As part of its longstanding technology sponsorship with the All England Lawn Tennis Club, IBM has developed multiple new, artificial intelligence-powered features to be used in Wimbledon’s app and website during the 2026 edition of the tournament. Fan-facing elements include a new feature called “Key Moments,” which adds contextual, text-based insights underneath the Wimbledon app’s rolling a “Likelihood to Win” metric during matches; and “Match Chat,” a conversational, generative AI assistant that answers fan questions during matches. The AI features were built using IBM’s watsonx AI platform and trained on Wimbledon’s editorial style. Using its AI coding agent “Bob,” IBM also this year helped the AELTC rebuild the architecture that underpins its content archive of more than 15,000 digital assets (e.g. articles, videos, photos, metadata).
AELTC Dir/Marketing & Commercial Usama Al-Qassab, IBM VP/Global Sports & Entertainment Partnerships Kameryn Stanhouse and IBM Consulting Associate Partner Fred Baker unveiled the changes during a press briefing last week. Al-Qassab said Wimbledon’s web and app platforms, which are powered by IBM, drew 18 billion engagements in the past year, a 16% year-on-year increase.
“Yes, there’s a lot of great tennis content, so we’ve got to thank the players first and foremost and the teams that deliver all of that content to the world,” he said. “But it [the AI features] is certainly driving much higher levels of engagement. It’s driving more people to be more inquisitive, to ask questions, creating greater amounts of engagements and shares than we’ve ever seen. And, indeed, that perpetuates the whole of the digital ecosystem, including all that we do with social media and all that we do with gaming.”
IBM has been a Wimbledon sponsor for 36 years, and earlier this year renewed its deal on a multiyear basis (Stanhouse said during the briefing that the new deal will “take them into 40 years together”). IBM has similar tech deals with the U.S. Open (tennis), the Masters, ESPN (focusing on its fantasy football product), UFC, and Scuderia Ferrari HP’s F1 team.
