How the PGA Tour uses AI to make golf more interactive for fans
PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — Whether you’re at the WM Phoenix Open or watching the action from home, the PGA Tour is using artificial intelligence to make golf for interactive for fans.
“Every time you see something pop up on your phone, every time you see something on TV, every time you see that little box that comes up on our broadcast that says the ball was moving this fast, at this place. He has this far to the hole, that information has to come from somewhere and that’s why we put that technology on the ground,” said Ken Lovell, the senior vice president of golf technologies at the PGA Tour.
Lovell showed On Your Side inside the PGA Tour’s Shotlink truck. Shotlink is the PGA’s scoring system, and it tracks every ball on the course. “That camera is taking a two-dimensional image and turning it into a three-dimensional coordinate system and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to find a ball in that field and then translate that into a three-dimensional coordinate in any given second, so you know where it went and how it moved,” he explained. Fans can follow every shot with TOURCAST.
The data coming from the course is constant as the system identifies objects in the cameras’ fields of vision. “There’s also mathematics going on where we can predict where the ball is going to go before it hits the ground because we have mapped this down to basically the square centimeter,” Lovell said. “The ball gets hit off the tee, the radar tracks it, the camera tracks it, and gets into the field of another camera. It hands it off from sensor to sensor.”
Thursday’s first round of play at the WM Phoenix Open was suspended because of weather, including hail, which can impact how the system operates. “Weather is ‘frenemy,” Lovell laughed. “If it gets cold, hot, all kinds of things, if it hails, those are objects and those are going to mess with it.” But it’s constantly getting better. “What we’re doing is saying, ‘All right. I want you to learn, based on all the information that we have, take all this information, rule out the ones that have the wrong shape or characteristic.’”
It’s not just for scoring. The PGA Tour uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in several different ways to get fans a little closer to the golf action. “We built an AI-powered chatbot so that instead of getting a stream of data, you can ask it a question. ‘Was this good? How many times has this happened? Is this golfer good at his job?’ Lovell said. “You can ask it questions. It will respond very similarly to some of the things we’ve seen with large language models in other places.”
The PGA Tour also builds simulations. “We’re projecting where people should hit the golf ball, and not just telling them what did happen, but looking at options for what might happen to make it more interesting for fans,” Lovell said. “The trick is not doing AI just to do it. The trick is making it useful to a person so that it’s better.”
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