The US Open is a sprawling, two-week tournament, with hundreds of matches played on 22 different courts. Most of those matches are not broadcast on television, and therefore do not have any spoken commentary. So the USTA asked IBM to add spoken commentary to the video highlight reels that are produced for every singles match throughout the tournament.

To do it, the IBM Consulting team built a generative AI solution, based on a powerful large language model called Sandstone, available through watsonx.ai. Sandstone already understands the English language, but it needed to be trained, or “tuned,” on tennis data in order to translate tennis scenes into complete sentences.

“Foundation models are incredibly powerful and are ushering in a new age of generative AI,” says Shannon Miller, a Partner at IBM Consulting. “But to generate meaningful business outcomes, they need to have domain expertise. And that’s why an organization’s proprietary data is the key differentiator when it comes to AI.”

The team used watsonx.data to connect and curate the USTA’s trusted data sources. The curation process includes de-duping and filtering the foundational data that informs the large language model, as well as the USTA’s proprietary data. The process filters for things like profanity or abusive language and objectionable content.

The AI Commentary model is then trained to translate the metadata attached to video clips into sentences. It generates dozens of different options before choosing the best sentence to describe the action, taking care to vary the sentence structure from clip to clip, so as to avoid repetition. Text-to-speech capabilities are then used to give voice to the words. Over the course of the 2023 US Open, match highlights with AI Commentary were viewed more than 2 million times.

The operation of the model is monitored for performance using elements of what will be included in the upcoming watsonx.governance release. And the same suite of watsonx tools were used to build the AI models that power the Match Insights feature with IBM Watson®. These models produce AI-powered fact sheets using sophisticated data analytics and natural language processing to distill millions of data points into meaningful insights about all singles matches.

For example, tennis fans can see which players have the most momentum in the tournament by checking out the IBM Power Index, which successfully ranked the eventual women’s champion #1 throughout the tournament, despite her world ranking of #6. And prior to each match, users can see which player has the highest likelihood to win. They can even see the relative difficulty of each player’s draw with the new AI Draw Analysis feature.

To develop new capabilities every year—like the ones found in the AI Commentary and Match Insights—the USTA needs to move with speed and purpose. The process starts the week after the US Open concludes, when IBM Consulting kicks off work using the IBM Garage^™ Methodology, a highly collaborative approach to co-creation.

“When we engage with a client, it’s critical that we work closely together every step of the way, ideating, iterating and adapting as we drive toward the client’s desired end state,” says Miller.

In order to transform new ideas into digital reality, IBM Consulting designs, develops and manages a powerful digital infrastructure capable of processing structured and unstructured data, and integrating technology from a variety of sources. This foundational infrastructure is advanced and improved upon every year.

“It used to be that innovation cycles were measured in years,” says the USTA’s Corio. “But now, innovation is measured in weeks and days, and it can come from anywhere. So we needed a flexible platform that could handle all kinds of data, automate the process of turning data into insight, and do it all while protecting the entire digital environment.”

The raw material of any digital experience is data, and the US Open tournament produces a lot of it. For starters, each US Open consists of 128 men and 128 women singles players, and a total of seven rounds for each tournament. Each tennis player comes with his or her own data set, including world ranking and recent performance. But that’s just the beginning.

Over the course of the tournament, more than 125,000 points will be played. And each one of those points generates its own data set: serve direction, speed, return shot type, winner shot type, rally count and even ball position. All told, more than seven million data points are generated during the tournament.

But to add more texture and context to the US Open digital experience, the team wanted to go beyond the numbers. So they are using AI to analyze the language and sentiment of millions of articles from hundreds of thousands of different sources to develop insights that are unique and informative, like the IBM Power Index. To help manage the collection, integration and analysis of the data sets, IBM used watsonx.data, a purpose-built data store specifically designed to handle AI workloads.

“It’s a massive data management operation, incorporating multiple sources of data and a variety of partners,” says Miller. “But the magic happens when you combine hard data like stats and scores with unstructured data like media commentary. That is what gives tennis fans a more complete picture of each match.”

To streamline this process during its years of work with the USTA, IBM Consulting has built automated workflows that integrate and orchestrate the flow of data through the various applications and AI models needed to produce the digital experience. These workflows are made possible by a hybrid cloud architecture and the containerized apps running on Red Hat^® OpenShift^®. The US Open hybrid multicloud architecture is made up of four public and three private clouds, drawing on data from a variety of sources and integrating features and capability from a variety of partners.

By containerizing the applications, the team can write them once and run them anywhere, ensuring the right data gets to the right application on the right cloud. And to keep the entire operation running smoothly, the team uses IBM Instana^™ Observability technology, which constantly monitors application performance and surfaces issues in less than three seconds, so the team can take swift action and avoid any downtime.

Over the course of the tournament, it’s not unusual for the US Open digital platforms to be on the receiving end of millions of security incidents. The type of threat varies, but most are looking for a crack in the armor and are not serious.

Defending the platform starts months before the tournament begins. Using the IBM Security^® Randori Recon solution, the team conducts a comprehensive attack surface analysis, scanning the entire network for vulnerabilities, including third-party or adjacent networks. Following this security reconnaissance, IBM Security Randori then ranks those vulnerabilities by their attractiveness to hackers, allowing the team to prioritize its response.

Once the tournament begins, the US Open uses the IBM Security QRadar^® Suite to assess the severity of each security event, evaluating threats, ignoring the insignificant ones and passing along only the most urgent issues to the security analysts. It then correlates that activity with threat intelligence from external sources, like the IBM X-Force^® Exchange solution, looking for any activity that might be part of a more coordinated, global attack. And finally, the IBM Security QRadar Suite serves up recommendations to IBM analysts on how best to deal with the threat. During the 2023 US Open, the IBM team successfully thwarted more than 10 million security events.

“With this platform, we’re capable of doing things that were not possible just a few years ago,” says Corio. “Managing all that data, producing AI-generated insights, securing the environment … IBM just makes it all come together for us. And I can’t wait to see what the future of the partnership holds.”

Founded in 1881, the USTA (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the national governing body for the sport of tennis in the US. The US Open (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the association’s Grand Slam tournament, first held in 1968—the year that Arthur Ashe won the men’s singles title. The US Open is played each September at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens, New York.