The Wimbledon tennis tournament in 2025 has brought us familiar doses of scorching sunshine and pouring rain, British hopes and despair, and the usual queues, strawberries and on-court stardust. One major difference with this year’s tournament, however, has been the notable absence of human line judges for the first time in 147 years.
In a bid to modernise, organisers have replaced all 300 line judges with the Hawk-Eye electronic line-calling (ELC) system powered by 18 high-speed cameras and supported by around 80 on-court assistants.
It has been sold as a leap forward, but has already caused widespread controversy. In her fourth-round match against Britain’s Sonay Kartal, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova was forced to replay a point she had clearly won, because ELC had failed to register that a ball had landed out. Furious, Pavlyuchenkova told the umpire: “You took the game away from me … they stole the game from me.”
British players Emma Raducanu and Jack Draper have also voiced concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the technology.
We have seen this before in business, government and elite sport (think VAR in football). Promising technologies fail, not necessarily because the systems are flawed – though some are – but because the institutions around them have not kept up. The belief that technology can neatly replace human judgement is seductive. It’s also deeply flawed.
Systems like Hawk-Eye at Wimbledon offer measurable gains in accuracy, but accuracy is not the same as legitimacy. People don’t just want correct decisions, they also want understandable and fair ones. When human line judges made mistakes, they were visible and open to appeal. When a machine fails, with no explanation and no route for redress, it breeds confusion and frustration.
Consider Formula 1. At the 2025 British Grand Prix in Silverstone, driver Oscar Piastri was handed a 10-second penalty by race stewards for erratic braking during a safety car restart. He called it inconsistent and harsh, and many fans agreed.
The key difference? We knew who made the call. There was someone to question, and a process to scrutinise. With machines, however, there’s no one to challenge. You can’t argue with a black box, or hold it to account.
Beyond performance
Technology is usually introduced to improve performance or reduce costs, but the full story is rarely made explicit. Wimbledon’s adoption of the new system was framed as a move towards greater accuracy and consistency, but it was also likely driven by the desire to speed up matches, cut costs, and reduce reliance on human labour.
Yet sport is not just about accuracy. It is entertainment. It thrives on emotion, tradition and theatre. For 147 years, line judges were part of Wimbledon’s identity. Their posture, uniforms, gestures, indeed even the drama of a close call, added to the spectacle. Removing them may have improved accuracy (and cut costs), but the atmosphere was also changed.
Tradition is often dismissed as nostalgia, but in institutions like Wimbledon, tradition is part of what makes the experience legitimate and enjoyable. When it’s stripped away with only a token explanation, players and audiences can lose trust, not just in the change, but in the institution itself. It is a cultural change, which is never easy.
One common solution is to combine human judgement with the technology, especially during the transition period, but hybrids rarely work well in practice as responsibilities get blurred.
In business, this is known as the “hybrid trap”: bolting new technologies onto old systems without rethinking or redesigning either. Instead of the best of both worlds, the result is often confusion, duplication and failure.
Wimbledon did not seem to offer a formal challenge system or human override during matches. Although 80 former line judges were retained as on-court assistants, their role was not adjudicative. This might speed up play, but it leaves the system brittle. When something breaks, there is no immediate redress. We have seen this elsewhere.
What this tells us about AI
Wimbledon’s failure was a textbook case of poor tech adoption. Hawk-Eye did what it was designed to do, but the institution wasn’t ready, least of all the players, umpires and spectators.
The same pattern is playing out with artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, from customer service bots to healthcare triage systems. These tools are being rolled out at speed, often with minimal oversight. When they hallucinate, embed bias or produce erratic results, there is rarely a clear route to appeal, and often no one to hold accountable.
The real problem is not just technical but institutional. Most organisations aren’t ready for what they’re adopting. Instead of transforming themselves to harness new technologies, they bolt them onto legacy systems and carry on as before. Key questions go unanswered: Who decides? Who benefits? Who is accountable when things go wrong? Without clear answers, new technologies don’t solve dysfunction; they entrench it. Sometimes, they hardwire it.
If we want technology to improve how the world works, we can’t just automate tasks, processes or jobs. We need to rethink and redesign the institutions these systems are meant to serve, using new capabilities these technologies make possible. Until then, even the best systems will continue to fall short, both quietly and occasionally spectacularly.
- is a Chair of Information Management, Associate Dean for Research & Innovation, Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
