The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM have introduced new AI-powered digital features for The Championships 2026, aimed at enhancing fan engagement through the Wimbledon app and wimbledon.com. The watsonx AI-powered capabilities include the Key Moments tool and an enhanced Match Chat, designed to provide a seamless and personalized experience for global tennis fans. These innovations are part of a broader modernization of Wimbledon's digital platforms, leveraging data analysis and improved architecture to streamline user journeys.

New AI Features

The Key Moments tool builds on the existing Likelihood to Win feature, offering deeper insights into match dynamics by analyzing plays that influence the game's direction. Available for gentlemen's and ladies' singles matches, it complements the probability model to help fans understand momentum swings. The enhanced Match Chat, an AI assistant, allows fans to ask natural language questions during matches, receiving instant, conversational responses with photos and video for context. Built on watsonx Orchestrate, it uses AI agents trained on Wimbledon's editorial style and tennis terminology.

Digital Platform Modernization

Wimbledon's digital platforms underwent a comprehensive modernization, including the extraction of over 15,000 digital assets to a new architecture. IBM Bob, an AI-powered development accelerator, was used to build a knowledge graph and develop AI-driven workflows. This reduced a mapping project that traditionally required months of work by a team of specialists to a single engineer completing it in 4 weeks, with the 15,000 assets extracted in just 47 minutes.

Engagement Growth

In 2025, AELTC reported a 16% year-on-year increase in engagement across all platforms, with a 39% growth in myWIMBLEDON registrations. The Championships 2026 will run from Monday 29 June to Sunday 12 July, with features accessible via IBM Slamtracker on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com.

Usama Al-Qassab, Marketing and Commercial Director at the All England Club, emphasized the partnership's role in delivering meaningful experiences. Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at IBM, highlighted how AI deepens engagement and accelerates innovation. The partnership, spanning over 35 years, continues to evolve with AI integration since 2017.

IBM announced the general availability of three new Z software tools designed to enhance security and operational efficiency for critical infrastructure. The new tools, IBM zSecure Detection, IBM zSecure Secret Manager, and IBM Z Database Assistant, aim to address evolving technological challenges such as frontier model attacks and the need for agentic AI in data operations. This announcement underscores IBM's commitment to innovating its mainframe offerings to meet modern sovereignty and regulation requirements.

New Security and Operational Tools

The release includes three distinct tools tailored for the IBM Z and LinuxONE environments. These solutions are intended to help enterprises monitor threats, manage certificates, and optimize database performance using AI.

IBM zSecure Detection

IBM zSecure Detection provides enterprises with a comprehensive tool to detect, investigate, and respond to threats on z/OS. It monitors system activity for ransomware and suspicious behavior, helping organizations strengthen their security posture amidst evolving threats.

IBM zSecure Secret Manager

Addressing the burden of certificate management, IBM zSecure Secret Manager offers a secure and automated solution for z/OS and LinuxONE environments. Powered by IBM Vault Self-Managed for Z, it helps teams manage shortened certificate lifecycles and fragmented management strategies.

IBM Z Database Assistant

The IBM Z Database Assistant leverages agentic AI to optimize database administrator (DBA) performance. This tool is designed to accelerate tasks and ensure trusted data remains continuously available, catering to the shifting needs from data access to data intelligence.

IBM Z continues to be recognized for its resiliency, with an average yearly downtime of less than a third of a second and 99.999999% uptime according to the ITIC 2025 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report. The new software tools are part of IBM's broader strategy to innovate and defend the full stack for the future.