"AI-powered" is slapped on every tennis app now. Most of it is just charts. Here's how to tell genuinely useful AI insights from marketing.

What's actually AI

Pattern recognition across many matches — finding combinations of factors (opponent style + surface + time of day) that correlate with losses
Natural-language summaries of your match — explaining *why* you lost, not just the score
Personalized practice suggestions based on your specific weaknesses
Anomaly detection — flagging when a stat suddenly drifts from your baseline

What's just dashboards in a wrapper

"AI insights" that are pre-written templates filled with your numbers
Charts labeled "AI" with no actual model behind them
Generic advice ("work on your second serve!") that doesn't reference your data

How to use AI insights well

1. Log at least 15-20 matches first — AI needs data to find patterns 2. Read the summaries, not just the numbers 3. Ask follow-up questions if the tool supports them 4. Cross-check AI claims against your own memory of the matches — if it says you "struggled with returns" and you remember serving badly, recalibrate the data

Tennis Log's approach

Tennis Log uses Google Gemini to generate match summaries and trend insights from your actual game-by-game data — not templates. Insights get better the more matches you log, because the model has more context to reason over.

AI is genuinely useful in tennis tracking, but only on top of disciplined data entry. Garbage in, generic advice out.