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Can you smell the grass? Wimbledon 2025 is hurtling towards us faster than a Perricard serve*, and its technology partner IBM has announced its all-new, AI-enhanced experience. This year it’s Match Chat, an interactive, know-it-all assistant designed to answer fans’ questions.
This is based on IBM’s own large language models, which it trains on information related to the “language of tennis”. Together with the vast amounts of data on hand about players’ performance, and live data feeds, these mean that users can ask questions about live matches.
“During the match, we’ll see updates in real-time with the live likelihood to win for the different players,” said Chris Clements, Digital Products Lead at Wimbledon, at a pre-tournament briefing.
“There’s a number of elements to this, which I think will be really engaging. But first and foremost is being able to go in and pick up on the match and and see exactly what’s happened so far, and then who has the best chance of prevailing?”
In this first iteration the Match Chat is text only, but Kevin Farrar, Head of Sports Partnerships at IBM UK, told me that he saw no reason why this couldn’t turn into voice chat at some point in the future.
But there’s also an interesting live element from the “chances of winning” graphic that shows the changes in likelihood of each player winning over time.
“I think if I was looking at something like that, I’m thinking, I wonder what happened at the end of that set for it to switch,” said Judy Murray, who was also at the briefing.
“And then you’ll see the button at the top that says, explore Match Chat. You go onto the Match Chat and find out what happened. Did the roof close? Did somebody roll over on an ankle? So if you haven’t been able to watch the match, you can actually have an understanding of what’s going on to make that momentum swing change.”
For now, the Match Chat feature will only be available for women’s singles and men’s singles matches. Or, in Wimbledon-speak, Ladies’ Singles and Gentlemen’s Singles.
This year’s app is part of a long-term partnership between IBM and Wimbledon that now stretches back 37 years. It introduced AI videos way back in 2017, while embedding generative AI into Wimbledon apps and web services from 2023. See the links at the bottom of this article for more.
Match Chat is built on watsonx Orchestrate. “So this is something that we use with clients all around the world to generate these type of capabilities,” said Farrar.
“In this case, because it’s a language interface, it’s a large language model based on IBM Granite and we’ve trained that model in the language of Wimbledon, the language of tennis, so understanding what a match is all about.”
It’s also building in fact-checking, governance and “guard rails” to ensure accuracy and to make sure that people asking inappropriate questions aren’t given inappropriate answers.
This year’s Wimbledon starts on 30 June, which will also be the day that users of the app and website can see Match Chat for themselves.
*For non-tennis fans, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard is a 6ft 8in (2.03 metre) tall French tennis player with one of the most fearsome serves in the business. Our TechFinitive prediction: with a favourable draw, he could easily reach the quarter-finals or even further this year.
