Navin Rammohan
Infosys
Mukul Pandya
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Navin Rammohan and Mukul Pandya describe Infosys Courtvision, which allows tennis fans to visualize the data points of their favorite players during the match, seconds after the point is played out. This AI and 3D tech-powered feature has existed since the late 2000s on broadcast television, but never before have fans had access.
In 2015, Infosys, an IT services company headquartered in Bangalore, India, was looking for a global sport with which it could get involved to show how innovative technology could drive customer engagement. The company had three objectives. First, it did not want to merely slap its logo or brand on a sports event; instead, it wanted to establish a genuine partnership that could showcase a variety of digital innovations. Second, Infosys hoped to re-imagine the sport through data, insights, and digital experiences for all stakeholders – players, coaches, fans, and the media. And third, the company sought a sport that was popular all over the world, and especially in its key markets.
Infosys hoped to re-imagine the sport through data, insights, and digital experiences for all stakeholders – players, coaches, fans, and the media.
After considering various options, including soccer and car racing, Infosys settled on tennis as a global sport that met all these criteria. It is the world’s fourth most popular sport, with more than one billion fans. Moreover, many of those fans were in the company’s key markets in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Infosys believed that, if it got deeply involved with tennis, it would reap many digital transformation opportunities.
In order to achieve these objectives, Infosys collaborated with a diversity of groups and organizations in the tennis ecosystem. In all, over the past seven years, the company has introduced more than twenty innovations. One example is Infosys MatchBeats, which powers live stats from using a foundation of machine learning and automated natural language insights. This feature alone has had more than 75 million fan views since its launch in 2019, and numerous fans have tweeted asking why MatchBeats is not available for all tournaments. (So far, Infosys has implemented MatchBeats at more than sixty tournaments.)
Few tools among tennis coverage innovations have had a particularly impressive impact on customer engagement.
AI Highlights and AI Shot of the Day
The Infosys AI Highlights and AI Shot of the Day features can curate hours of tennis match data, automatically selecting highlights to be made public minutes after the game is over. They also overlay these highlights with graphics that showcase the key moments of the match. Given the speed at which the AI works, it can actually provide these services while the match is underway or after every set or game, as well as serving social media snippets. This immediate response would be impossible without AI.
Using AI, Infosys can look at every facet of the games from the first day of the tournament to the last. It allows the company to pick out the best shot of the tournament, using multiple parameters including the roar of the crowd, the length of a rally, the spin and speed of the ball, and many other factors. If the media teams at the Australian Open, for example, want to look at just aces or forehand shots, the AI can help them do that. The technology can also rapidly create playlists based on these attributes.
To give you an idea of the scale of these features, on Day 5 of the Australian Open 2021 alone, 2,703 points were played in the singles competition, 1,633 in men’s singles and 1,070 in women’s singles. Infosys AI analyzed all this data in seconds, using more than 120 filters and over 1,000 combinations to generate suggestions for Shots of the Day, ready-formatted for instant publication on social media such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Innovations such as these have made tennis more appealing to its fans. At the Australian Open 2022, just the content generated by this AI garnered over 10 million media views of the shots of the day.
In addition to these features, Infosys was able to use coding to add an ‘elegance value’ rating for each shot. Elegance value, or a shot’s refinement and style, added subjective, AI-based analysis to the image. That is not to say that a more elegant shot necessarily draws greater customer engagement or vice versa. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ ML) use video analysis, audio analysis, hawk-eye procedural analysis, or a combination of these methods to calculate these ratings in cases in which a shot’s elegance is predominantly gauged by the type of shot. Within a single type of shot, they base the rating on the outcome and intrinsic parameters of the shot including speed, spin, proximity to the net, accuracy, crowd noise, and more.
Elegance is a subjective parameter that allows the system to highlight the best shot of every tournament. This concept did not previously exist in tennis; it was made possible by AI and was completely new to the game.
These innovations helped Infosys make tennis coverage more appealing to the media. For example, in collaborating with two of its partner organizations in tennis, Infosys made AI Highlights available on its portal so that every broadcaster around the world could easily pick it up and instantly embed highlights on digital channels for their audiences. In addition, during one of the Australian Open editions, an organization used AI Highlights to automatically produce instant match highlights minutes after the matches ended and publish them on popular search engines. This use benefits sports journalists and also offers enormous value to tennis fans everywhere.
Short Video Snippets
Another pragmatic use of these AI video portals is to distribute resulting clips on social media. Short snippets engage fans because they are able to see them instantly on social media. This is another way in which AI has significantly increased fan engagement.
AI-Assisted Journalism
Another innovation that has had tremendous impact is the AI-assisted journalism tool that Infosys created to help journalists instantly create infographics from the match. If users are looking for a certain data point, Infosys can provide it and create an infographic within minutes. This feat was simply not possible in past. Now some journalists use this module to insert infographics into their articles. It also helps to engage fans. For example, at Roland- Garros, also called the French Open, users used this tool to create and post more than 700 match reports. At the 2022 edition of the slam, it drove over 27.5 million interactions on rolandgarros.com.
Did the deployment of AI help Infosys increase customers’ engagement with tennis and, indirectly, with the company as well? Absolutely. Before Infosys introduced these innovations, about a million people were engaging with the content. Thanks to these AI tools, the number of fans engaging with the content in 2018 increased by 27 percent from the year before. With the launch of the new match center for The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) in 2021, AI has powered a variety of insights and stats-driven features for fans, drawing 1.6 million users.
Overall, 150 million fans have engaged with Infosys and its growth rate is in the high double-digits. Its use increased 38.1 percent in 2022 from the prior year’s numbers during Roland-Garros. This increase includes more viewers on tennis websites as well as social media channels. And the key to this sharp increase is that these tools made it easy for fans to consume content.
Player Portal
Along with fans and journalists, players and coaches also benefit from Infosys. The company has created a player portal to help players dynamically view and analyze portions of their matches. In the past, they would have gone to YouTube to watch their entire game performance against a competitor.
With the player portal, they can examine their performance at a granular level. The system allows them to choose exactly what they want to view: for example, all their forehand shots against an particular opponent. This use of AI helps players and coaches to better understand their game, offering subjective information about positives and areas to improve, basic and advanced stats, as well as stats powered by pattern analysis.
AI provides coaches and players with performance data as well as analysis of that data in a way that was not possible before. It is no surprise, then, that more than 3,000 players and coaches have used this tool since its launch just a few years ago, even though it is available only at select tournaments such as the Australian Open and Roland-Garros. From 2021 to 2022, its usage doubled.
AI is also democratizing the use of digital technology.
AI is also democratizing the use of digital technology in devising player strategy. In the past, players who could afford data coaches had an edge. Today, technology levels the playing field in data and video analysis, whether the player is ranked 300th in the world or third. This capability grants the sport of tennis some of the most technologically advanced coaching in the world.
Looking ahead
Infosys has increased the engagement of fans, journalists, players, and coaches with tennis. And it seeks to go further. In the future, Infosys would like to personalize the content it distributes, ensuring that each constituent gets the information they most value. At the moment, casual and deeply involved fans get the same content. Infosys hopes to develop an AI model that can provide exactly the content depth that suits each fan.
Infosys is already making inroads. When the company redesigned the Australian Open app, personalization was at the core of its efforts. For example, it allowed fans to bookmark favorite players and receive customized content about their scores and schedules. Meanwhile, news and push notifications make it convenient to follow the sport.
During the Australian Open 2021, Infosys developed the virtual hub, a digital hospitality platform that offered premium personalized content to key partners of the tournament. It featured virtual rooms with customized welcome messages, partner branding, and unique and differentiated content for various groups. The platform hosted more than 900 senior industry leaders from more than fifty different brands across the globe and delivered more than 19,000 sessions and more than 120 pieces of original content.
Infosys will continue to deliver customized, AI-powered experiences for players, fans, and the media. As the power of AI increases – which users have already seen in the performance of ChatGPT – these tools will only become more intelligent, productive, and usable.
In the future, we will need to focus on creating more sustainable, accessible, AI-powered, and consumer-driven experiences for the tennis ecosystem. Digital sustainability tools will move the company toward a circular economy and tennis toward net zero. Just recently, Infosys launched a new carbon tracker tool to help players achieve net zero, seeking, as always, to improve the experience of everyone who loves the sport. As long as Infosys stays true to this calling, it will continue to ace the AI tennis game.
Author Bios
Navin Rammohan is Vice President and Segment Head of Marketing at Infosys, responsible for the company’s European marketing initiatives. They also manage Infosys’ sponsorship and events activities in Europe. Navin has over twenty years of experience in marketing and communications, with a focus on technology companies and brands. They earned a B.Tech from the Government Engineering College, Thrissur, a post-graduate degree from MICA | The School of Ideas, and completed an executive education program at Stanford University.
Mukul Pandya was the founding editor in chief of Knowledge@Wharton from 1998 until his retirement in 2020. After retiring from K@W, Pandya was a senior fellow with Wharton Customer Analytics and AI for Business. A four-time award winner for investigative journalism, Pandya has published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more. He has written or coauthored four books.