AI Arrives at Augusta and Fans Are Winning

The Augusta National Golf Club is defined by traditions that do not change. At the 90th Masters Tournament, the fan experience did.

IBM wired artificial intelligence (AI) tools into the tournament’s digital platforms, enabling fans to query decades of footage, see real-time shot probabilities and follow a live predictive model of the field as each round unfolded.

The broadcast didn’t change. But what fans could do with it did.

From Archive to Answer

IBM built the Masters Vault Search as an entry point to the experience. Fans can type a description of a player, a hole or a half-remembered moment, and the system finds the clip. It runs on optical character recognition, speech-to-text transcription of broadcast commentary and scene detection, cross-referenced against a database of results from 1968 and stroke-level data from 2015.

This is what fans have been asking for. IBM conducted a global survey of more than 20,000 fans across 12 countries and found that real-time updates and personalized content are the top two priorities for AI-enhanced sports engagement. Eighty-five percent of fans surveyed said they see value in AI as part of the experience. The Vault addresses that without requiring fans to know where to look.

Every Shot, Recalculated

Hole Insights, now in its third year, doesn’t wait for a commentator. The moment a ball lands, the system captures its exact coordinates and compares them against historical data for that location. It calculates the probability of eagle, birdie, par or bogey and generates a contextual read on the shot, the company said. A second player landing in the same spot gets a separate calculation built on that player’s individual history, not just the position.

Legendary caddie and commentator Jim “Bones” Mackay advised the development team, lending course-specific judgment that the model couldn’t build from data alone, IBM reported.

A third tool, AI Predictive Modeling, ranks players across six attributes like approach play and pressure scoring, updating as each round develops. A casual fan watching a tee shot drift right gets a probability before the commentator finishes the sentence. That’s the gap the broadcast doesn’t close on its own.

The Broadcast Model’s Limits

Eighty-one percent of sports media executives have expanded their use of AI in the past 12 months. By 2030, owned apps and social platforms are expected to overtake websites as the primary channels for fan engagement, according to a survey by Stats Perform. That shift is already reshaping where sports properties invest and what they expect fans to do once they get there.

Fans receiving personalized recommendations spend more time on team platforms and make repeat purchases at higher rates. Companies prioritizing customer experience grew revenue at 1.7 times the rate of their peers, with customer lifetime value rising at 2.3 times the rate, PwC reported.

IBM runs the same AI infrastructure across Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Grammys, the company noted. Augusta is one node in a broader argument about what live events become when data moves fast enough to keep pace with what’s happening on the course.

The Masters app now fields questions the broadcast never could. Rights holders across every major sport are watching to see what fans do with the answer.

Augusta isn’t alone. Formula 1 and Salesforce launched a fan companion agent in March built on Agentforce. The agent draws data from more than 100 sources to build unified fan profiles and handle queries around the clock.

The system already resolves 80% of fan support queries and cuts chat-handling times by 30%, CX Today reported. F1’s global audience stands at 827 million fans, with 43% under 35.

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