By Ken Van Vechten
Many people associate artificial intelligence with the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when it betrays Commander David Bowman and the other astronauts of Discovery. Thankfully, in the nonfiction world of golf, utopian, not dystopian, carries the day, although the advances are equally staggering.
We feel its impact in ways we’re not even aware: analyzing course loads to improve flow and pace of play; personalizing John Q. Public swing-data collection – Shot Scope is an example – to help players diagnose good and bad, and offer suggestions as to how to better navigate the course based on their individual peculiarities; providing tools and models to superintendents to improve maintenance practices; selecting what type of marketing offers end up in your in-box based on feedback you left somewhere in cyberspace.
But in this Futurescape of myriad advancements, three stand out …
For eons, golf club design and construction were far more art than science; a woodworker shaving and shaping a block of persimmon, a blacksmith hammering away at a hot ingot of metal, and all based on the artisan’s mental image of the finished good or a pen-and-ink sketch. Forgings still live, of course, but the qualitative bases of those processes went out decades ago with material advancements and computer-assisted design (CAD). AI has unleashed another tidal shift as better products hit the market and seemingly-promising duds hit the “cutting room floor” sooner, and edge-pushing “wild concepts” can be entertained and explored.
Callaway has been at the forefront of using AI to optimize club design, exploring the implementation of AI more than 10 years ago. “We were the first equipment company to introduce it into our clubs,” says Brian Williams, Callaway’s vice president of research and design. “AI helps us prototype and develop clubs in a way that we would not be able to do as a team of engineers. It can solve for solutions that are not intuitive to us and simulate alternatives on a scale that we were not capable of.
“To be clear,” he adds, “AI does not design the clubs for our team, rather our engineers can leverage it as a key tool to help us provide the best performing clubs that we can.”
At Titleist, AI quickens the ideation process. “It helps us converge toward meaningful performance solutions before we spend resources making parts and conducting empirical tests” says Chuck Golden, the company’s research and design vice president. “Put simply, AI gives us the freedom to evaluate ideas more efficiently.”
The three big questions of years past were: Forged or cast? Stiff or regular? Wilson, Ram, or Spalding? And a really avant outfit would ask a fourth: steel or graphite? Awright, somewhat simplistic, but many of us remember a day when the only place to get clubs was either a green grass shop or a sporting goods store. Not so much today, when a fitting outfit can offer upwards of 60,000 combinations of club head and shaft.
Go ahead, winnow that field on your off days.
“We capture more than one million swings each month in our fitting bays, collected from thousands of golfers with unique swings,” Sherburne says. “By applying AI to this dataset, we can build models that learn from these patterns and begin to predict outcomes for golfers with similar swing profiles. This not only makes the fitting process faster and more efficient, but also more precise. No fitter can realistically evaluate every possible option without the support of AI.”
During a typical PGA Tour event, the tour will collect 54 million data points across a four-day event provided courtesy of 150 or so (pre-cut) players tallying more than 30,000 shots. And within all that action, a typical broadcast might air 30% of the play.
That’s a lot to handle with not much shown.
“Golf has always been a two-tiered experience,” he adds. “Everybody watches the main storyline, but then everybody in Japan is watching (Hideki) Matsuyama and everybody in Scotland is watching (Robert) MacIntyre.”
It’s about providing the macro and adding the micro, the specific, targeted micro; micros, actually.
What makes it all work is generative AI, the new-paradigm capability that can create complex, original content – text, videos, images, music – from that massed assemblage of information up there in the cloud. It’s not just about crunching and processing a seemingly endless array of inputs and data; it’s about how to apply and use the information, customizing it, getting this to that consumer, and that to another.
“Hyper-personalization,” Gutterman calls it. “Generative AI is really enabling us to do that.”
Up next is Your Tour, on the tour app and web platforms, allowing fans to select specific players and customize the type of content they want to receive and in what form, be those stats, video, even voiced commentary … not uttered by a human.
Beam me up, Scottie (Scheffler).