00:23.38 ModGolfPodcast Welcome to the Mod Golf Podcast, where I speak with the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the disruptors, and the influencers who are shaping the future of golf. I am your host, Colin Weston, and today, 00:35.11 ModGolfPodcast We're gonna take a deep dive into AI. I know we've talked about it on the podcast a few times, there's some apps and training platforms out there, but this is the real deal. Today, I am going to be talking with Clive Mayhew, who is the founder and principal investor with golf.ai. Clive and I have been back and forth for the last couple of weeks here having some fun. 00:58.71 ModGolfPodcast creating some interesting things using their AI-powered platform. Some of them intriguing. Some of them are kind of freaking me out a little bit. I'm not gonna reveal what those are quite yet. Well, freaking to me out in a good way, I guess, of what the future holds. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today, how golf.AI will help inform the future of golf as a player, recreationally, professionally, the industry as a whole, whether it's products, apparel, golf course maintenance, all the things, basically the entire plethora, the spectrum, if you will, of everything within, well, in North America, $100 billion dollar a year in industry, and Clive is joining us from Sydney, Australia. 03:03.70 ModGolfPodcast So my understanding is that the golf industry has a around a $5 billion dollar a year financial impact on the economy there, but I'll let Clive let us know about that. Hey, maybe he'll even use golf.ai to let us know exactly what that number is. Okay, that's enough of me rambling, giving you the introduction here. Let's bring them on. Clive, welcome to the Mod Golf Podcast! 03:33.49 Clive Mayhew G'day. Great to be here from Sydney, Australia, as you say. I think it's about a $5 billion dollars industry in Australia. Typically, the Australian is about 5% of the US market in everything. So I'm just assuming it's 5%, but it's something we could ask golf.ai at some point. 03:50.26 ModGolfPodcast There we go. 03:50.27 Clive Mayhew But great to be on your call, Colin. I love your show. I love what you're doing in golf. And I really wanna wear a different hat today. I don't want to talk about golf today.ai. I wanna talk about AI in the golf industry, okay? So I want to make it broader. What you're gonna see is many different players in the space delivering AI services. Obviously, we're were we one of the first to do that. And we have probably the you know the best brand for that. 04:18.23 Clive Mayhew But we've been spending a long time thinking about this across the golf industry. So I just want to share that knowledge, if you like, with your audience today. 04:26.80 ModGolfPodcast I love that. We will pull out to that 30,000 foot level and get your thoughts and insights on AI overall in the golf industry, as you just touched on there. But yeah, I do want to drill down to find out a little more about the origin story of golf.ai as far as the history of yourself. You have Peter, who's also Canadian, I believe living in Toronto. So, I want to know a little bit about that and also the why. As an entrepreneur, it's like when you have chat GPT and open AI and other ah ah learning language models out there, it's like it's becoming a crowded space. Where did you see the opportunity? So tell us about why you put all the energy in and where you see the opportunity in the niche of of creating golf.ai just to serve the golf community. 05:13.61 Clive Mayhew Yep, great question. So this is actually my third golf tech startup in the last few years. During COVID, I did this, you can call me a little bit crazy. 05:24.59 Clive Mayhew I did my own competition of golf called the Golf Challenge, which are these five different challenges. We hosted a TV show in Australia, and that was really because at the time during COVID, all my professional playing mates had nothing to do. 05:38.97 Clive Mayhew They were literally putting in their apartments. 05:39.43 ModGolfPodcast Right. 05:42.04 Clive Mayhew they were do it they couldn't go out. So I was lucky enough to host them. I have a simulator and a golf hut and a bunker. You'll like the bunker I have. It's the replica of the 17th of the old course. 05:55.19 ModGolfPodcast Nice. 05:55.26 Clive Mayhew So I a putting green. So we literally did this TV show in COVID conditions where we were all like two feet apart from each other. 06:05.62 Clive Mayhew How stupid is that now? But we did it. We recorded this TV show and what fell out of that was this thing called the Golf Challenge. That was the first one I did. And then from there, it actually evolved into me producing a GPS scoring app, using web three technology, which was under the brand of play today. And then from there, we created a golf metaverse for a live broadcast tournament called the New South Wales Open. 06:38.55 Clive Mayhew And then from that, it evolved into building this metaverse, which actually we have live golf in there right now. So that was my two first startups, which is quite interesting. But one of the activations inside the metaverse was this character, and I'll try to put on the voice. 06:55.15 Clive Mayhew It was a wee Scotsman and his was New Tom. So we took it from old Tom and we created this character called new Tom. 07:05.30 ModGolfPodcast Nice. 07:05.64 Clive Mayhew And New Tom, we've been working on building a data set of golf rules. using AI, and we've been doing that. So we just built that and put it into our metaverse. And that activation got more usage than any other activation. So that was probably about January this year, so January 10 months ago. And that data set we think is quite interesting. So that was really the origin of Golf and.ai. So it was a guy called Old Tom. 07:37.31 Clive Mayhew answering questions using AI, using our data set we produced on golf rules. And then literally, the Metaverse sort of died, as you all know, I'm in the crypto space died for a while, it's coming back, which is great to see. But the Metaverse sort of had no usage, apart from this one activation. 07:53.88 Clive Mayhew And as this activation got bigger and then we started to think about what we could do with AI in golf, we just decided to spin out a company. I bought the domain Golf at.ai and I've now created and launched the Golf.ai service. 08:11.53 Clive Mayhew So it came from some origin. It came from three years of playing in golf tech. And now it's really exciting in terms of where we are and what the opportunity is for Golf.ai. 08:21.60 ModGolfPodcast Interesting. I love the insight you just provided there that what you created originally in the metaverse, which was very frothy like three, four, five years ago there. And there was one element of that, as you talked about with new Tom, that was the kernel of what you then. 08:40.54 ModGolfPodcast pivoted and then built or used as a foundation for golf.ai, which I see a parallel a story, some of the work I do in entrepreneurship and history of startups like Slack. 08:55.98 ModGolfPodcast Probably everybody knows Slack as far as using that as a communications platform, mostly for business. But that started off as a chat component for a gaming company here in Canada on the West Coast. And that became so popular that the game kind of went by the wayside. And then Slack now, of course, is a unicorn multi-billion dollar company, but really they created something for internal communication. And it turns out that's the thing that was the thing. So I love the fact. 09:24.00 ModGolfPodcast with yourself as an entrepreneur that you're always discovering, you're not holding on to an original idea or doubling down so much, even when it's like pushing a rope, you manage to extract yourself and then take the best elements of what you already built and then have used it for something new, which you've done with golf.ai. 09:39.72 Clive Mayhew Yeah it's interesting, Colin. It's going to be the same with golf.ai. So we launched it with golf rules. The idea is you can ask golf.ai I'm using your voice or chat, any golf rule question in English, Japanese and Korean right now, it's going to be 30 languages soon. Any golf question you have while playing 10:01.67 Clive Mayhew golf and he'll answer that and give you the rule. But I'm pretty sure that as this goes forward, we're going to start flipping other elements inside golf.ai too. so When you build this stuff, you have to really be very close to your initial customers to see how they're using it and then just go where they take you. So Slack's a great example of that. And Golf.ai, even though it was flipped through another another business concept, will evolve and be flipped in many ways until we get that secret killer application, if you like, that that will will scale it very quickly. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what actually it will be, even though conceptually, we're building what we think it will be. 10:42.60 ModGolfPodcast Now you only launched it just a few months ago. So you're still kind of developing the data set. And it's, I'm assuming is learning on its own. Just as far as what the preferences are for what people are asking. So my next question is really to do with all startups have to struggle with, with products that they're creating. 11:03.86 ModGolfPodcast And that is customer market fit, getting that validation to find out, originally when you had New Tom is, what do people want to use new Tom for? So tell us about that in the early days and what you've learned so far, just as far as what people are using golf.ai for, and also some of the assumptions that you had originally that turned out to not be true. 11:26.85 Clive Mayhew So right now it's being used for golf rules. So that's the number one application because that's the dataset, which we've developed just to give you some stats. If you ask chat GPT and a golf rule, it gets about 55% correct. Um, it doesn't give you a rules number. which is the actual rule calling. 11:48.27 Clive Mayhew So we have a data set on top of chat GPT, which takes it up to about 90% accuracy um with golf rules referenced as well. So you actually have a proper official golf rules reference to it. ah The last 10% of golf rules is it's nuanced, right? Ask me a question about golf rules. You can ask it in many different ways. 12:07.38 Clive Mayhew So AI is still working through what we call reasoning. And the reasoning is what needs to be better on the models to make the next 10% work better. But it's pretty good at 90%. We have this recent one where there's a Facebook community on golf rules where he has 2,000 questions. um And we get 100% right of those 2,000 questions. So it is pretty much being used for golf rules right now. 12:31.35 Clive Mayhew Outside of golf rules, we have an "ask me anything". Now this is really interesting Colin. So the idea here is literally ask me anything about golf. And the way that AI works, and people don't think they understand this yet, is it's referenced all of the data from the internet and it's all accessible via AI. so Golf.ai, if you're asking anything to do with golf, it's actually really, really good. 12:58.67 Clive Mayhew But this is the problem. People are not asking anything. People don't know what to ask it. So it's like the beginning days of the search engine. 13:05.59 ModGolfPodcast Right. 13:09.34 Clive Mayhew Beginning of the search was the same. People go, "can I really ask that question?" And then can I really talk into the AI and ask it these sorts of questions? And the answer is yes, but people are not doing it. So they pretty much ask one question, and then they don't follow up, and they don't go further detail. They don't go on it the next level down. And that's where the AI is incredibly good. So there's a lot of education needed and on how you can use AI to really get engaged. 13:38.49 Clive Mayhew So one of the things, and I'm a bit of a golf nerd, so I actually ask it questions when I go to bed. So I have a one of the voices on there is as a chap called Ewan Porter, a famous ah commentator in Australia, a golf commentator. He's done some LPGA commentating as well. He has a great Aussie voice. 14:01.05 Clive Mayhew So I say, "Ewan, can you just give me a golf story to fall asleep to?" And he talks about he talks about anything to do with golf. And you literally you just fall asleep listening to Ewan Porter. So that's my golf nerd use of golf.ai right now. 14:17.61 ModGolfPodcast Well, if you would have said that you listened to the ModGolf podcast every night to fall asleep, I think this conversation would be over and we could not be friends, but you didn't say that. So I appreciate that. Even though if that was true before you started to harness the power of AI in order to drift off to sleep every single night. So, hey, I want to ask you this question. So what can you tell us without divulging any trade secrets or any copyright or IP infringements here, but I have no idea how you build a platform like this. So can you explain to me, like you're talking to a third grader, the best you can to explain how you have built what you have built or even the key components or even the sequencing. Is that possible for you to respond to? 15:08.01 Clive Mayhew Sure. So the website itself it's just a normal website. The process is built around how people sign in with Google or with Apple. So that's a very simple, that's what I call sort of basic technology, which has been developed for many years. So the actual interface and the actual front end is all standard tech, which is relatively easy to build. Our secret sauce is really because of what we've been focusing on from an AI engineering perspective. 15:38.48 Clive Mayhew So Peter Bergen, who's our CEO, is what I would classify as being an AI guru who's built this incredible platform on all around the AI engineering. Now, if you know a little bit about the way that AI works is you have these things called prompts. Prompts ask the engine. 15:54.00 ModGolfPodcast Yes. 15:55.60 Clive Mayhew They literally ask how you ask a question to an LLM, a large language model. So what we have is, it's not just prompts. We have a couple of layers on behind the prompts. So literally a prompt will take us to an element of our own, and it's called a vector database, which is a search based database. And the vector database then takes that and has certain words and certain characteristics, which we then go deeper around golf search technology. So it's pretty much just the AI engineering that we focus on. And that's what we think we can scale relatively quickly. 16:32.43 Clive Mayhew And it's really exciting because you said before, what is the difference between chat GPT and all these other language models? And why would I invest in a vertical like golf? And how do we make it differentiated and keep it sustainable going forward? It's really because of the data sets of golf. So the large language models, we don't believe, and I personally as an investor don't believe that they will invest in every vertical as deep as the vertical providers will do. 17:03.96 Clive Mayhew So let me give you an example of that. When I say a depth in the vertical of golf, golf rules is a great example, right? So my golf rule data set, I own that that database. I've developed it in conjunction with a partner who's been doing this for five years. And the accuracy of our results, 90% versus 55%. That's what we call a vertical data set. 17:29.46 Clive Mayhew Golf has many of these. So when you go on a golf course, you go around the first hole and the data set of the actual course has been mapped for you. So there's a company called iGolf, has this incredible data set of all the golf courses around the world. We link into iGolf, we convert that into a vector database, and then we make that accessible over a over a large language model. So you can go on the first tee of any golf course and you say, what's the shot? 17:59.47 Clive Mayhew and golf.ai will come back and he'll talk you through what the shot should be knowing all the gps locations gps positions knowing the wind knowing that the weather conditions at that point in time and these are just different data sets which we're bringing in for answering that question what's my shot i don't believe the open a model and maybe i'll be wrong but i don't believe open ai will do that level of vertical integration around golf. So that's why there's an opportunity to build golf.ai and make that sustainable because we'll go deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's just one of many, many data sets in golf, which we're integrating into right now. 18:40.43 ModGolfPodcast Interesting stuff. Well, you and I are going to have a bit of fun on our video conversation that we're going to do right after we finished up with the ModGolf Podcast on the audio here. So of course, we're just waving our hands in the air and talking about things. People can't see it because we're just having a conversation using our ears here. But on the ModGolf YouTube channel, you and I are going to ah have some fun with some demos that we're going to do. We're actually going to pop a couple prompts Into golf.ai i've got a couple already my mind no spoilers here of what they are and we'll see what results we have. But speaking of results over the last couple of weeks and this is a nice little pat on the back for you and Peter and the crew here with golf.ai that i've been using it in one of the ways that i've been you i've been using it for two ways for the podcast. 19:32.50 ModGolfPodcast One way I've been using it over the last four or five episodes, including this one, is I've included the prompt to ask to generate some questions for my guests, even though I've done this over 200 times. I'm quite comfortable having conversations and seeing where it goes, but I will say it's been really helpful. And yes, I did try the same thing with chat GPT and compared to the response that I did receive in golf.ai, and I've gotta say that what you produced was great. So if people wanna know what a prompt is, this is what, I'll just read, I've got it on my other screen here, what my prompt was for this podcast episode. So I typed in, "I need questions for hosting a golf podcast with Clive Mayhew, with golf.ai, about the history of the company, why they created the platform, how will they plan to monetize golf.ai, and his thoughts on how AI will impact all facets of the game of golf and the golf industry. I'd also like Clive to share his connectivity to the game of golf and his business / entrepreneurial history." And cranked out 20 questions in five different categories. Am I gonna use them all here today? No, but it spurred on some other ideas. I'm gonna sprinkle in a couple of these questions, but the very effective stuff. 20:52.74 ModGolfPodcast And on that note, to take it one level farther, this is what I said at the top of the show. We're going to talk about something that intrigues yet scares me, is you've taken someone's voice. It's not Old Tom's voice. You've taken someone's voice and created an avatar from them, haven't you? 21:11.02 Clive Mayhew Do you want me to play it? This was a really interesting one So let me play you someone's voice who I've taken just to have a bit of fun on this show today. 21:19.12 ModGolfPodcast There we go. 21:24.11 Clive Mayhew I'm gonna put the other the Bluetooth on so you can hear this i again. 21:28.42 ModGolfPodcast Yeah, it started again because I can edit that down. It's okay. 21:31.31 Clive Mayhew yeah 21:44.25 Clive Mayhew It's great as I'm having problems with the tech for the old and it just turns itself off. How ridiculous is that? All right. I think. Yeah, we're on now. OK, so so let's have some fun then. How about if I play you a voice that I created and you may recognize this voice, Colin. 22:08.90 ModGolfPodcast Alright, alright. 22:10.73 Clive Mayhew The Ryder Cup is one of the most exciting events in professional golf showcasing a fierce competition between teams from the United States and Europe established in nineteen twenty seven the tournament is held every two years alternating between courses in the US and Europe out of the Ryder Cup is unique featuring match play rather than stroke play which adds an element of... So, that's your voice, Colin! 22:35.12 ModGolfPodcast I did recognize that voice. I've edited my own voice over 200 podcasts now. So I do recognize my own voice. So once again, I'm intrigued yet kind of a scared that you've just made me obsolete as a podcast host. 22:47.37 Clive Mayhew So yeah, so what I've done is we've created and what we call AI playing partners. ah I've created one called Colin Weston. 22:56.23 ModGolfPodcast Right. 22:56.52 Clive Mayhew And we have Colin Weston on our dev site. We haven't put it onto our commercial site. So for me to put it on our commercial site, I would need to have an agreement with you. so that we can officially represent you in the AI world. But it's amazing. So this technology is incredibly powerful. And in the context of a podcast, literally, we could take your voice and we can make it an interactive podcast so that when you're talking like you are now, the consumer can actually just stop the recording and ask you a question about what you're talking about. 23:34.58 Clive Mayhew And you would literally stop the AI podcast and you would reply answering the question on the topic that they answered. So we're going to make podcasts truly interactive, which the technology has never been able to do that before. 23:51.57 Clive Mayhew Now, does that mean that your podcast will disappear? No, not at all. I think what will happen is that people will still love the fact that you go deeper and you'll have a human element, but it makes the whole interaction with podcasting, takes it into a different space completely. And that's just another application of AI. We're doing it specifically for golf. I actually have an incredible example of that right now, which I'll just play you as well. 24:17.07 ModGolfPodcast Please. 24:17.22 Clive Mayhew Which I think you'll find this one interesting. So this is the Golf AI Podcast. Listen to this: Welcome to This Year in Golf, the podcast brought to you by Golf dot.ai. I'm Jeff. And I'm Marge. We're thrilled to have you with us as we look back at all the incredible moments that unfolded in January 2024. Absolutely, Marge. Just a quick note to our listeners. This episode is AI-generated, but fully based on Golf.ai's incredible knowledge base of golf information, news, and more. January was quite the whirlwind, wasn't it? So many surprising twists and heart... 24:52.75 Clive Mayhew Okay, so I'll stop it there. So what you have there is you have two interactive AI voices talking to each other. And we're literally gonna be producing a monthly podcast with this summarizing the last month of golf. And at any point in time, you can stop that podcast and you can ask those AI commentators any question about what they've been talking about and go and dive a bit deeper. Then you can continue to play the same podcast as it goes further. 25:20.68 Clive Mayhew I'm really excited about how AI is going to be used in media going forward. And this is a great example. The podcasting form of media will change significantly with AI. There's no question about that. 25:35.07 ModGolfPodcast Yeah. And that example you just gave their Clive, did you use golf dot.ai to generate the script for that? 25:44.64 Clive Mayhew Yeah, so we actually used, it was interesting. So we cloned the voices and then we used the questions into Golf.ai, recorded them and made and in and and split them together. And then once that comes out live inside our platform, you literally be able to stop and ask it a question on any of the any of the any of the actual data you've you've been listening to. 26:08.33 Clive Mayhew So it's very exciting. So yet another example of how you can use AI just in the media category. 26:19.29 ModGolfPodcast So this is just making my head explode a little bit here because I've been playing around with AI over the last month or so, not just for golf and for podcasting, but also my background in architecture and design. So even though I'm not fully immersed in that professionally at the moment, 26:38.11 ModGolfPodcast I still find it quite intriguing as far as where AI is going, whether it's for design or whether it's for construction. And also producing YouTube videos. And I see now there's some very, very popular channels that everything is generated using AI. First started with AI generated art that you use with the prompt that you put in. And then from there, you can then put it in some other platforms. One's called Mid Journey that you can use to then generate video clips and then put put it together then with the narration over that. So it's really interesting where the whole thing is going. But I want to bring this all back to golf. And we talked about this at the top of the show. You're not just here to talk about golf dot.ai, but also your thoughts, your insights of how AI will impact all aspects of the golf industry. So I'll let you run wild with this because there are golf courses, the operations, the customer service side of it, apparel, products, equipment, everything. So the floor is yours. Let us know your thoughts on this. 27:49.51 Clive Mayhew Yeah, so it's amazing how quickly it's developing too, isn't it? It's an area that every week you've really got to stay on top of because it's just developing so quickly. But let let's talk about golf and the golf industry as a whole. Golf courses, there's 50,000 worldwide, 30,000 of them have been mapped. 28:13.72 Clive Mayhew So what's going to happen for golf? If you're running golf courses, it's going to be really interesting. So I heard a podcast, a few weeks ago from Jay Karen and Don Rea, the new president of the PGA. 28:29.65 ModGolfPodcast Yes. 28:29.72 Clive Mayhew where they actually had someone talking about five golf courses in America that have started to use AI to interface into their customer service ah department. So typically a golf course today someone will call the pro shop or call the membership hotline and they'll be able to book a tee time. They'll be able to talk to the person who literally just keys in and accesses the data on behalf of the customer. 28:59.06 Clive Mayhew So, AI literally will be the interface for, I believe, for everything for golf courses. And I say that quite deliberately. I say the word everything. And I think you have to pause when you say that word because, I come from the AI industry, so I'm sort of like overly positive about it. 29:21.65 ModGolfPodcast Yes. 29:21.68 Clive Mayhew but It's just inevitable. And I'll tell you why. All this data is residing in the golf course. They spent the last two to five years building datasets on behalf of the customers. So they're doing what I call CRM systems, customer relationship management systems. They're doing tee-booking systems. They're doing all of your handicap information, all of your data that they've been building and inside their systems. And they have a person interacting with that data to communicate it to you. And that's really what AI can just simply replace. Now, when I say replace, not replace in the sense of getting rid of that person, but realigning that person to different activities. So for example, you could ask what I call a course AI assistant, a golf course AI assistant. It's a virtual assistant that can automate tasks like membership management. 30:16.22 Clive Mayhew And ask my golf course about anything to do with my membership of that golf course. You can ask for your tee time booking. You can do communication on what events are coming up and it's literally like talking to me today. You'll be talking to an AI assistant who will be able to access your data set in a safe secure way and communicate that with you And it's real time, 24 seven, with no people involved and no latency. So there's not me going to call you back. It just makes so much sense. And so at the moment, five golf courses are piloting that in America. 30:54.96 Clive Mayhew My prediction, next 12 months, there'll be a couple of hundred, maybe take it up. In two years time, I think you'll be 50% of golf courses. In three years, 95% of golf courses will have the basic AI interface for that sort of data set. 31:10.35 Clive Mayhew Now that's not going to be a golf.AI product, that's going to be other providers in that space who already provide those back-end datasets. It will just AI-enable them to make it as simple as possible for golf courses to use AI to improve their operational efficiency inside the golf course. It's like a low-hanging fruit in the industry and I think it's a no-brainer. 31:33.10 Clive Mayhew But when the golfer arrives at the golf course and has done their tee time booking online, then literally it gets exciting. And this is where golf today.ai can come in. Because if we've done the tee time booking for you, when you turn up at the actual golf course, we can then say, "do you want to play golf today?" And one of our AI playing assistant can actually take you around the golf course. 31:56.06 Clive Mayhew So it starts with the GPS, local rules, any of the pin positions, but it tells just talks to you about the game. If you've hit your first two shots ah from 100 meters left, you've hooked them. 32:09.19 Clive Mayhew Come to third shot, we'll say to you, "you've got a bit of a hooking problem today. Maybe you need to just open your stance a little bit more, lean forward" or whatever the tip is against against hooking and actually help them through in a voice interface as they're playing the game of golf. So it's the combination of the GPS, all of the on-course data with recommendations would make it easier. It's truly a virtual caddy which is accessible to anyone playing golf, provided by the golf course. And this is where I think golf courses had to have the the power, if you like, to enable AI across their community, is that they can they can facilitate this from every part of their experience of golf. And that's what I'm excited about within golf courses. So for me, golf course owners, um like Jay Karen's community, the National Golf Course Owners Association, 33:05.17 Clive Mayhew They really can embrace AI and fundamentally, take it out to the golfer's world. So I'm excited about working with Jay and that community to enable their courses to be AI enabled. Let's move along the value chain. So once we've got the golf courses going and using it, the golf equipment providers. So Callaway is on the list, as one the suppliers of the golf industry. 33:29.87 Clive Mayhew They turn over about $20 billion of equipment sales per annum. And what we can use in generative AI and equipment is taking these data sets of the individual and sharing that so that the consumer has a better golf experience and actually buys the best equipment for their game. So we're just about to release a thing called What's in My Bag. 33:53.13 Clive Mayhew And the idea with What's in My Bag is you take a video of your golf bag, and we actually convert it through AI to the data set of what the clubs are. So whether it's a Titleist 780 iron, and then we actually tell you for your handicap what your distances should be. And you can change them to say, you either hit more or less. 34:14.16 Clive Mayhew So when you go onto a golf course, not only do we have this experience of knowing how far the hole is, we actually know how far you hit all your clubs. And we know the wind and the weather, so we can say, today it's 100 meters, you should hit your seven iron, and you should open your stance because it's a lower, you want to hit a lower ball flight, for example, whatever that may be. But for the equipment providers, it's quite interesting. What this gives is the data set to say, I had got a three-year-old iron. 34:43.12 Clive Mayhew And AI tells me that the latest irons can increase the distances by 15%. So maybe I should be upgrading my irons. Or maybe it's my putter is five years old and we have a better, larger, hot sweet spot on the new putters, which enable that to happen. And putting is by far the weakest part of my game from the stats we've been collecting or using the AI. So I think it's fundamentally going to open up the whole a golf equipment recommendation spot space. 35:14.49 Clive Mayhew so that people can buy the right equipment at the right price for the game. Huge change for people. Let's go to the third sector I want to just talk about is golf tourism. 35:25.69 ModGolfPodcast Yep. 35:26.14 Clive Mayhew Golf tourism, again, huge market, $25 billion dollars. For example, I live in Australia and I want to go to New Zealand and play golf with a few mates. I literally just ask golf.ai I want to go to a New Zealand. What are the top five courses I should play? Boom. It'll come back and tell me, okay. The destinations, Queenstown, which is a golf destination. 35:49.51 Clive Mayhew Which courses can I play from January the 15th to January the 18th? And golf.ai looks up the tee-booking times available for those courses and tells me what I can book for those four, eight players that I want to book on. And then literally, if he wants to book them, you literally just say, 36:09.10 Clive Mayhew "book those courses now" and then we can go through and have the e-commerce conversation to do that with the partner providing those booking tea times. So golf tourism suddenly, instead of going via a traditional tour, like a travel agent, 36:24.69 Clive Mayhew where they'd manage all that for you because you don't have access to those data sets. It opens up all of that to the consumer. And if you've ever booked a golf trip for your mates, it's so time consuming. Dealing with these tourists operators who come back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. 36:40.96 Clive Mayhew So literally you could just do it by asking a few prompts or a few questions around what you want to do. And even if you don't make the booking, you like you know what you can do. So it's like within two or three minutes you've got like, oh, I can go to Queenstown. Oh, I could go to Auckland. Oh, okay. Why don't I see if I can go to San Francisco? 37:00.01 Clive Mayhew So you can sort of almost compare your different um places where you want to go and have a real understanding of whether you can get tee times to book as well. So tourism for me, I get excited because I love golf trips. 37:15.41 ModGolfPodcast Right. 37:15.31 Clive Mayhew So for me personally, It's going to be a great platform for golf trips. So we're just piloting right now um in Dubai. So we have a partner in Dubai. We're going to open up. ah Dubai is the first market. So all the golf courses in Dubai you'll be able to book using Golf.ai using that prompt I just talked to you about. But the goal is to do that across all tee times, facilitate this for the whole golf industry, to enable people to have a much better experience, to play more golf is the key. Play more golf by making it simpler. 37:46.08 ModGolfPodcast There we go. Well, I love this! The last piece they're talking about is golf travel and tourism, because personally I'm going to have the opportunity in May to travel to Belfast. I've been invited to speak at the Golf Technology Business Conference in Belfast in the middle of May. And I've got a bunch of buddies. I'm in Vancouver here. I grew up in Toronto, but so they're close to Montreal, but a seven hour drive and a 38:14.29 ModGolfPodcast bunch of them were going to the President's Cup, which happened in September. Long story short, last minute, they had a spot open. I flew in and joined them. So in the 12 person group chat that I have with these guys, I put out there in May that I'm going to be going to Ireland and never been before. And before that, one of the guys put out "Okay, where's our next golf trip going?" Because even though we went to the President's Cup, we took all our clubs and we played a couple of rounds. And I said, "well, hey, maybe you guys should come to Ireland." And I'm thinking, "but I'm not going to be the one that's going to be booking all this trip. I'm going to be busy enough." So I was just about to write that prompt. 38:54.02 ModGolfPodcast Just with that, having that week, the third week in May to put it out there in Northern Ireland that we want to play at least four or five rounds of golf, I know a lot of the courses are exclusive. You can't even get on. 39:04.21 ModGolfPodcast So, just putting it out there, "we want to book this for whether it's eight guys, 12 guys, and give us an itinerary and perhaps even book that." 39:05.21 Clive Mayhew Yep. 39:12.68 ModGolfPodcast So it's really interesting. 39:13.42 Clive Mayhew Yeah. 39:13.80 ModGolfPodcast You just mentioned that Clive, because I was just about on the weekend to ask golf.AI that exact question. 39:22.07 Clive Mayhew So right now, AI will tell you the courses you can play. So it'll say, you know if you're going to Ireland, these are the top five courses. yeah And I have fun with it, asking those questions. And we're working with a provider in Ireland to integrate all the tee times as well. We're probably a couple of months from having the actual live tee times, being able to ask the questions for the tee times. 39:43.16 Clive Mayhew But I think that's it's just inevitable. We're going to have that across the whole of the UK for people like yourself who want to go play Ireland and Scotland and all the traditional courses in the yeah UK. And in a couple of months we'll have them so you can actually see the tee times. 39:57.66 Clive Mayhew The booking element of that, where you actually book via the partners who deliver the tee times to us. 40:04.58 ModGolfPodcast Right. 40:05.22 Clive Mayhew So we're a destination portal and we integrate into people who run tee time booking systems. W've got pilots going on to Dubai, we've got pilots going on in Portugal and Spain, we've got obviously Australia because it's our home. 40:21.30 Clive Mayhew But we'd love to put it out there. 40:21.47 ModGolfPodcast Yes. 40:22.86 Clive Mayhew Anyone who has tee time booking systems please contact us because we can AI enable them very, very quickly. And it's a great service for people. I don't know if you've played around trying to use some of the booking systems. They're not easy to use. And and the AI interface makes it so much easier for people to book. And just to explore the idea of travel is just a wonderful thing. 40:49.92 ModGolfPodcast Well, perhaps I should introduce you to my friends at British Columbia Golf, which are our provincial section I guess you can say using that PGA model. Our provincial section of Golf Canada and we have over 300 beautiful courses here in the province and I've had a chance to play quite a few of them and some are in the desert, some are in a rainforest and everything in between, some are in the mountains up in Whistler. Perhaps I need to connect you with our friends at British Columbia Golf because 41:23.88 ModGolfPodcast Part of their mandate also is to promote and grow the tourism aspect of golf in the province of British Columbia. 41:30.08 Clive Mayhew Yeah. And what's going to happen is people are just going to say, "okay, so tell me about those golf courses." And then literally you'll tell me about the locations of those golf courses. And then they'll see how wonderful that place is as a tourist destination. 41:43.25 Clive Mayhew And they've probably never thought about that before. I don't like having a go at certain industries, but the travel agents, they literally guide you to where they can get the bookings, right? 41:55.88 ModGolfPodcast Right. 41:56.60 Clive Mayhew So they don't say, "guys, really, Let's explore five different places where we want to go and and and explore as a destination for our travel." They take you to where they can get the bookings because that right now is so limited in terms of being able to do this. This potentially could open up the whole of the golf tourism industry, not just for the golf, but for people to explore different parts of the world. That's why Dubai is investing in this. So there's always leaders in this space. Dubai is a leader in this space because they want all of their nine golf courses full, but they want people to come to Dubai. And they know that's a tourism destination. And that's really why from November to March, they reckon it's the best 42:41.13 Clive Mayhew golf destination in the world from a weather perspective, right? 42:45.38 ModGolfPodcast Right. 42:45.67 Clive Mayhew I disagree, I think Australia is, but you know, I'm a bit biased! 42:49.12 ModGolfPodcast You're a bit biased. 42:52.26 Clive Mayhew So they really will pioneer this, but it'll be interesting. Places like Canada, where you want the Australian, you want the American tourists to come in. So that will be a great opportunity for certain regions to get together, put 300 golf courses into the system, allow the tee times to be there and then promote use that as a way to promote the area of Canada. 43:13.79 ModGolfPodcast Love this, love this. Okay, before we jump over to our video conversation for the ModGolf YouTube channel where we're gonna do a demo and have some fun over there, I did wanna circle back on one of the other components you were talking about where AI will really be impacting and influencing and enhancing the golf industry. And that was on the course operations and management side. And I want to tie this into with your own business model here with golf.ai. So there's other companies out there in the golf tech space like Golf Genius Software that 43:49.51 ModGolfPodcast Mostly look after golf tournament and events on the software side. And let's say Tag Marshall, which is now looking to optimize course efficiencies and the player experience on the backend. Is there an opportunity for you with golf.ai to, as we say, the term to white label your product to then partner with them in in some way that you can benefit from that, or are they creating their own ah AI-enabled capacity that they're going to take care of? 44:17.85 Clive Mayhew No. 44:24.55 ModGolfPodcast So I'm very curious to hear as far as the future there. Are there partnerships out there, whether it's with the NGCOA and Jay Karen, or even some of these other companies that are established, like Golf Genius and Tag Marshall that I mentioned, that perhaps rather than them building the whole thing themselves, you're able to then plug and play and add more value for them to having some type of a licensing agreement? 44:46.28 Clive Mayhew You've just nailed our business model, Colin. You're far too experienced as an entrepreneur and you get this stuff so well. So yeah, our strategy is very simple. We're integrating with everybody. So we're going around the industry and asking if you have an API to your data set, 45:04.87 Clive Mayhew Let us AI enable that through golf.ai. So you don't need to do it yourself. Golf Genius is a great example. We're a sponsor of a tour they have down under called the Next Gen Tour, which is for emerging players. 45:18.53 ModGolfPodcast Right, right. 45:18.88 Clive Mayhew And we we interfaced into their data set for that Next Gen course, like their player data. For those kids to be when they're playing to access their leaderboard for example via golf.ai So we've done that once already with Golf Genius we're going to do it many many times we're going to go deeper and deeper with Golf Genius as a partner but we're going to do it with everybody. Believe it or not, there's about 300 software providers in the golf industry Colin. They range from the Golf Geniuses all the way down to smaller providers, and then a few of the big ones like the Golf Nows. There's 300, and we want to enable all those data sets. 45:57.32 Clive Mayhew So any question in the vertical of Golf, you go to Golf.AI and we will be able to interrogate the dataset relevant for that question. And that's really where a vertical play like this, a vertical AI play becomes incredibly powerful. The more datasets we get access to and the more partnerships we have access to, the greater the services from Golf.AI. 46:19.26 Clive Mayhew From our point of view, the conversations we've had with everybody has been incredibly positive. I mean, they've built their software and their business model about providing this their software to whoever that part of the industry they serve. We're just enabling it for AI for other people to have access. So making it broader and wider at no cost to the software providers. So that's really how we will see our growth. And like I say, none of the providers have said no to us yet. 46:48.92 Clive Mayhew So they all see some value in opening their datasets to the AI language models. 46:55.28 ModGolfPodcast Got it, got it, okay. So I was going to put on my investor hat here and ask you the question yourself being an investor too. So I was going to flip it around and ask that tough question as well. How does golf.ai make money? 47:07.33 ModGolfPodcast What is the plan? And it sounds like it is more of a business to business play with these other golf industry, tech based companies that you're looking at, or even the NGCOAs in the world, or maybe even the USGA or maybe the PGA Tour. 47:25.09 Clive Mayhew Yeah. 47:25.21 ModGolfPodcast It sounds like it's more of a business to business play rather than you're not looking to monetize or charge someone per prompt or question that they're going to have. That's not what you're looking at to monetize the platform. 47:38.85 Clive Mayhew No, so initially it is absolutely free for consumers to use, so they can do any queries, any prompts they like for free. However, going forward, when we have enough data sets that we integrate to, there'll be a premium service. 47:52.96 Clive Mayhew So the premium service, for example, could be that as you're walking around a golf course, we can give you another dataset which enables your game to be a little bit better. Another dataset that allows you to have golf coaching. Another dataset, for example, to link into whatever data we've got access to. So there will be a premium level for consumers. I don't see that happening though for probably the first 12 months. So the first 12 months, it will be free, and then we'll we'll have enough value for the consumer to say, "yeah, I'm happy to spend $20 a month to get that premium set." But where we're focusing is having a premium service for the golf courses. So as I said, the big winner with AI is the golf course providers. 48:39.99 Clive Mayhew So Jay Karen's community of the National Association of Golf Course Owners, he has like 3,000 golf course providers across America. All of those will benefit the most by integrating AI into their golf course. And that's where we will charge a premium service for them. They sign up online via golf.ai, and then we provide a premium service. Here's another example of one we're piloting right now in Dubai. 49:06.73 Clive Mayhew The Emirates Golf Course. You can literally turn on to the first golf course. You can play using Golf.ai. It'll give you the your virtual caddy. When you get to the eighth hole, it'll say to you, on would you like to order some drinks? You know, we have the golf the golf cart will be coming around in five minutes. 49:25.59 Clive Mayhew Boom. you know Another great experience for the golf course provider, incremental sales for them. Do you realize our bar is open until 11 o'clock tonight? Would you like to make a booking? you Would you like to make a reservation? People on the golf course integrating back to the F and B facilities of the golf course provider. 49:44.39 Clive Mayhew And if we do a good job of that and we enable that, the level that we're we're planning to do, then the golf course providers will make money from that AI. So, that won't be $20 a month, maybe that's $2,000 a month for the golf course provider, but they will make many times that return on investment by AI enabling their golf course facilities, their F and B, their membership, their tee time bookings, whatever that may be. 50:08.29 Clive Mayhew So our business model going forward is 50,000 of those golf courses worldwide and we think we can provide a huge value opportunity for those golf course providers using AI. 50:21.28 ModGolfPodcast Well, the exciting news is that we're just barely scratching the surface on the potential of what AI can deliver for the golf industry all the way across that. So as we finish up here, I did want to mention this, want to give you and Peter and the whole team a bit of a pat on the back here. 50:38.01 ModGolfPodcast How i've been using golf.ai over the last few episodes, I've been refining what I've been doing here with The ModGolf Podcast. I have brought on a podcast consultant and they've been really helpful. One of the things they said as part of an audit on The ModGolf Podcast is. 50:57.83 ModGolfPodcast Many of you know, I've created over 200 episodes since 2017. But one of the things I wasn't getting to the forefront was what are the benefits for you, the listener? What are you going to learn? What are you going to take away? What are you going to discover from listening to this awesome conversation I'm having with Clive today? So what I have done, I have taken the entire transcript after we've recorded this. 51:22.02 ModGolfPodcast I copy and paste that. And that would be the equivalent of probably about a 20 page document. Don't edit it at all. And I go into, I tried this first with Chat GPT and I put in the prompt at the top of it. I said, "I need the three key takeaways for our listeners of what they will learn and benefit from this conversation with - put in the name of the guest. And then I paste the whole thing in Chat GPT. 51:51.96 ModGolfPodcast and it can't do it. I said, oh, that doesn't work. I've got an idea. Why don't I do the exact same thing with golf.ai, typed in the exact same prompt, pasted it all in, and voila, the last four weeks in a row if you go back to listen to the previous episodes I've done, you'll notice at the front of the show, I'm now letting you know what those three key things that you will take away from this show. And at the top of this show, 52:19.83 ModGolfPodcast We're going to do that afterwards. You will have heard those already. So that's what I'll be doing with this transcript with my conversation with Clive. And we'll generate the three key takeaways from this awesome conversation. Thanks to golf.ai. There's a plug for you there. You don't even pay me. See, there you go. And you've got it. 52:39.52 Clive Mayhew You know, it's amazing. I ask it stuff, and you know, as the investor and the the founder, I have no idea what comes back. And it's so exciting. 52:51.03 Clive Mayhew Sometimes there's a thing, they say it's a AI hallucination, right? So it makes stuff up. But you know, in golf, when people make stuff up, it's really exciting. I play I play golf with my mates, and I guarantee they're all making shit up, right? They're just exaggerating everything. But you ask golf.ai, I, and this is a great example, what you've done, Colin, is that I had no idea that was an application for our service. And you've just told me yet another one. 53:18.68 Clive Mayhew So there's so much that AI can do. And you know I'm with you. I'm gobsmacked. I'm sort of like, well what's going to happen with AI in the next two to five years? I say to people, it's everything. And I said that time and time again, that's my pitch line. It's going to do everything. And people go, "that means it does nothing." I said, "you just wait. You just wait and see what it does because it's going to do everything." 53:45.04 ModGolfPodcast Well, on that everything note, why don't we leave our conversation there? I think it's nice and simple for our listeners. If they want to learn more, kick the tires and ask a couple of questions. It's www.golf.ai. 53:56.56 ModGolfPodcast It's as simple as that. Is it not? 53:58.40 Clive Mayhew it is 53:59.51 ModGolfPodcast There we go. So. Clive Why don't we leave our conversation there for now? We're gonna jump over to YouTube, as I mentioned in the show notes. I will leave not only the link for golf.ai, even though it's dead simple, because I just said it three times, but we'll also have the link for the YouTube video that we have where we're gonna do a couple of demos and have some fun and kick the tires and maybe we'll discover something we never even thought of what we're gonna plug in there. 54:23.94 Clive Mayhew It is. 54:26.13 ModGolfPodcast So come join us over there on the ModGolf YouTube channel and why don't we leave it at that? So once again, Clive Mayhew, who is the founder and principal investor of golf.ai, joining us from beautiful, and it looks from the background, sunny Sydney, Australia today in summertime there. 55:05.61 ModGolfPodcast Thanks so much for joining me today on the ModGolf Podcast! 55:08.41 Clive Mayhew Always great. Thank you, Colin. And again, thank you on behalf of the industry for these podcasts. You bring up some really interesting topics and everyone enjoys them. So again, thank you very much, Colin.