World Gymnastics in Advanced Talks to Bring AI Judging Support to LA28

The federation wants Fujitsu's camera-based Judging Support System on the Olympic mat by 2028.

World Gymnastics is in advanced talks to introduce Fujitsu's AI-powered Judging Support System at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, president Morinari Watanabe told The Athletic, according to reporting published Oct. 23 and amplified this week by Inside The Games and Sports Business Journal.

The ambition is not a live Olympic confirmation. No announcement from World Gymnastics, the International Olympic Committee, the LA28 organizing committee or official timekeeper Omega says JSS will be part of the Games' timing, scoring or results stack. Watanabe said he previously sought to bring the system to Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 and pointed to the IOC's contract with Omega covering timing, scoring and results systems through 2032 as the obstacle that blocked those bids, per Inside The Games' account of his Athletic interview.

What is live now is broader use at the 54th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Rotterdam (Oct. 17–25). For the first time, apparatus supervisors there have had JSS analysis across all 10 men's and women's apparatus, while human judges retain responsibility for official scoring decisions, according to The Athletic via SBJ and Inside The Games. World Gymnastics' own JSS page describes the same 2026 Rotterdam milestone as planned supervisor deployment across all ten apparatus and states flatly that JSS "does not replace judges and does not make official judging decisions."

World Gymnastics and Fujitsu have collaborated on JSS since 2017. The system first saw official Worlds use in 2019 in Stuttgart on four apparatus — rings, pommel horse, and men's and women's vault — and has expanded apparatus by apparatus since, with official coverage across all ten artistic apparatus listed from the 2023 Antwerp Worlds onward on the federation's timeline. At each apparatus, four to eight cameras feed the system; AI maps bone and joint positions, identifies skills, and returns multi-angle review, 3-D imagery and numerical angle data so judges can call back an element in seconds, Inside The Games reported.

Watanabe framed Olympic interest around past scoring controversies, including the women's floor bronze dispute at Paris 2024 and the men's all-around controversy at Athens 2004. "These controversies have left a deep wound on the sport of gymnastics as a whole," he said, per Inside The Games. Some judges have backed the assistive model. Masao Kondo, an international judge who heads the Japan Gymnastics Association referee commission, told Asahi, as quoted by Inside The Games, that modern skills outrun naked-eye precision.

"Some skills in still rings are not recognised as such if the shoulder angle deviates more than 45 degrees from the required position. The human eye has no way to distinguish between 44, 45 and 46 degrees. The system is therefore backing us up." — Masao Kondo, Head of the Referee Commission, Japan Gymnastics Association

World Gymnastics maintains that JSS remains a support tool. Watanabe's longer-term ambition, as summarized by The Athletic via SBJ, is for AI to determine gymnastics scores without relying on human judges except in exceptional cases — a different posture from the federation's current "support only" deployment. In a 2021 interview with Inside The Games, Watanabe separately argued that clearer scoring presentation would help spectators who can follow a timed race or a ballgame scoreboard more easily than a gymnastics mark.

For sports-business readers, the story sits at the intersection of officiating integrity, vendor category creation for Fujitsu, and Olympic technology exclusivity. Until World Gymnastics, LA28 and the IOC's timing-scoring partner resolve how an AI support layer can sit beside Omega's contracted results systems, JSS remains a Worlds-proven assistive product in advanced talks for the Games — not an announced Olympic scoring change.