Wimbledon 2025 is set to be the smartest Championships yet, and it might help me fall in love with tennis again
This year’s Wimbledon tennis championships is set to be the most interactive and exhaustive for sports fans thanks to a major AI upgrade.
The iconic tournament, long a mainstay of the British summer, is introducing a range of AI-powered upgrades and services for fans through its Wimbledon.com website and app.
This includes an all-new feature allowing fans to explore information about certain matches in almost real-time, and an upgraded tool looking to predict the possible winners of every match.
Match Chat and more
IBM has now been the technology partner for the All-England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), tournament organizers for Wimbledon, for 36 years, with 2025 marking another significant milestone for the pair.
Following in the footsteps of recent AI-powered innovations such as 2024’s Catch Me Up, which utilized Watsonx's generative AI to create player-based updates in the form of "cards" available on the Wimbledon.com website or mobile app, and AI commentary introduced in 2023, the two organizations hope these new advances will offer fans old and new greater insights into the tournament.
"The way sports are being consumed is ever-evolving,” Kevin Farrar, Head of Sport Partnerships at IBM UK, told a pre-tournament briefing attended by TechRadar Pro, “our challenge is to see how we tap into that”.
New for 2025 is Match Chat - a new conversational interface which lets fans explore info about the match in nearly real-time.
The tool is built with technologies on watsonx Orchestrate, taking AI agents and large language models (LLMs), such as IBM Granite, which have been trained on the Wimbledon editorial style and language of tennis - so “Gentlemen’s” and “Ladies’” singles, rather than Men’s/Women’s.
Fans will be able to use a number of pre-written prompts, or ask their own questions (such as, ‘who has served the most aces in the match?’, or ‘who is performing better in the match?’), with replies delivered almost immediately.
IBM says the Match Chat training also ensures the tool stays focused on the tennis - users will only be able to ask it questions about matches at the tournament, so there’s hopefully no chance it will get distracted if you ask it where the tastiest strawberries are.
“Whenever we're designing something new, it always starts with the fan first...we think this is going to be a really engaging experience that addresses a number of different kinds of fans,” noted Chris Clements, Digital Products Lead at the AELTC.
"At its heart, sport is a human thing, it's an emotional thing - we're using AI to be able to tell these stories to be told more effectively."
First introduced in 2024, the “Likelihood to Win” tool is also getting an AI boost, and will now alter its projected win percentage even throughout a single game, generating projections from AI-powered analysis of player statistics, expert opinion and match momentum.
The 2025 Wimbledon Championships run from June 30 - July 13, 2025, with the app available to download on Android and iOS now, as well as across the Wimbledon.com website.
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