The U.S. Open returned to Queens this week, with the final Grand Slam of the year bringing millions of fans to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to watch many of the world’s top men’s and women’s players compete for the title.

As fans prepare to follow hundreds of matches over the next two weeks, IBM and the United States Tennis Association have announced new and enhanced AI-powered fan features in the U.S. Open app and on USOpen.org for this year’s tournament.

IBM has worked with the U.S. Open for decades to evolve the fan experience, especially in recent years through AI-powered innovations designed to help fans personalize their tennis coverage. That long partnership matters because the tournament has become as much a digital viewing event as a live one, with many fans using apps and second-screen tools to track scores, storylines and match context as play unfolds across the grounds.

That experience has increasingly matched what sports fans now expect from digital products. According to new global research commissioned by IBM and conducted by Morning Consult, sports fans’ digital expectations are rising as platform choices expand. The survey of more than 20,000 sports fans across 12 countries found that 46% said their expectations for digital sports experiences have increased over the past one to two years. It also found that 72% of respondents use sports apps as their central hub for fandom, while 40% said having their information in one place is their main reason for following along.

IBM says it is continuing to reshape that experience during one of the biggest events in sports.

"I think we have such an incredible reputation in tennis through our two [Grand] Slam partnerships, as well as The Masters, where there’s this anticipation for the event, but also to see how we’re going to keep them connected," Kameryn Stanhouse, vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships at IBM, told Fox Business in a recent interview.

"That’s one of the things that I love about what we do in sports is that we actually leverage technology as a way to foster conversations and connection. You can talk to people whether they’re able to go to tennis matches [or not]. We’ve got 1 million people that are going to go to the [UTSA] Billie Jean Tennis Center across the two weeks, and then 14 million people are going to be engaged at home on their couch, but able to feel like they’re courtside and engage on that second-screen experience."

For the 2026 U.S. Open, that second-screen experience will begin with an all-new Live Updates homepage designed to give fans a more personalized way to follow the matches they care about most. Stanhouse said fans will be able to select their favorite players and quickly find those matches, while also seeing relevant insight and stories.

Another new feature is the Serve Quality metric, which Stanhouse described as a "first-to-market feature" that adds new context to one of tennis’s most important elements.

Last year, American star Coco Gauff entered the U.S. Open with a new coach focused specifically on improving her serve. In tennis, service can be the difference between winning and losing, and players with stronger serves generally win more matches.

IBM says the new feature will be available across all 254 singles matches. The AI-powered tool will use advanced limb-tracking technology developed with IBM Bob to analyze the precise mechanics of every serve, and the live data stream will be managed by IBM Confluent.

"We basically trained this model to look at all the historic white papers, all the research about serves. Then, we’re looking at 21 specific joint points on the body – everything from the elbow to the big toe that looks at momentum," Stanhouse explained. "The position of a serve on the court, where it lands. We have six different coordinates we’re looking at all the way to the racket positioning. Synthesizing all of that, it’s doing snapshots 50 times per second – lots of data points in this one. But overall, 1.2 billion data points that’s going to be analyzed over the tournament to give you a Serve Quality number."

The app will also introduce a new Key Moments feature that expands on the existing Likelihood to Win tool. Likelihood to Win has been popular because it calculates each player’s chance of victory using AI-powered analysis of current and historical statistics, expert opinion and match momentum. Key Moments is designed to add richer information so fans can better understand why momentum is shifting, not just who is leading.

"We’re looking at that structured and unstructured data, taking AI to make an analysis, and then make a pre-match projection that takes into consideration not only how they’ve been playing, but what’s the media saying? What’s been said on social media? What are the broadcasters saying? Did someone get a new tennis coach? Do they have a lingering injury? So, we take all that into consideration and provide a pre-match projection," Stanhouse added.

IBM’s upgraded Match Chat feature will also serve as an interactive companion for fans throughout the tournament. Powered by watsonx Orchestrate, Match Chat uses a collection of AI agents and purpose-built models to provide fast, accurate answers on a range of topics, from analysis and Serve Quality to basic information such as how to pronounce a player’s name.

For Stanhouse and her team, the U.S. Open remains an opportunity to show what IBM technology can do in sports and to demonstrate how similar tools could be used by other companies. In a tournament where attention is split between the venue and millions of viewers following remotely, the updated app is meant to keep those audiences connected to the same match narrative in different ways.

"Everybody says my team has the best job at IBM. There’s many, many great jobs, but I think what we do is so exciting because there’s a tangible output that people actually see and people are waiting for. Each tournament that we go to is not only a learning opportunity because we’re constantly thinking about how we’re going to evolve things for the next year, but it’s such a pay-off to see everything come to life. Because what we do is not just serve the fan experience, but we’re so creating unique conversation pieces for our clients. They see how IBM technology makes all of this possible and inspire what you could do with us."