IBM Watsonx Empowers Fans With Golf Insights at the Masters

The Masters golf tournament has partnered with IBM to use its watsonx generative AI platform to provide fans valuable insights.

Organizers have created more personalized ways for fans to engage with this year’s Masters Tournament taking place April 11-14 at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club.

Watsonx powers the tournament’s Hole Insights, a digital platform offering Masters fans detailed information on shot projections for each hole on the course.

IBM’s generative AI models can show fans where balls could land from every swing, even comparing shots with data on 170,000 shots from previous tournaments.

Credit: IBM

Golf fans can access the platform through the Masters website and mobile app to uncover live insights like the chances of whether a shot could result in a birdie. 

The digital platform also provides detailed recaps of every hole throughout the tournament, showing which holes proved tough, like "The 14th hole has played difficult today, with 25% of shots resulting in bogies.”

IBM is also helping the Masters translate English clips from the event into Spanish through AI-powered narration.

An IBM generative AI model was trained to generate authentic audio for Spanish-speaking fans. It expands the English AI commentary tool introduced at last year’s tournament.

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The AI translation tool enables golf fans to switch between English and Spanish. It also works for close captions, allowing fans to listen in one language while having subtitles in another.

IBM is using watsonx’s governance tools to monitor the accuracy of its AI narrations during the tournament.

"The generative AI power of watsonx is enabling IBM and the Augusta National Golf Club to co-create technology solutions that bring the magic of the Masters to life for millions of fans around the world," said Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president of marketing and communications at IBM. “These are the same capabilities we're applying to our work with businesses across industries as they aim to build better customer care experiences, reach new levels of productivity and make more informed, data-driven business decisions."

IBM has been working with the Masters Tournament since 1996. The company helped set up the event’s first website and later created AI-generated highlights.