Golf meets artificial intelligence (AI) as IBM, the official digital partner of the Masters, brings AI-powered player projections and insights to this year’s Masters Digital Experience.
Projections with IBM Watson is being introduced for the 2022 tournament, an AI feature that analyzes various training techniques to generate daily predictions for each of the competing golfers.
The feature was created by a team of IBM consultants gathering six years of Masters data from 2016 to 2021, using approximately over 120,000 golf shots to train AI models. The solution factors in several data points including each golfer’s previous performance, along with biographical information. With these factors in mind, Projections with IBM Watson can create predictions such as the most exciting hole to watch for every golfer, the low/high score for all golfers, projected finish on the leader board and projected Masters Fantasy points for every round.
IBM has been the digital partner of the Masters for more than 25 years starting with the launch of Masters.org in 1996. Since 2020, IBM’s hybrid cloud environment has been used by the Masters to quickly scale and manage various sources of data across multiple locations.
The Masters will be played from April 7-10 at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, with the AI tech accessible via both browser and app.