Mollie Cahillane

mollie@bigswingmedia.news

For decades, the head pro was the heartbeat of a golf facility, managing everything from the tee sheet to turf quality. The rate card behind the counter at your pro shop dictated the value of your Tuesday morning or Saturday afternoon, and a human voice answered your questions about driving range operating hours. But with the explosion of AI and its ever-evolving capabilities and functions, the golf industry is embracing new technologies.

"There's no denying that AI is going to be transformational for golf," said Tom Adcock, head of digital at St Andrews Links, speaking at last week's Golf Business Technology Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland. "I think all of us are responsible for the future of golf, and if we want to retain [the human element] we need to think really carefully about what touchpoints we're replacing."

‍The "revenue assistant" and the prescriptive era

The most immediate shift is occurring in the pro shop, where the traditional static rate card has become a liability. Data from Sagacity Golf, an AI-driven revenue management platform, found that public and municipal courses traditionally leave more than 12% of their potential revenue on the table annually because they're failing to adjust to real-time demand.

As technology accelerates, platforms like GolfNow's Athena and Sagacity AI have moved into the prescriptive era. These systems function as a 24/7 revenue assistant, analyzing local weather shifts, historical booking paces and competitor benchmarks to autonomously optimize prices, rather than predictive tools that could forecast busy periods and create dynamic pricing.

This shift moves software from predicting a busy Saturday to acting on it, like automatically lowering the price of a 10:00 a.m. tee time when the first cloud appears to ensure the course isn't empty.

"The process of changing prices manually was always a labor-intensive burden," said Mike Hendrix, founder and president of smbGOLF and former GolfNow executive in published materials. "By allowing the tee sheet to adjust autonomously, we've turned a fringe tactic into an industry standard."

Filling the white space

As these systems move from predictive to prescriptive, this shift is being embraced at the ground level.

Matt Welliver, director of business strategy for Lightspeed, noted that more than 350 courses with Lightspeed have adopted Courserev (a company that uses AI to automate golf course management). "I'm dealing with assistant pros that are integrating their system and asking me for application programming interface (API) credentials," Welliver said in Belfast.

"[Golf] was always lagging, but we're not lagging now. We're right up there with some of the best of the industries."

Effectively, the person checking you in for your round could be as much a data analyst as they are a swing coach.

While the tools are becoming more autonomous, they still require strategic oversight. Ross Liggett, founder of Metolius Golf, noted that while LLMs (large language models) like Claude and ChatGPT are "mindblowing,” they aren't a total autopilot. "The organization of the data is still something that a human needs to be involved in," Liggett said in Belfast.

This sentiment is echoed by Manna Justin, founder of CourseRev.AI, who noted that the rate of change is so high that developers often have to "rein in" the models to provide consistent service. "Over the next 18 months, every model that exists will drastically change," Justin added. "We are also leveraging AI into dynamic pricing, which means that it will focus on trying to get the maximum revenue or profitability to every golf course."

The Human-Centric Future

Though conversations in Belfast and beyond centered around AI and a technology-driven future, speakers and attendees emphasized that replacing the pro isn't the ultimate goal of the new intelligent infrastructure.

Facilities integrated with AI technology can also see pros spend less time on administrative tasks, like manual tee sheet adjustments and inventory counting and more time on high-value activities like coaching, fitting and member engagement.  

Justin Binke, director of sales and revenue at Founders Group International, has seen voice AI reduce pro shop call volume by up to 30%. "Our golf pros can do more with the customer versus sitting down in the back office all the time," Binke said.

As Alistair Sinclair, CEO of PlayMoreGolf, put it: AI allows for a better understanding of the consumer. "AI comes along now and you can have a conversation with someone… and say this is how you understand what profit is."

Ultimately, the golf industry remains a people business. "It's absolutely time now to start looking into these AI technologies, because the early adopters are going to benefit so much more long term if they start now," Binke concluded. "But golf is still a relationship business. It's still that relationship, human to human."

‍The Hardest Thing in Sports

By now, you’d have to be living under a rock to not know that the 2-time world figure skating champion … a man named Ilya Mallinan - whose pre Olympic odds were minus 10,000 … basically the same as a number one seed in March Madness playing a number 16 seed - fell at the (Milan) winter Games … not once, but twice and finished 8th.

To me it was less shocking than just another confirmation of what I’ve come to believe is sports number one law of the jungle: the hardest thing to do is win when you’re supposed to.

What is it they say? … “Coming close only matters in horse shoes and hand grenades.”

I don’t care what anybody says - I’ve been around enough to understand that if you’re one of the chosen ones, the joy … let’s say … of winning silver, is dwarfed by the despair of losing gold.

Look, this clearly doesn’t apply to all of us … just the special ones … and that’s precisely why they’re special

When he first turned pro, Tiger Woods told Curtis Strange. Second place sucks. Strange laughed and said Woods would learn, but it was just pure honesty … AND the type of thing that makes the giants such an outsized presence in history:

“You play the game to win,” my friend the former Jets coach Herm Edwards once famously said.

Good enough - unless it amounts to one thing - is never good enough. It can make for a frustrating and miserable existence. It’s also a trait that often finds those afflicted … in the record books.

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_{Originally aired in The Big Swing with Jimmy Roberts on February 24, 2026}