How IBM and the US Open are using Watsonx to create more AI-generated tennis content

Tennis fans shouldn’t be surprised to see IBM’s Watsonx platform bringing even more AI commentary to the 2024 US Open. It’s been a partner with the tournament so long, it could be playing doubles.

Partners since 1990, the U.S. Tennis Association and IBM’s new features include using generative AI to create real-time match reports and AI-generated long-form articles reviewed by USTA’s editorial team. This year’s tournament, which began Monday, will also give fans more frequent AI voice commentary using IBM’s latest AI models to power more expressive and contextual insights. Meanwhile, a redesigned SlamTracker offers in-depth analysis before, during and after each match.

Using Watsonx helps bring depth, speed and scale to USTA’s editorial coverage, said Brian Ryerson, USTA’s senior director of digital strategy. He said it also helps solve the “blank page problem” as the team keeps up with more than 200 matches. IBM also is using the tournament to showcase its Watsonx governance platform, which adds guardrails to monitor and mitigate inaccuracies from the LLM. The AI models collect more than 7 million data points during the tournament ranging from serve speed stats and win-loss ratios to analysis from thousands of tennis articles and blogs.

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