IBM and USTA Roll Out Suite of AI Fan Features for 2026 US Open

LOS ANGELES, August 25, 2026– IBM and the United States Tennis Association on Monday unveiled a suite of new artificial-intelligence features for the 2026 US Open, aiming to give fans more personalized, real-time insights across the tournament’s digital platforms. The enhancements, available on USOpen.org and the official US Open mobile app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, build on a partnership managed by IBM that has delivered advanced digital experiences in tennis for more than three decades.

The new Live Updates homepage for this year, which uses artificial intelligence to generate match-ups, statistics, and stories based on personal preferences, forms the core of this strategy. This will allow fans to give priority to their favorite players and navigate to the most relevant information, with the hope of reducing information overload at a tournament with many matches played on different courts.

Serve Quality metric and data pipeline

One new statistic that has been introduced in the headline is the Serve Quality, a completely novel statistic that ranks every serve made in all 254 singles matches on a 0-100 scale. This metric is based on limb tracking technology developed with IBM, which captures 21 data points for both the player’s body and racquet 50 times per second. All in all, the metric is predicted to generate 1.2 billion data points throughout the entire event, which are streamed in real-time via IBM Confluent.

Unlike regular serve speed, which simply measures the speed at which a player serves, Serve Quality tries to explain why a player can serve effectively through its combination of efficiency, accuracy, consistency and ball toss information into one simple number. This metric is embedded in the AI assistant Match Chat, allowing fans to ask questions about serve effectiveness in a set-by-set manner.

Key Moments, Likelihood to Win and Match Chat

The existing Likelihood to Win module of the tournament, which predicts the likelihood of winning based on the current and historical statistics, expertise, and the flow of the match, will be expanded by a Key Moments component. This new component will highlight key moments and changes in momentum in any singles match simply, allowing fans to not only know the score but also understand how it was reached.

The Match Chat module, which uses watsonx Orchestrate technology, has been improved in such a way that it can function as an interactive companion during the match. Fans can ask questions in natural language and get immediate conversational answers along with photos and video clips. The AI agents and models are trained in the style of the USTA editorial and tennis vocabulary.

Fan adoption and tournament context

The move to more advanced AI capabilities is in response to the increasing demand for intelligent sports content by the fans. In a global survey commissioned by IBM, on behalf of Morning Consult, it was reported that 91% of tennis fans use sports apps in events, and 64% of them trust AI-generated sports content. According to Brian Ryerson, Senior Director of Digital Strategy at the USTA, “our work with IBM this year has been game-changing, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in digital fan engagement. By leveraging their AI capabilities, we’re delivering new, innovative, and highly personalized content and insights to our millions of fans worldwide.” 

The 2026 US Open will be held from August 23 until September 13 at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. The new capabilities can be accessed via the official tournament website or the US Open app, which is available for download on Apple and Android app stores.