AI Arrives at Augusta and Fans Are Winning | PYMNTS.com

IBM wired artificial intelligence (AI) tools into the tournament’s digital platforms, enabling fans to query decades of footage, see real-time shot probabilities and follow a live predictive model of the field as each round unfolded.

The broadcast didn’t change. But what fans could do with it did.

From Archive to Answer

IBM built the Masters Vault Search as an entry point to the experience. Fans can type a description of a player, a hole or a half-remembered moment, and the system finds the clip. It runs on optical character recognition, speech-to-text transcription of broadcast commentary and scene detection, cross-referenced against a database of results from 1968 and stroke-level data from 2015.

This is what fans have been asking for. IBM conducted a global survey of more than 20,000 fans across 12 countries and found that real-time updates and personalized content are the top two priorities for AI-enhanced sports engagement. Eighty-five percent of fans surveyed said they…