Tennis and racket sports fans, meet a new kind of AI: Agassi Intelligence.
Under a new five-year collaboration between IBM and Andre Agassi‘s sports entertainment company, the partners plan to develop and market an IBM AI technology-powered mobile app that distills and aggregates Agassi’s legendary tennis knowledge into a digital coaching platform for the masses.
High-Powered Partners
IBM Consulting and the Agassi Sports Entertainment Company (ASE) are marketing the venture as a racket sports platform that also includes pickleball and padel (played in an enclosed court in which players can hit the ball off the walls), fast-growing tennis offshoots that have become widely popular worldwide.
Agassi is a unique figure in tennis history, blending a powerful game with strategic brilliance. Considered one of the best to ever play the game, he is one of only three men to have won all four major Grand Slam tournaments (eight total) and an Olympic gold medal. The Las Vegas native was legendary for his early rebelliousness and flamboyance, flaunting neon outfits and flowing locks, before settling down late in his career, shaving his head and winning his last Grand Slam, the Australian Open, at 35, an advanced age for pro tennis.
In recent years, Agassi has become an avid pickleball player and a notable advocate for the sport, as well as a proponent of collaboration with tennis. Agassi, after stepping away from the tennis spotlight for many years to focus on business and raising a family with his wife Steffi Graf, the all-time tennis great, re-emerged over the past year as a sought-after coach and TV tennis commentator.
IBM and Tennis
As for IBM, the tech giant has long been associated with pro tennis as a sponsor and digital partner of the sport’s most prestigious events, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and a supplier of tennis analytics data.
For this project, IBM Consulting has already begun building the app using IBM’s Watsonx generative AI platform, combined with computer vision, to deliver top-grade technique coaching to players’ mobile devices based on advanced video analytics (that’s the Agassi Intelligence part) gleaned from video footage of app users playing. The app will then deliver succinct coaching advice about swing technique and ball anticipation.
The app, expected to be available sometime next year, will also include an interactive chatbot, racket sport merchandise market and other content and entertainment.
“This is super cool, because ASE is going to transform racket sports in a way that democratizes coaching,” said Jonathan Wright, global managing partner for AI-driven transformation at IBM. “So, give coaching to everyone, not just a few people who can afford it, not a few who are with clubs, but to anybody who’s got a phone and a racket. They’ll be able to get coaching right on their phone.”
Tennis Tech
While IBM and ASE’s vision for the project includes building the international racket sports community and bringing coaching to areas with little racket sports infrastructure, Wright emphasized that this is a for-profit venture. The partners did not disclose the financial terms of the arrangement. IBM will supply the technology and app-building expertise, cloud services and data platform, and ASE will provide the racket sport wisdom.
The IBM-ASE app will enter an increasingly crowded tennis tech marketplace. Tennis and pickleball coaching, analytics and stats apps such as SwingVision and Dartfish have become popular with teaching pros, coaches and club players around the world.
However, the prospect of an Agassi-powered app is already generating substantial buzz in the tennis world.
“The Agassi digital app has huge potential in regard to growing racket sports games around the world. Agassi’s name will be extremely valuable for marketing,” said Jim Kane, a tennis teaching pro in Massachusetts. “My dream and hope would be for the rich and the poor and the culturally deprived to have access to the AI platform.”
Kane noted that many coaches now analyze video of players’ strokes for a fee, “but it seems to me that coach-driven analytics may be replaced by AI-driven analytics.”
For his part, Wright said the Agassi app is different from other tennis tech products on the market today because it will use the latest generative AI and not rely on fixed cameras. With users’ mobile cameras, visual analytics and the AI, the app builders, according to Wright, are creating “micro clusters,” a technique that summarizes large data streams and functions as a compressed representative of the stream.
“You compare yourself against your own micro cluster,” Wright said. “What that means is I’m not being pre-described how I need to hit a shot because I’m being compared against Andre. I’m actually being compared with people of my own physical abilities and the way I play.”
At this stage of development, the IBM Consulting team is shooting video of tennis players and collecting large amounts of visual data to feed into the app.
