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Conversations with the smartest people in the golf business to get the inside stories and strategies driving the business of golf forward. Hosted by former PGA Tour player Roberto Castro.
Decker
[00:00:00] Speaker: I'm Roberto Castro, and this is The Course Record Show: the trends, technology, and strategy driving the business of golf.
[00:00:13] Roberto: Welcome back to The Course Record Show Field Report from the PGA Championship. I spent my first day at Aronimink on Monday, walked the entire golf course. It is a pure old-style golf course. It's in perfect condition. The stories about the greens are true: tons of humps and bumps, tons of slopes. If they can dodge some of this rain Wednesday, Thursday, I think it's going to be a really, really compelling championship.
But the energy was great. The vibes were great. Philly's going to show up strong. It's going to be a great, great PGA Championship. Joining me today for a Quick 9, I have Ryan Decker. Ryan is a Director in CapTech's Sports Practice. He's worked with Rob and the PGA of America closely to bring some of the things Rob talked about to life.
Ryan, thanks for being here.
[00:01:00] Decker: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:01] Roberto: So Rob talked about that multi-year journey, you know, started with location and figuring out where fans were. What has that led to? What's the big thing in 2026?
[00:01:12] Decker: Yeah. So this year, really excited to roll out a new fan-facing feature. We're calling it Plan Your Day, and this feature's going to be available in the championship mobile app, and it's going to give fans a chance to really start to personalize their own experience while they're attending the PGA Championship.
You can go quickly right off the home screen, jumps you right into the survey. You answer a few questions, takes about 30 seconds to get through it all, and at the end, we curate an itinerary for your entire day on the golf course.
[00:01:44] Roberto: And then-- Well, hold on. And then during that day, will it, will the app be following up with you and saying, "Hey, we know you had these goals, or these were your itineraries. You're kind of near the merchandise tent. Why don't you peel off now so you don't have to walk a thousand yards later?"
[00:01:59] Decker: Yeah. So we have all sorts of geo-triggered push notifications-- Okay ... that are going to be kind of following you around throughout the day, reminding you of things that you were setting out to do, giving you some different options of partner activations to check out, or maybe a grandstand that's not as full that you could go look at.
So it's really going to-- How do you-- give you that personalized experience while you're out on the course.
[00:02:22] Roberto: So one thing you've talked about is producing the fan experience, right? For a television show, the producer sits in the truck. They have access to all the cameras, all the information, and they can produce that show.
You're essentially trying to produce a day for a fan at the golf course, but how do, how do you know whether that grandstand is full or not?
[00:02:42] Decker: Yeah. So that's another really cool thing that the PGA is rolling out. They now have cameras on the grandstands. They've got cameras within the concessions. They've got a bunch of other IoT signals that are capturing data throughout the fan journey while you're attending the championship.
So we're sitting there, we built an awesome platform that then has a web app sitting on top of that. So we're centralizing all of that data into one location. So we have a few dashboards that we're looking at, really understanding all of the signals.
And then we're layering in AI to actually start to surface insights in real time. So with the click of a button, we can see what all the fans are doing, you know, over the last hour. We're also surfacing some insights at the end of the day that we're then handing off to the Champ Ops team, so they can start to see what happened throughout the day, how many fans are at a particular location.
And they can start thinking about, okay, where do we need to get some, you know, maybe more security or more inventory, maybe more merchandise over to the shop the next day? So really starting to think, how do we deliver real-time intelligence across the course through a variety of data sources that are set up and feeding directly from the app and the other signals that are out on course?
[00:03:56] Roberto: That's awesome. I think about the operations piece. My long-distant Georgia Tech brain thinks about operations and logistics, and it sounds like it's not just you guys, right? It's the whole ops team has access to this. And whether you're on the merchandise side, food and bev side, security, transportation, right?
Rob even mentioned, "Hey, a weather system is rolling in. How many people are on the golf course? Where are they? Where are the buses? How do we make this as efficient as possible to get people back in a safe place or get them off the golf course?" I think that's huge.
You mentioned AI. It's a golf technology sports business podcast here. Let's talk AI. Basically, there's too many data sources and too much data for even a team of ops people to look at. And the AI can consistently and constantly crawl the data set to find outliers, to find interesting things that are happening and surface them to you and the ops team. Do I have that right? Like, this is actually impactful. It's not just a marketing scheme.
[00:04:55] Decker: Yeah. We're not just doing AI to do AI. We're really using it as that second set of eyes. I like to think of it, you know, as my, my data analyst.
[00:05:04] Roberto: Yeah.
[00:05:04] Decker: We've got it all set up where, you know, we've got it triggering and monitoring all the different data sources.
We've already established all the prompts. We've worked very closely with the PGA of America to develop the KPIs for what AI is monitoring, as well as a knowledge base of all the operational procedures they would, you know, normally do in the event if something were to happen. Yeah. So what's really interesting is we're not only able to start to look at what's happening throughout the course, but surface that in real time, surface it automatically, and then humans can decide what to do next.
So really, that human in the loop, the AI really is another assistant for us to be able to surface data very quickly and make decisions and really deliver impactful value to the PGA, to the fans, and everyone that's involved with the championship.
[00:05:54] Roberto: Everyone, including partners. I think that's really interesting, right? T-Mobile's one. Their 5G network is enabling all the IoT pieces on the course. They're enabling a lot of that data flow, and that allows them to tell a great story about their partnership with the PGA of America. And that really matters, right? Marketing is not just a sign anymore. It's, "Hey, how is my product or my service being used to make somebody's day better, to make the fan experience better, to make this massive championship run?"
And I think that's a really great story. We're going to try to talk to someone from T-Mobile later in the week. In the next couple of days, we'll talk to Kaitlyn Nelson from the CapTech team. She's a data engineer. We'll maybe get a little bit more under the hood on what's happening with that data platform.
But headlines: producing the fan experience, using a vast data set and AI to surface what the ops team needs to pay attention to. That's really cool. All right, shifting gears away from the tech. You're a golf junkie. You're a good player.
[00:06:51] Speaker 3: This episode is presented by CapTech. At CapTech, we're building what's next in sports, focused on modernizing and monetizing your data, building new sports experiences, and deploying sports AI agents that have real impact. Reach out to me or our sports practice lead, John Bradway, anytime to talk about the future of sports.