going on during the match.”
Highlighting the personalised fan engagement feature of ‘Catch Me Up’, Kevin says:
“If you have a favourite player in the app or website, that's the content that you will see. We also use geolocation to serve off these player cards and we also serve stories that are trending, that might be top seed, top rank players. So, we’re always trying to create fresh content so that when you're going in we feed stories that you want to see.”
Cloud computing and generative AI hybrid: Digital solutions from IBM for an enhanced Wimbledon experience for fans
Behind the scenes, IBM's generative AI capabilities, enhanced by its robust cloud computing infrastructure, plays a crucial role in managing the massive influx of visitors to Wimbledon.com. Kevin highlights that foundational large language model of IBM’s watsonx, is layered with security to ensure protection of user data:
“What we do is we take an IBM foundation model, watsonx for example, with the ‘Catch Me Up’ feature, we're using a large language model and make sure that we're using trusted data sources. So, it is a case of selecting the right model, selecting the right data training, and then there's governance built in throughout that whole process.”
Kevin also highlights the increase in fan engagement on Wimbledon website, and the hybrid cloud approach to handle this large volumes of data for a seamless user experience:
“The number of visitors to Wimbledon.com spikes massively in the leadup to and especially during The Championships”, Kevin tells Dinis. “So, in order to scale effectively, we use a hybrid cloud infrastructure, a combination of IBM clouds and AWS clouds.”
According to IBM, this setup includes an on-premises video encoding and scoring system, private clouds for secure data management, and public clouds for scalability. The infrastructure can scale up by 55,000% during the tournament to meet the high demand.
“We have a series of services that are running and then we also have a series of apps for example catch me up to keep our fans engaged.”
Future Prospects: An inclusive and diverse fan engagement at Wimbledon
Looking ahead, IBM aims to further integrate technology into the Wimbledon experience, making it more inclusive and diverse. As Kevin highlights:
“A lot of our focus at the moment is around the fan engagement piece, but we also have wonderful multimodal models, that's also taking inputs and feeding data in video and in images. I think the more data we can pick, the more insights we derive from their data, and then we can create amazing experiences on top of those insights.”
