The fairways at the Waialae Country Club in Hawaii, home to the Sony Open, are lined with thick Bermuda rough, and requires more finesse than power. One of the toughest competitions on the PGA Tour, it has left many golfers searching for a way out of the kiawe trees. It is a shot-makers paradise, and a spectator’s too.

Golf has always been a game of numbers — scores, yardages, strokes gained — layered atop strategy, temperament, and skill. What’s changing is how those numbers reach fans. Through a collaboration between the tour and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the sport’s vast collection of data is available at the fingertips of anyone watching.

The tour is expanding its use of AI in partnership with AWS, aiming to give fans deeper, real-time insight into how professional golf is played, tracked and consumed. That started with the Sony Open, which ran from January 15-18, 2026.

At the center of the initiative is an effort to make every shot visible, contextualized and searchable — not just the ones shown on television.

Using AWS AI infrastructure in a live production environment, the tour now generates shot-by-shot commentary for every player in every tournament, producing analysis on more than 30,000 shots per event. The commentary appears in TOURCAST, the tour’s digital platform that tracks players in real time and allows fans to follow entire fields rather than just featured groups.

The AI-driven system does more than report distances and outcomes. It adds context, explaining how a shot fits into a player’s round, tournament or historical performance, and in some cases offering predictive insights based on the situation at hand.

This season also marks the debut of a new “favorite players hub” within the tour’s app and website. Powered by AWS technology, the feature allows fans to select players and receive automatically updated highlights, statistics and AI-generated storylines throughout the week. The goal, tour officials say, is to make it easier for fans who want to follow specific golfers, without jumping across multiple platforms.

“We are excited to continue our AWS relationship with this expanded global partnership as we build on the progress we’ve made to further connect our fans across the globe with our players, events and content,” said Dan Glod, executive vice president of corporate partnerships at the tour. “AWS shares our vision for reimagining how the game and its supporting content is developed and delivered to fans around the world.”

The technology also supports the tour’s World Feed, an international broadcast product that launched in 2025 and now reaches more than 200 countries and territories. Produced out of the tour’s newly opened PGA Tour Studios, the World Feed uses generative AI-powered commentary to create graphics and statistical overlays that provide additional context for viewers watching outside the United States.

“The PGA TOUR continues to push the boundaries of how AI can enhance sports experiences for fans, players and broadcasters,” said Kristin Shaff, global director of strategic partnerships at AWS. “By expanding our partnership, we’re enabling the TOUR to deliver new features at a global scale.”

Golf presents a unique challenge for broadcasters and digital platforms. A typical tournament spans four days, covers hundreds of acres and includes up to 156 players competing simultaneously. Unlike stadium sports, much of the action unfolds beyond the reach of traditional television coverage.

AWS and the tour are using generative AI and machine learning to address that gap. Shot data flows through cloud-based systems that trigger automated prompts, generating factual and contextual commentary through large language models hosted on Amazon Bedrock.

The tour says accuracy is critical, particularly when automation is involved. With tens of thousands of shots per tournament, manual review of every generated insight is not feasible. Instead, the system assigns confidence scores to commentary and withholds content that does not meet established thresholds.

The expanded partnership builds on a relationship that began in 2021, when AWS became the tour’s official cloud provider and AI partner. What started as a technology modernization effort has evolved into a large-scale experiment in how data, automation and generative AI can reshape sports media.

Looking ahead, the tour plans to expand the technology further. One area under development is AI-generated audio commentary, which could eventually provide live narration across dozens of simultaneous video streams, including in multiple languages. Historically, that level of coverage has been cost-prohibitive.

The broader strategy reflects a shift in how sports organizations are thinking about fan engagement. Rather than treating data as a backend tool, the tour is putting analytics, personalization and automation directly in front of viewers. The result is a more comprehensive picture of the game — one that allows fans to follow not just the leaders, but the entire field, shot by shot, in real time.