Kevin Farrar, Head Of Sport Partnerships For IBM UK, And Partnership Executive To Wimbledon/AELTC, Discusses An Enhanced Fan Experience At Wimbledon Using Generative AI Innovations With Dinis Guarda

IBM, a key partner of Wimbledon, has been utilising generative AI to create a more engaging and immersive experience for tennis enthusiasts globally. Kevin Farrar, Head of Sport Partnerships for IBM UK, and Partnership Executive to Wimbledon/AELTC, discusses how these innovations are shaping the future of Championships with Dinis Guarda.

Kevin Farrar has over 36 years of experience at IBM acting as an advisor on technology, innovation, and adoption in the sports industry. He provides input to strategic planning discussions to influence the client & IBM technology roadmap & plans. 

As a Head of Head of Sport Partnerships for IBM UK, and Partnership Executive to Wimbledon/AELTC, Kevin has been leading how IBM has been enhancing both the fan and player experiences.

During the interview, Kevin highlighted the key facets of Wimbledon IBM partnership to Dinis:

“Wimbledon gives us an opportunity to really showcase IBM facilities in a number of areas. Data is, obviously, at the heart of it, but there’s automation, security, AI, cloud computing, and on the consulting side, we work with Wimbledon to put a team that uses the IBM Garage Methods, agile design thinking etc. We are always looking for new data sources and from that data, both structured data and unstructured data, it has been a journey each year.

There are hundreds of millions of viewers around the world through the different channels who want people to have a feeling of being here without being here. In the app and on the website, there is a rich collection of visually blended images of what’s going on the ground between different players.”

AI in tennis and sports: Ensuring personalised fan and player experience

Wimbledon works closely with IBM to provide fans with AI-generated insights and world-class digital experiences. As the Official Technology Partner of The Championships for the past 30+ years, IBM has developed solutions to modernise and streamline workloads, and deliver innovative digital experiences to engage sports fans around the world through IBM iX, the experience design arm of IBM Consulting. 

“There’s been a lot of focus obviously over the last couple of years around generative AI. In 2017, we launched a feature where we were creating AI highlights reals of matches, listening to the noise of the crowd, looking at gestures of the players. We see a couple of stats that are exciting points in the match, in terms of Break Points or Championship Point, Match Point. We combine all those factors to give an excitement level to each of the rallies”, Kevin tells Dinis.

The new ‘Catch Me Up‘ feature, built using IBM’s Granite Large Language Model, displays pre- and post-match player cards with AI-generated player stories and analysis via Wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon app. Kevin highlights:

“What we wanted to do was create an experience where fans, when they come into the app or the website and can read stories about their favourite players. Short form stories that give a bit of a preview ahead of matches and then also a post match summary of what’s going on during the match.

If you have a favourite player in the app or website, that’s the content that you will see. We also use geolocation to serve off these player cards and we also serve stories that are trending, that might be top seed, top rank players. So, we’re always trying to create fresh content so that when you’re going in we feed stories that you want to see.”

Commenting on the underlying generative AI and data platform, IBM watsonx, Kevin told Dinis:

“What we do is we take an IBM foundation model, watsonx for example, with ‘Catch Me Up’ feature, we’re using a large language model and make sure that we’re using trusted data sources. We have a series of services that are running and then we also have a series of apps for example catch me up to keep our fans engaged.

The number of visitors to Wimbledon.com spikes massively in the leadup to and especially during The Championships. So, to scale effectively, we use a hybrid cloud infrastructure, a combination of IBM clouds and AWS clouds. 

It is a case of selecting the right model, selecting the right data training, and then there’s governance built in throughout that whole process.”

Inclusion and diversity are the key aspects of IBM’s Generative AI solutions for Wimbledon

Looking ahead, IBM aims to make the Wimbledon experience more inclusive and diverse. Farrar highlights the role of generative AI in complementing the content created by Wimbledon’s team. “This is very much where we are complementing the content already created by the Wimbledon content team, enabling the generation of content at scale through watsonx and generative AI,” he explains.

Future developments include utilising multimodal models to process data from various inputs, including video and images. “The more data we can pick, the more insights we derive, and then we can create amazing experiences on top of those insights,” says Farrar.