This year’s Wimbledon tennis championships should be the most interactive and exhaustive for sports fans thanks to a major AI upgrade.
The emblematic tournament, a long time a British summer pillar, has a range of upgrades and services fueled by AI for fans via its website and Wimbledon.com application.
This includes a whole new feature allowing fans to explore information on certain games in time almost in real time, and an improved tool seeking to predict the possible winners of each match.
Cat match and more
IBM is now the technological partner of All-Angland Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), tournament organizers for Wimbledon, for 36 years, with 2025 marking another important step for the couple.
Following the traces of recent innovations fed by AI such as Catch Me Up of 2024, which used Watsonx generator to create updates based on players in the form of “cards” available on the website or the mobile application of Wimbledon, and the comments of the AI introduced into the shooting.
“The way sport is consumed is constantly evolving,” said Kevin Farrar, head of sports partnerships at IBM UK, a briefing before the tournament attended by Techradar Pro, “Our challenge is to see how we explain this”.
New for 2025 is Match Cat – a new conversational interface that allows fans to explore information on the match in almost real time.
The tool is built with technologies on the Watsonx orchestrate, taking IA agents and large languages models (LLM), like IBM Granite, which were trained on the editorial style and the editorial language of Wimbledon – therefore “gentlemen” and “ladies”, rather than for men / women.
Fans will be able to use a certain number of pre-written prompts, or ask their own questions (such as “who served the most ace of the match?”, Or “Who behaves better in the match?”), With answers delivered almost immediately.
IBM says that the match of match chat also guarantees that the tool remains concentrated on tennis – users can only ask him questions about the tournament matches, so it is to be hoped for no chance that he is distracted if you ask where the tastiest strawberries are.
“Whenever we conceive something new, it always starts with the fan first … We think it will be a truly engaging experience that addresses a certain number of fans,” noted Chris Clements, digital products at the head of the AELTC.
“In its heart, sport is a human thing, it is an emotional thing – we use AI to be able to tell these stories to tell more effectively.”
Introduced for the first time in 2024, the “problem of winning” tool also obtains an AI boost, and will now modify its percentage of projected victories even throughout a game, generating projections from the analysis fueled by the AI of the statistics of the players, the opinion of the experts and the momentum.
The Wimbledon 2025 championships take place from June 30 to July 13, 2025, with the application available for download on Android and iOS now, as well as on the Wimbledon.com website.
