BONUS: The hidden technology behind Wimbledon

0:05Hello and welcome to this special episode of the Times Tech Podcast brought to you in paid partnership with IBM. My name's Katie Prescott and I cover all things tech and business for the Times newspaper here in London. Now, believe it or not, from the rain we've been having, it is summer and summer in London can mean only one thing. No, it's not London Tech Week. We've had that already. It is, of course, Wimbledon time. You might associate Wimbledon with strawberries and cream, Pimms, champagne, fashion. Maybe not a natural home for a tech podcast, but there is actually a huge amount of tech in tennis.

0:46And for the last 36 years, Wimbledon has partnered with IBM to bring tennis closer to its fans using tech. They've been doing things like websites, apps, and more recently, AI. And I'm delighted to talk more about this partnership today with Cameron Stanhouse, who's Vice President Sports and Entertainment Partnerships at IBM. Hello. Hello. And Chris Clements, the Senior Manager of Digital Strategy and Products at the All England Club. Hello to you both. Hello. Thanks for having us. It's great to see everything getting ready. I know it's a madly busy time, sort of millions of strawberries, petunias, and all of that.

1:22I say it's madly busy, but it's like Christmas Eve, right? It's been a year of preparation for the beautiful, beautiful championships we have. Fingers crossed, on the cusp of a heat wave as well. Not too hot. Yeah, not too hot. Exactly. You never get it right. Let's start by talking about your partnership and how IBM and Wimbledon work together. It might not be something that people associate tennis with, as I said. I mean, Cameron, do you want to start by talking about this? Yeah. Yeah. One of the great things about IBM Sports and Entertainment Partnerships is that they are truly partnerships.

1:54We authentically integrate our technology into everything we do. And Wimbledon is our first and best example of that. We started working with them in 1990, launched their first website in 1995, launched the first app in 2009, and then started infusing AI into it in 2017. So it's been part of this really big digital transformation for, as you said, 36 years. We've renewed our partnership. We'll be going into 40 years together, which is pretty incredible these days. Everything we do is about how we can continually pay reverence to the sport and to the traditions at this great place, pushing and driving for innovation and being better.

2:29And so it's a really beautiful technology partnership. And a lot of that is about going beyond the technology. It's actually about understanding our audiences and understanding what they're looking for in this modern world. and then making sure that we're creating the experiences that they want from Wimbledon. What does it mean for the thousands of fans who come to the grounds here, but also who are watching on telly? Wimbledon, we're 149 years old and we've got a phenomenal heritage and reputation built off the experiences of hundreds of millions of people all around the world, perhaps even billions.

3:04So it's important that as we're looking at how we build out our technology and how we use technology to support us, we're thinking about all of those different people and how they experience the championships in different ways so that's from people fans watching at home in every corner of the globe through to guests that come on site through to to really important people like our players and members of the media like yourself it's been very much thinking about all of those different groups and how we can create these amazing journeys for them what does that look like in practice cameron can you give us an example yeah it's a i think one of the important things is technology's role in the championships is really unique because it's actually bringing people closer to their favorite sport player tournament, right?

3:42Wimbledon is such a coveted space and people live their whole life wishing they could come here, but many people won't. And the technology allows them to be here and experience it and give them kind of an insight and a look into the grounds and what Wimbledon is like without having to be here in person. But for this year, you know, we have three exciting features that we're launching. First has been really a modernization of the current website and app, which is bringing Wimbledon up to speed to a new era. And there's about 15 ,000 pages that are all interconnected on the website. And one of the things with that is we use this incredible technology called IBM Bob.

4:17It's an accelerator for developers. And it was able to transition all of this to the new platform in a matter of weeks. So transferring all 15 ,000 pages only took 47 minutes with this AI tool. Yeah. So that's just transitioning the website. But the other more fan-facing features that people will notice are live likelihood to win. It's a pre-match projection that takes into consideration the rankings, player stats data, but it also takes into consideration what's happening in the media with the conversations and what's happening in social media. It provides a projection of who's going to win a match.

4:48So it's a really great fodder for commentators, but also has a really high accuracy rate. This year, we've enhanced it even more to not only go to a live version, so showing what's happening with the percentage change on every single point of the match, but actually showing when the momentum changed happened. So whether it was, you know, not just losing a set, but what is actually a double fault that actually changed the momentum of the game, we'll be able to pinpoint that for fans. And then the third is enhanced match chat. So like an AI companion in your pocket, I like to say like your best friend encyclopedia.

5:19So if you're a tennis savant, you can get deeper by asking questions about what's happening in the match. But if you're not as much of a tennis aficionado, if you're more of a novice, you can ask really simple questions like, why is this player ranked this way? What's the head-to-head? Or like the favorite one in tennis, how do you pronounce someone's name? Which is extremely helpful for broadcasters. So those are the three things that we're super excited about for this year and that we think are going to be a really great assistant to fans in watching the game. And you're finding fans want this sort of technology.

5:51I don't know, you sort of presume that people might come to Wimbledon for more of an old-fashioned experience. Absolutely. We are definitely finding that the fans want these new features to be rolled out. Ultimately, what this partnership's all about is us knowing our fans and knowing what they want from their experience of Wimbledon, and then working alongside IBM to find where the technology can deliver really, really useful innovations. It's really about making sure that whatever we do is very meaningful. We've got that very, very rich heritage. So we've got to make sure that where we are innovating, we're doing that in a very focused way to make sure that we're delivering exactly what they want, but in a way which also respects Wimbledon and all of the heritage that we have.

6:34You said at the start that you started using AI, I think about 2017. Clearly, ChatGPT came out in 2022, and that's seen a surge in generative AI, huge acceleration in the technology. How has that changed? People may be more familiar with ChatGBT because it's a consumer-facing product, right? That's what's so special about sports for IBM is that IBM technology is infused in so many things in people's day-to-day lives. They just aren't aware of it. And so by partnering in sports, we actually create a consumer-facing space where people can touch and feel our technology and see how it aids their life.

7:06So Match Chat is a great example of generative AI and allowing people to have a conversation with an agent that's going to tell them what to do, what they want to know about a match. Again, catching them up on what's happening. So it provides that assistance within the app and also keeps people in the ecosystem and not having to go search something outside, but be able to have that app as their companion as they're watching the match. And that's one of the really unique things about Wimbledon and the Grand Slums in general is there is so much happening, especially in those first few days. And so what it's really about is being able to more effectively tell all of those stories that are happening around the grounds and make sure that people are aware of how those storylines are playing out and what things they should be watching out for as they go forward.

7:52It's the big shocks and the big upsets and finding out how those happened and why they happened. those are the really important stories to be able to tell so then people can follow those journeys they can start to understand what's so special about those players and how they're performing and then that gets them even more involved and engaged with the championships yeah that's what I'm most excited about key moments too is to be able to go match by match and see what the defining moment of the momentum swing was in a match and why somebody ended up winning or losing so that's going to give us a lot more data and storytelling capabilities and excited to see how that comes about this year and you're right the start of Wimbledon I mean that's where I always find it incredibly exciting when the players the really famous players are spread out across all of the different courts you don't have to just have a centre court ticket or a court one ticket and then clearly it starts to focus later in the championship yeah and it is amazing being around the grounds i mean you know i would maintain that the best value ticket in in world sport is probably grounds past the women in those first few days and and ultimately what we're doing through some of these features and the way we curate our digital experiences is aiming to bring that buzz to people wherever they are in the world so that they can keep up with all of those storylines and they can feel a little bit of that kind of windward and magic.

9:04And I think although it's not necessarily the thing that makes the headlines, one of the most important things that we're working on in the background is making sure we've got the infrastructure in place to power those experiences. And what does that mean in terms of infrastructure? Good Wi-Fi for fans coming? So that is one element of it. Which is difficult. We are making significant investment over the next few years in terms of both the mobile infrastructure and Wi-Fi in and around the grounds. But that's also about a lot around our kind of core data architecture and making sure we've got in place those data foundations to be able to underpin these experiences.

9:40so how do you go from a website which gets tens of thousands of hits a day year round to something which is then getting millions and millions and millions of people that are using it during the championships and to do that you've got to work quite hard to make sure you've got that infrastructure in place and in the past that was a little bit easier because actually those those services and those those kind of experiences were fairly generic we were giving the same thing to everyone in the future when we're giving more and more differentiated experiences, that then becomes an even more complicated picture.

10:14So yeah, these aren't necessarily the things that you'll read about in the headlines, but actually they're really, really important. Yeah. And also the security aspect too, right? Like you've got millions of people flooding to a site. You want to make sure it's secure and that you don't have any breaches. I mean, we run security for the championships, but we also run security for NATO. So we're used to this kind of thing and they are confident in our abilities to deliver a seamless experience for them. So when you think about these sports partnerships, clearly they're about brand awareness, but is it also for IBM a chance to try out the technology in really different and quite extraordinary settings?

10:48As a business, do you learn from it? Yeah, absolutely. We work with them as we would any commercial business client, right? We figure out what their goals are, and then we seamlessly hand-in-hand design, develop, and deliver experiences that meet those goals. And so each experience is based on what that specific property is trying to achieve. So where the Masters looks very different than our fan app in Ferrari versus Wimbledon versus US Open, they're all completely unique. But yeah, we use it as a ground for testing a lot of products too. I mentioned this IBM developer accelerator, Bob, we were using it at other tournaments as a code assistant for some of our developers to see how it would work.

11:24So it's actually a great product R &D ground because we're doing it at scale and able to make tweaks to see how we want to adjust something before rolling it out to market. So it's a huge benefit. But then the brand awareness too. I mean, everybody knows who IBM is, but a lot of people don't know what we do. And so one of the best use cases, I mean, ESPN fantasy football is an American thing, but somebody was like, my son loves to tell me what Watson's going to give him for a prediction every day. He refers to Watson X, our AI technology, as if it was his friend. And the job is for us to push each other, right?

11:56Like healthy conflict. They may have a huge priority where we're going to push them to go further. And we may have something where we're like, you really should try this and it's not a fit for them yet. So I think we bring the best out of each other with that healthy dialogue. And And again, that comes from sitting together year round, constantly looking at what the future is going to be constantly innovating. You mentioned the ballot and the pressure on the website. I mean, I just I just can't imagine my brain was going to all the different pressures that Wimbledon has. What would you say is the biggest tech challenge you face?

12:25I think one of the biggest challenges is around that scalability. Yeah. So for us, the day one is actually the first day of qualifying. It's not necessarily day one of the championships main draw that many people think of. and as much as you can simulate things and do as much testing as is is possible and we really do there's always that slight nerve-wracking moment when you see the first ball being hit on court and to just make sure that everything's coming through and everything's working seamlessly well it's lovely to see it all sort of coming together now and all the grounds people pulling it all together yeah you know the calm before the storm thank you thanks so much for joining us and all the best for the coming weeks i hope it goes really well