How AI Is Reimagining the Game of Golf—for Both Players and Courses

Article by Bradley S. Klein, The Wall Street Journal, April 2026

It is hard to imagine a game that is more bound by tradition than golf. Many courses and clubs have strict rules about cellphones. They dictate the color of socks and the length of pants one wears. They rely on golfers to self-enforce a complex book of rules.

So much for tradition. Now, from reserving a tee time to maintaining fairways and greens to enjoying a beverage afterward, the whole game is being upended by artificial intelligence. For the golfing community, the transformation is just beginning—and promises to accelerate in the next couple of years.

Start with something as simple, and fundamental, as booking a tee time. Golfers have long been able to reserve start times online. But soon, courses are likely to use a virtual assistant that takes in all your information—and your personal data—to both give you what you need.

Let’s say you and a friend, both mid-handicappers, are looking for a tee time between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. And you want to walk the course, not ride. And you want to make sure the pace of play will allow you to finish your round in 4½ hours. And you want to cap your budget for three planned rounds at $1,000.

“Not a problem,” says Craig Kleu, chief operating officer and co-founder of Tagmarshal, a software company in Kennesaw, Ga., that specializes in golf-course services. A course manager can use the company’s technology to identify when and how your needs can be met—and to anticipate (given your golf handicaps) just how quickly you and your friend will complete your rounds. The forecast will be based on data that Tagmarshal has collected from more than 95 million rounds of golf at more than 900 golf properties.

It isn’t just golfers who benefit from such advances. Booking a tee time through an AI call center provides a “data-rich” environment for course managers, says Fraser Marriott, head of the golf business at Lightspeed Commerce, a Montreal-based software company. The call center typically will retain the golfer’s name, location, email address, cellphone, ZIP Code, payment method, tee-time preferences and history of previous bookings. “You get a pretty granular understanding of your clientele,” he says.

What’s more, if a tee time becomes available, AI will reach out to golfers on a wait list—and can entice customers at the last minute with a discounted rate from the one posted or the one normally set through dynamic pricing.

When it comes to improving a golfer’s game, AI, in many respects, is assuming the role of a personal instructor and caddie combined. Tools are emerging for recreational golfers that measure a golf ball’s launch velocity and trajectory, analyze each part of a golfer’s swing and map the terrain where shots might land—all designed to shave strokes from a scorecard.

For example, PG1, a mobile app developed by Performance Golf in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., invites users to enter information about themselves: their practice habits (how much time are you willing to devote to drills on a daily or weekly basis?), their learning preferences (audio? video? through a coach?) and their swing tendencies (bent elbow? too much wrist lag at impact?). The same app, via the camera on a smartphone, can record a golfer’s swing. AI then uses this data to produce a series of recommendations—swing tips tuned to a user’s body type, as well as practice routines to enhance performance.

For a typical flaw like a ball flight that is repeatedly low and left, PG1 might advise players to extend their elbow farther from their rib cage as part of their downswing. Such adjustments can take months to internalize, which is why specific drills are prescribed to reinforce changes.

Arccos Golf, based in Stamford, Conn., started in 2012 with a tiny GPS device mounted on a golf club, a sensor that tracked a player’s yardage. Today, the company’s products, including an AI-driven app and range finder, act as a virtual caddie, one that recommends the club you should use and the optimal landing area for each shot.

The technology, again, is supported by mountains of data. In a little over a decade, Arccos sensors have tracked approximately 1.5 billion shots from about 25 million rounds of golf on thousands of courses; as such, the company’s tools likely know (or are familiar with) the course you’re playing, including the contours of fairways and greens. The software also incorporates real-time measurements of wind, temperature, humidity and altitude as users move from hole to hole.

(Tournament players, beware: Live feeds might violate the rules of golf, which limit players to three sets of information: yardage estimates, the day’s hole locations and a small map of the greens. With that in mind, most apps can switch off unsanctioned information during formal competition.)

While players want to improve their scores, golf courses want to improve their bottom line. One way to do that is “course optimization”: understanding how golfers move through 18 holes and how they spend their time and money on-site. Here, AI is also going to be a key ingredient.

For instance, “pace of play” is one of the two most important factors in golfer satisfaction, along with course conditioning, says Matt Barksdale, vice president of golf at Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. He is referring not just to how long a round takes to play, but the feel of a steady flow to the round—one without major delays, interruptions or long waits on tees for the group ahead to finish.

To help get that flow just right, AI analyzes reams of data. Tagmarshal, for instance, begins with historical round times, statistics from courses themselves about golfers in the past and how long they have taken to complete play.

With this information in hand—and with details about who has reserved tee times for a particular day (such as players’ handicaps and previous bookings)—the technology can anticipate the speed at which various groups of golfers might move through the course and alert management to potential problems. For instance, a corporate group of high-handicap golfers who haven’t played the course before can be red-flagged in advance.

For good measure, the course layout for the day—the locations of tees and holes—as well as course conditions (green speeds, moisture levels) and weather forecasts are stirred into the AI pot. Indeed, flagsticks on each hole can be outfitted with a digital “wind tag” that records velocity and direction.

The point of all this: AI is helping course managers be proactive regarding the pace of play rather than reactive.

Once play begins for the day, still more data are pumped into the system.

At Pinehurst, for instance, “run times”—how long a round is taking—are carefully scrutinized beginning with the day’s first group of golfers. “We monitor weather, hole locations and course conditions,” Barksdale says, “and coordinate it with whether we have a lot of group play, organized events or more individual play.” Even the day of the week is part of the formula. Resort operators know that midweek play tends to involve more experienced golfers, who are likely to play quickly, whereas weekend players often are more casual and less experienced. (And slower.)

Pinehurst also equips every caddie and every golf cart with GPS trackers, the better to know precisely how play is progressing. This information, too, is fed into the resort’s database. And if play should begin to slow, course managers can call out the cavalry—suggesting where to place marshals around the course to shepherd golfers along.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.