The professional men’s golf tour is leveraging two AI agents to better connect with its young fanbase.
When the LIV Golf professional men’s golf tour launched in 2022 as a rival to the PGA Tour, it set out to capture a younger, global fan base. The international league’s four-day, 72-hole format competitions, featuring both individual and team components, boast a festival-like atmosphere, with concerts and other events geared toward younger audiences.
“We definitely see interaction with younger fans, people who enjoy the cultural value around sport, as well as the event itself,” says Nick Connor, SVP of technology at LIV Golf.
The tour, financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF, is seeking to transform itself into an agentic enterprise as part of its efforts to further engage with those fans.
“Engagement really is the gateway to monetization,” Connor says. “The more fans we have using our products, the more opportunities we have to interact with them, create moments they treasure, and build that fandom and their affinity with us as a brand.”
A change in course
Monetizing that fan engagement has become even more critical since the Public Investment Fund announced earlier this month it would cut funding for the tour after the 2026 season, throwing the league’s future into doubt.
PIF, having invested more than $5.3 billion in LIV Golf over the past four years, has said it’s reducing its international investments and putting greater emphasis on promoting domestic sports.
Emergence of agents
Regardless of what lies ahead, however, the tour unveiled in February some fruits of its agentic AI efforts with new agents Fan Caddie (aka ‘Chip’) and Agent Caddie.
Chip is an agentic AI golf companion intended as a real-time concierge for golf fans. It’s a second-screen experience that can serve up stats and insights, or even help attendees navigate event logistics. Meanwhile, Agent Caddie is a broadcaster-facing agent available via Slack to provide the tour’s commentators with real-time shot intelligence and statistics to support their storytelling.
Chip’s features include:
- Real-time tournament insights and replays. Fans can ask the agent to provide hole-by-hole scoring insights, player comparisons, and stat cards.
- An interactive leaderboard that provides live data from the content team to help fans better understand what’s happening on a course.
- Integration with LIV Golf’s online retail offering, Shop the Look, giving fans the ability to explore and purchase gear worn by their favorite players and teams.
- On-course utility, offering ticket and hospitality information to fans attending LIV Golf events.
- Customization of content according to fan tastes.
Agent Caddie relies on much of the same data as Fan Caddie but presents stats and insights in a way that’s more suitable to broadcasters.
“Fan Caddie has a bit more summarization and is more graphical,” Connor explains. “Agent Caddie is deployed in Slack, and it’s got a narrower scope in the sense that it’s more about stats retrieval for storytelling on broadcast.”
Behind the scenes
LIV Golf has worked closely with Salesforce to build out its agentic capabilities. The agents are powered by Agentforce 360, though Connor explains that much of the early work was around Data Cloud as the team sought to build out its data architecture, clean up its data, and solve for issues like data ingestion.
“In the context of Fan Caddie, we have a big emphasis on statistics and ensuring people can ask questions about the players,” Connor says. “Some of that did exist in terms of data ingestion, but we had to do quite a bit of work to tidy that data up and bring it into a structure that was actionable for reporting and agentic AI.” The important first step, he adds, is to get the data structured right and ensure the data quality is good.
LIV Golf will spend the coming year further iterating on Fan Caddie and Agent Caddie, but Connor says it’ll build out new agents to support other parts of the organization, including marketing, retail, legal, and finance. “We’re invested in doing this across our organization to improve our daily workflows, and to make our organization as effective as it can be,” he says.
