In 2012 I was in a room full of PGA professionals teaching digital marketing. I told them customer service was about to change. I said golfers would welcome having their phones tagged, so that when they pulled into the parking lot, their favorite beer and a good cigar were already on the cart, waiting at the bag drop.
A PGA pro with thirty years in stood up. He’d spent his career being taught the value of face-to-face contact with the golfer, and he wasn’t about to hear otherwise from a marketing guy. I said something that went over about as well as a shank into the clubhouse: a lot of golfers no longer wanted to talk to anyone in the clubhouse.
I was half right, and so was he.
He was defending the counter conversation. I was arguing for the outcome: the golfer feels known and doesn’t wait. Nobody misses being on hold at 7 a.m. while the shop checks in a foursome. Plenty of people miss being recognized. My beer-and-cigars idea was never less service. It was service that anticipated instead of asking.
What AI does well
Today, the pro shop phone is one of the first places AI is showing up. Some courses have AI answering calls, booking tee times, and handling the routine questions about rates, cart policy, and rain.
I’m for a lot of that. A golfer who calls at 5:30 a.m. to grab a Saturday tee time shouldn’t get a ringing phone because the shop doesn’t open until 7. A golfer who calls at 6 p.m. after the shop closes shouldn’t get a voicemail box. And on a busy Saturday morning, when the staff is checking in foursomes, selling merchandise, and juggling the starter, a second call shouldn’t go unanswered because everyone’s hands are full.
Every call answered is a win, for the golfer and for the course. Missed calls are lost foursomes, and most shops are short-staffed. Nobody’s hospitality suffers because a machine picked up at 5:30 in the morning.
I’ll say it plainly: AI that covers the gaps is good for golf.
Where it starts to encroach
Golf is in one of its healthiest stretches ever. The National Golf Foundation reported record rounds played for the fourth time in five years, and more than 8 million women and girls playing on course, an all-time high. NGF also found that the public increasingly sees golf as social, healthy, welcoming, and fun.
Nobody came to golf because the booking flow was efficient. They came because it felt like a place where they belong. Golf is still a social game, and that’s the part I want to protect.
So here’s the line I keep coming back to. There’s a difference between covering and replacing.
Covering is the machine picking up when no human can: before open, after close, or when the desk is buried. Nobody gets pushed away from a person because of it.
Replacing is the machine picking up when a person was standing right there and the course decided it didn’t need to be. That’s a choice, and it comes from a spreadsheet, not the golfer.
Watch for the signs:
- The bot answers the phone all day, even with staff at the desk, and there’s no easy way to reach a person.
- A first-timer with a nervous question gets a script instead of someone who wants them to come back.
- The member who’s unhappy and about to quit talks to a machine, and nobody at the club ever hears about it.
- Check-in becomes a kiosk, and the first face a golfer sees at your course is a screen.
- The pro shop, the starter, and the bar lose hours because “the technology handles it.”
None of these looks like a big decision. Each one saves a little money. But add them up and you have a tee-time vending machine, and vending machines compete on price. The course with the best rate wins, and the course with the best welcome loses its edge.
The test
For any AI deployment in a golf operation, I’d ask one question: does the golfer’s next human interaction get better or worse because of this?
If AI buys your staff the time to be present at the first tee, to remember a name, to sit down with the new golfer who’s afraid of looking foolish, then it’s working. If it’s used to justify fewer people, then it isn’t saving you anything. It’s spending the thing you were selling.
The boom isn’t guaranteed either. NGF reported rounds were down in July, with some of the biggest year-over-year declines in golf-rich states. When margins get tight, the first thing an operator cuts is people. That’s when the technology stops being a tool and becomes a strategy.
The next generation
Younger golfers hate phone calls, and I don’t blame them. But they aren’t anti-human. Topgolf and simulator bars prove that. They want the social experience without the logistics. They’ll happily book, check in, and pay through a bot, and they’ll pay more for real hospitality where it counts.
The line I drew in 2012 still holds. I was not advocating less service. I was pointing out that some golfers prefer a service that anticipated their needs. AI can now do that at scale, which is why the risk is higher too. There’s a difference between “they knew my beer” and “they’ve been tracking me,” and courses will have to decide which side of it they’re on.
AI can make golf easier to book. It can’t make anyone feel welcome, and welcome is what’s been growing this game. The courses that win will use the technology to answer every call, then spend every minute it buys them face to face.
