How AI is reshaping the U.S. Open for players and fans

At this year’s U.S. Open, fans watching tennis with their phones in hand are not simply checking messages. They are using artificial intelligence to follow the match as it unfolds.

During Coco Gauff’s match against Turkey’s Zeynep Sönmez, the U.S. Open app delivered AI-generated analysis of key moments, each player’s chances of winning and a new “serve quality” measure. Cameras around Arthur Ashe Stadium tracked the ball, rackets and players’ limbs, recording details such as elbow and knee flexion and wrist-flex velocity.

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There’s so much unpredictability in sports, you could take a look at all the data, but anything can happen out there on the court. That’s the fun about it. We want to provide an insight, but still, let’s watch the matches play out.

IBM’s Watsonx agentic software platform then processed the court data. It assessed the efficiency, accuracy and consistency of a player’s serve and turned the findings into a score out of 100. After Gauff’s match, the system said her winning serves featured “controlled racket preparation and deep knee bend during her setup.”

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Tennis is a lot of problem solving on the court, so it’s a lot of patterns, and I think serve is a really big one. It’s the one controllable shot we have in tennis.

Tyler Sidell, IBM’s technical program director for sports and entertainment partnerships, said the tournament could generate more than 1 billion data points. About 14 million fans can access the AI features through the U.S. Open app. Sidell said the data should open conversations without taking away the uncertainty that makes tennis compelling.

Players are also using the technology. Jessica Pegula, who reached the fourth round, studies serving patterns before matches. “Tennis is a lot of problem solving on the court, so it’s a lot of patterns, and I think serve is a really big one,” she told CBS News. She added that players still need to trust their instincts when opponents change strategy or defy expectations.

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You can get a lot of analytics, but sometimes things change during the match, sometimes someone changes their strategy, or they maybe go against the grain of what you thought they were going to do, and you still have to really trust your instinct.