Watch: Who’s that advising golfers on the best shot to play? It’s an Artificial Intelligence caddy
A company named Arccos has combined data analytics with images of golf courses for the service.
The real job of a caddy on the golf course, as any seasoned player will tell you, is not to carry the clubs around. It’s to provide objective advice on the best shot to play in any given circumstance.
Back in the day there were human caddies – there still are for a chosen few – this advice could only be as good as the caddy’s analytical abilities. But now, a company named Arccos, whose business plan is built around, believe it or not, golf data analytics, has come up with an Artificial Intelligence offering to do the job.
According to founder and CEO Sal Syed, a good round of golf is all about data, because there are so many variables, from the course to the weather, from the position of the ball after the last shot to the location of obstacles. And Syed’s company has packed it all into an electronic sensor fitted into golf clubs and an app, so that a player can now get advice for – imagine this! – “75 million shots, 368 million geo-tagged course mapping features on 40,000+ courses and weather data”.
There really seems no excuse for a bad score now.