3517: How AWS and the PGA Tour Are Changing Live Sports Technology

Dec 12, 2025

In this engaging conversation, Eric Hansen, VP of Product at the PGA Tour, and Elaine Chiasson, AWS's global golf team leader, dive into how AI and data are revolutionizing golf. They discuss the mind-boggling amount of data generated during tournaments, likening golf to F1 in its complexity. Discover how AWS's cloud solutions and AI create personalized fan experiences, from automated commentary to real-time insights. They even explore future possibilities like multilingual commentary and automated broadcasts, ensuring fans never miss a moment!

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INSIGHT

Golf As Many Concurrent Arenas

Professional golf is like 18 concurrent arenas with leaderboard interdependencies across many players.
The PGA Tour processes ~30,000 shots per tournament requiring massive real-time data handling.

ANECDOTE

A Century Of Media In The Cloud

The PGA Tour migrated 100 years of video and ShotLink data into AWS and shut down their colo.
That media lake enables AI and generative features across fan experiences.

INSIGHT

Gen AI Fills The Unseen-Shot Gap

Generative AI fills context gaps for the 70% of shots without video by adding stats and comparisons.
Automated text enables rapid round recaps for dozens of players the editorial team can't cover manually.

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How do you capture every moment of a golf tournament spread across hundreds of acres, tens of thousands of shots, and dozens of players competing at the same time? That question sits at the heart of this conversation recorded at AWS re:Invent, where I sat down with Eric Hansen, VP of Product at the PGA Tour, and Elaine Chiasson, who leads the global golf team at AWS, to unpack how data and AI are reshaping the way fans experience the game.

Eric explains why modern professional golf has more in common with Formula 1 than most people realize. Every ball struck, every position on the leaderboard, and every shift in momentum generates data that needs to be processed instantly. With more than thirty thousand shots across a single tournament and only a fraction of them shown on traditional broadcasts, the PGA Tour faces a constant challenge. How do you give fans context, insight, and a sense of presence when most of the action is never seen on screen?

Elaine shares how AWS has helped the Tour build the foundation to answer that question. From migrating decades of video and shot data into the cloud to applying generative AI for automated commentary, language translation, and real time insights, this partnership goes far beyond infrastructure. Together, they are experimenting with automated camera switching, AI driven production workflows, and personalized fan experiences that surface the right information at the right moment, whether you are following the leaderboard or a single favorite player.

The conversation also digs into trust and accuracy. Eric walks through how the PGA Tour validates AI generated commentary to ensure it stays aligned with the sport's standards, while Elaine highlights why operational discipline and governance matter just as much as innovation. They explore what hyper personalization looks like inside the PGA Tour app, how global broadcasts could evolve, and why the long term opportunity lies in making every shot matter for every fan.

As live sports move toward a future shaped by data, automation, and AI agents working behind the scenes, this episode offers a clear look at what that transformation really involves. So as golf continues to blend tradition with technology, what kind of fan experience do you want to see next, and how comfortable are you with AI calling the shots?

Useful Links

Connect with Eric Hansen, VP of Product at the PGA Tour.
Connect with Elaine Chiasson
Learn more about AWS and PGA Tour

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