This comes as the two organisations push further into agentic AI for both operational and fan-facing applications.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM announced the modernisation of Wimbledon’s digital platforms today, coinciding with the start of The Championships on June 29.
At the centre of the backend work is IBM Bob, an AI-powered development accelerator used to migrate more than 15,000 digital assets, articles, videos, photographs and their metadata relationships to a new content architecture. A task IBM said would typically require four to five specialists working for months was completed by a single engineer in four weeks, with the full asset extraction taking 47 minutes.
IBM Bob was used to build a knowledge graph mapping content relationships across the archive and to develop AI-driven workflows that translated the entire structure into the new platform, an approach IBM is positioning as a template for how organisations can use AI to accelerate large-scale infrastructure migrations.
On the fan-facing side, the updated Wimbledon app and wimbledon.com are running a new Key Moments tool alongside an enhanced Match Chat assistant, both built on IBM’s watsonx platform. Match Chat, built on watsonx Orchestrate, uses a collection of AI agents and purpose-built models trained on Wimbledon’s editorial style to respond to natural language queries during matches, now with photos and video included in some responses.
IBM and the All England Club have partnered for more than 35 years. IBM said the work contributed to a 16% year-on-year increase in engagement across Wimbledon’s platforms in 2025, with registrations to the myWimbledon personalisation service up 39% over the past year.
RELATED STORIES
How stadium Wifi and connectivity will transform the World Cup fan experience
