Agassi Sports Entertainment, a publicly traded racket sports-focused company co-founded by tennis legend Andre Agassi, has signed a partnership with IBM to collaborate on a multi-faceted digital platform for racket sports players.
The yet-to-be-named platform, which has been in development for the past six months and is targeting a mid-2026 launch, will manifest as both a mobile app and web product. Initial capabilities will center on AI-powered technique analyses for tennis and could eventually expand into pickleball and padel. One of the primary goals of the project, according to the principals involved, is to democratize access to high-level, personalized racket sports instruction.
“The models that we’re creating, the AI -- or should we call it, ‘Agassi Intelligence’ -- what that is doing is allowing anybody to get coached, anybody to get feedback, anybody to improve,” IBM Consulting Global Managing Partner Jonathan Wright told SBJ in a joint interview with ASE co-founder & CEO Ron Boreta. “It is really very cool in terms of health, in terms of wellbeing, in terms of getting people mobile, getting people active.”
One of the platform’s initial capabilities will be ingesting video footage of users playing tennis and providing immediate, natural language feedback on one’s form and strategy. Agassi, who has a separate relationship with IBM as a brand ambassador, and well-regarded tennis coach Darren Cahill are advisors on the effort, while the AI models that underpin it are being developed using IBM’s Watsonx AI suite.
Wright and Boreta described the scope of the platform as a multiyear collaboration between ASE and IBM that will go through several iterations and add more features -- including, potentially, peer-to-peer social networking and competition. “Everything we do as a company will live within the IBM platform,” Boreta said of ASE, highlighting additional pillars such as exclusive content (from Agassi and Cahill), racket sports events (e.g., the company’s acquisition of the “World Series of Pickleball” trademark earlier this year) or e-commerce.
Wright, meanwhile, likened the product to “the ‘Strava’ for racket sports,” referring to the popular exercise tracking app, and said some offerings in the platform will require a subscription (although he declined to disclose specific price points or revenue targets).
“There will be some subscriptions to unlock premium content, but it has to be accessible to a wide audience,” he said. “That is one of the philosophies that both IBM and ASE have.”
