AI For Golf Course Owners Keynote by Trent Gillespie-NGCOA MCOR 2026
Thanks for attending my keynote talk!
Here are the additional resources I promised:
- Key Slides
- My AI Strategy Assessment & 90 Day Action Plan tool
- My AI Roadmap Creation Tool for Golf Course Owners.
- Below is the AI summary of the keynote talk.
Need help with AI? Here is a link to the AI Jumpstart service through my company, Stellis AI.
Have other questions? Contact Trent
Now or Never: Turn AI Into Your Operating Advantage
The Moment You're In
There is a moment in every career where you can step up and lead before you feel ready, or let the opportunity pass to someone else. With AI, that is the moment every golf course operator is in right now.
The operators winning with AI today are not the ones with the biggest tech budgets or the deepest expertise. They are the ones who are learning, experimenting, and putting it into practice. They are learning their way into the future before their competitors do.
This is the key shift to make first: AI is not an IT project. It is a leadership one. It is not another tool rollout or a software upgrade. It is a rewiring of how you run your business, what you offer, how you deliver it, and even who your guest is.
Two Mistakes Most Leaders Are Making
Mistake 1: Treating AI as a tool rollout. Handing out a chat tool will not reinvent your operation, because it does not change your products, your experience, or how you compete. To capture the real upside you need Operational AI™, which rests on three things:
- Leadership – lead your organization into this new era rather than waiting for it to happen to you.
- Vision – define how you will serve a new kind of guest.
- Action – put the tools to work to compete and win.
Mistake 2: Optimizing for a world that no longer exists. Many operators apply AI to the way they worked 5, 10, or 20 years ago instead of reinventing for the future that is arriving. Guest expectations are already changing faster than most business strategies, and that is exactly why vision matters.
Where the Industry Stands Today
| Signal | Data Point |
|---|---|
| Daily AI users | About 20% productivity improvement plus higher quality work |
| Weekly AI users | About 5% improvement |
| Less-than-weekly users | No measurable benefit |
| Knowledge workers already using AI at work, often without authorization | About 50%, a shift that happened in just the last few months |
| Consumers who have replaced traditional search engines with generative AI | 58% |
| Leisure travelers already using AI for trip planning | 56% |
| Golf course operators already using AI tools | 43%, with roughly another 13% planning to start this year |
| AI users afraid to admit they use these tools | 69% |
The takeaways are direct. There is real value here, which is why so many people use these tools even against company policy. The adoption curve is steep and recent, so if you are not empowering your people you are leaving opportunity on the table. And unmanaged usage creates security and data risk when people use the wrong tools the wrong way.
The key message: Get AI out of the shadows and empower your people to use it daily. But be clear that tools alone will not reinvent your business. For that you need vision.
The Core Question: Your Future Customer™
At Amazon, vision came from one relentless question: what will our future customers want years from now? The team would imagine that future, then work backwards to build it before anyone else. That mindset produced Alexa, Kindle, and a reinvented version of e-commerce.
Applied to your business, the question becomes sharper: what changes when intelligence is cheap? Not dashboards or software, but real intelligence such as creativity, judgment, and strategy, now available for around $30 a month. For all of history, intelligence has been the thing organizations paid the most for, and there was never enough of it. Now it is closer to a utility, like electricity for thinking.
The Future Customer™ Method: Five Questions
Answer these five questions with your leadership team to build your vision for serving the guest who is coming:
- What do your guests say they value most today?
- Which of those values will still differentiate you when know-how is free and instant?
- Which of those values can you no longer charge extra for, because it becomes table stakes?
- Where will guests still desire and pay for a uniquely human touch?
- What brand-new value could you create because intelligence is cheap, something guests don't even ask for yet?
Questions 1 through 3 establish your baseline and your risk. Questions 4 and 5 are about building for the future, and you return to them in the Trailblaze step of the SPRINT framework.
The Expectation Shift
| Past Guest Expectation | AI-Powered Shift | Future Guest Expectation |
|---|---|---|
| Search for golf destinations | AI trip-planning recommendations | Find and book courses through AI |
| Generic course experiences | Hyper-personalization from guest data | Experiences designed specifically for them |
| Ask staff for help | Predictive concierge services | Information provided before they even ask |
When you apply AI, you can optimize for how guests behaved in the past, or you can build toward these future expectations. The future is where you should invest, and it is the more rewarding work.
What Changes When Intelligence Is Cheap
As OpenAI's Sam Altman has noted, as data center production becomes automated the cost of intelligence approaches the cost of electricity. We are already seeing those lines converge.
Live Demonstration: A Win-Back Tool, Built in Minutes
One of the cheapest ways to grow revenue is to keep guests from leaving. To show what that looks like, Trent asked ChatGPT to design an application for golf course operators that would identify at-risk clients before they leave, then pasted the requirements into Replit, an AI tool built to build applications, and instructed it to build the app step by step.
The result was a working "win-back list." Loaded with a sample set of 50 golfers, the dashboard flagged 10 who were going quiet and 8 who were seriously at risk, each with a reason (for example, a golfer who had not played in 12 weeks) and a ready-to-send personalized outreach message, plus an automatic follow-up option.
The provocative question: How many months would it have taken your organization to decide to build a tool like this? Now anyone can do it in minutes, for the price of a coffee. The only questions left are how you will use it and who moves first: you, your peers, or your competitors.
The Agent Landscape: Two Types to Know
General-Purpose AI
Think of these as a Swiss Army knife, trained on all the world's information and able to do many things well. They are becoming the primary interface to your entire workday, not just a place to write an email, potentially replacing your email system as the place where work happens. What they may not do well is your specific processes, because they do not have your data or know exactly how you want things done.
Specialty Agents
Think of these as power tools. They are purpose-built, connected to your systems, and designed to complete your processes. Their advantage is consistency: ten people produce ten different results, while one well-built agent produces a consistent one. In your world, those agents might include:
- Member experience agent answering questions 24-7 and handling guest requests
- Reservations and revenue agent booking tee times and event bookings
- Marketing agents handling content creation and social media
- Operations agents covering maintenance scheduling, equipment planning, and weather monitoring
Agents at Work
Trent demonstrated an agent in ChatGPT's agent mode logging into a HubSpot CRM, navigating the interface on its own, finding a contact, and creating a follow-up task, including selecting a custom date when the one needed was not in the dropdown. Note that handing an agent your login credentials carries a security consideration worth understanding.
He then chained tasks together through connections: pulling notes from an AI meeting note-taker, creating a HubSpot task with a meeting summary, and drafting a follow-up email ready to open in Outlook, all in about three minutes. Adding a branding skill and a proposal skill, the same agent then produced a fully branded Microsoft Word proposal following the company template.
Low-Cost Agent Use Cases
Several high-value agents can run for under $500 a month, including a last-minute tee-time filter, a booking upsell assistant, review-request generation, and GM performance briefings.
Reinventing Processes with Agent Chains
The bigger opportunity is reinventing whole processes rather than automating single tasks. Consider post-round revenue generation as an agent chain:
- A feedback agent knows the details of each round (when it was, who they played with, course and weather conditions) and reaches out a few hours later to ask how the day went and start a conversation.
- A sentiment agent reads the reply, decides whether it is positive or negative, and routes any concern to the right person to address.
- A rebooking agent uses the guest's history to suggest a specific next time, for example a Wednesday morning slot, and opens an immediate dialogue to bring them back.
Throughout, your GMs are still there to handle issues that arise. Their role shifts toward managing these agents and making sure they perform well. In effect, every operator becomes a manager of AI workers, not one or five or ten, but as many as the job needs. There are already AIs that hire other AIs, and a startup making it possible for AIs to hire humans when an agent cannot do the job.
What's Left for Humans: Vision
If AI can do so much, what is left for people? Vision. When intelligence is no longer your limit, imagination is. The edge comes from the people closest to the work, the ones who see the problems and can use these tools to serve guests better, at every level of the organization, not just the CEO.
Giving people AI tools produces a roughly 100% improvement in an organization's capacity for innovation. The smartest people in the room will no longer be those who know the most, but those who know how to think and innovate with AI. Building that skill in yourself and across your team is the most important thing you can do.
The AI SPRINT™ Framework
Transformation does not start with a giant project. It starts with the AI SPRINT™, which is a rhythm rather than a project: a monthly discipline of learning, experimenting, and sharing. Each month leaders ask what the best way to use AI is, take a step, reflect on what they learned, share it, and step again. Remember that speed without direction is a treadmill to nowhere, so direction comes first.
Light the fire that finally gets AI moving. Educate your leadership team hands-on and together so they share one foundation, since most leadership teams are not aligned on capabilities, ownership, budget, or timeline. Assign a transformation owner, an AI champion, who is typically not from IT because this role drives strategic change across the business and should be measured on velocity of change (how many workflows you improve per month). Then start transformation sprints to build a culture of experimentation. Ask yourself: who is your spark? If you don't have one, it may need to be you.
Design your company to win with AI, not just use it. This is where you answer the five Future Customer™ questions with your leadership team and turn them into a plan. That plan is your AI strategy. One client, not a technology company, set a goal of generating 10% of revenue from AI services within three years; they developed 120 ideas, narrowed to 6, began investing in 2, and are launching this summer.
You cannot force people into this future or build innovation through fear, but you can make daily AI use safe, supported, expected, and rewarded.
Make it safe Provide a business-appropriate AI tool (pay the roughly $30 a month rather than relying on free ones), create an AI acceptable use policy, and protect job safety by framing AI as a way to create new products, services, and growth. Note that 69% of AI users are currently afraid to admit they use these tools.
Make it supported Give role-based training. Keep a running list for each role of the best ways found so far to use AI, and add to it as new ideas surface.
Make it expected State clearly that you expect people not just to use AI but to find ways to improve the work with it. This can be as simple as saying it in a meeting, or building it into performance reviews.
Make it rewarded Provide incentives, whether a gift card, a spot bonus, or recognition.
Start with sales and marketing because it is low-risk, low-cost, and revenue-generating. Marketing content and personalization can see up to a 400% improvement in effort, as long as you put in real work rather than producing AI slop. Sales personalization means researching individual guests and event bookers deeply, not blasting more standard emails. Then attack your operational bottlenecks, since the organization only moves as fast as its slowest part. You do not need a million-dollar data lake to begin. High-ROI starting points for operators include filling empty tee times before they expire, winning back guests who quietly stop coming, turning happy rounds into reviews, catching complaints before they hit Google, and giving every GM a weekly briefing they don't have to build.
Combine AI tools with the monthly sprint rhythm to build a real culture of innovation, possibly for the first time. Keep an idea pipeline and reward results. A simple engine for this is the AI Sprint Email, a five-minute monthly task in which each employee emails their manager four questions:
- What did you use AI for this month?
- What changed because of it?
- Who did you share it with?
- What is one task you will use AI for next month?
Managers roll these up the chain, creating a living repository of the best ways your people are figuring out to use AI.
Once your leadership is aligned, your staff are motivated, and AI is integrated, reinvest in things that were not possible before. This is where you build for Future Customer™ questions 4 and 5. Question 4: where will guests desire a uniquely human touch? Yours is a human-based industry, so augment your service with AI rather than outsourcing it away. Question 5: what brand-new value can you create now that intelligence is cheap? Invert the old model that put the course, clubhouse, and staff first and the guest last. Put the guest first with a personalized experience: a course that monitors each golfer's game, offers suggestions hole by hole, tracks performance over time, and powers a concierge that knows them completely.
Your Action Items
- Get AI out of the shadows: provide a business-appropriate, paid tool and an acceptable use policy so daily use is safe and secure.
- Name your spark and assign an AI champion outside of IT, measured on how many workflows they improve each month.
- Get your leadership team in a room, trained together, and aligned on one AI strategy.
- Answer the five Future Customer™ questions and turn them into a written vision and plan.
- Start integrating with sales and marketing, then work down your list of operational bottlenecks.
- Launch the AI Sprint Email so every employee reports their monthly AI wins in four questions.
- Test your AI visibility now: ask AI what the best courses in your area are, and see whether you show up.
The Choice
Yours is a human-based, experience-driven industry, and that is exactly why AI is such an opportunity: it lets you deliver your courses, your guest experience, and your service better than ever before. Adopt the Day One mindset and start each day with the same hunger to make a difference and to serve your guests better, taking a little risk along the way.
You may not feel prepared. You may be unsure this affects your industry. The real question is simpler: will you lead, to the best of your ability, in a way that creates growth and opportunity for as many people as possible? Take it one step at a time through the AI SPRINT™. You don't have to do it all overnight, but you do need to start.
Q&A Highlights
On whether paid AI subscriptions are secure: Trent explained that business-level tools generally fall under the same indemnification and protections as a corporate tool like Microsoft 365, with some nuance. Sensitive information should be kept out, including healthcare or HIPAA data, employee and HR data, and credit card numbers. His rule of thumb: if you would be comfortable putting it in your work email, it is probably fine for your AI tool; if not, keep it out.
On agentic AI becoming a golfer's personal tee-time aggregator: Trent saw two sides. As an operator, you need to be visible to AI to win those bookings, and you should build tools that connect your booking system so guests can book directly from your website. On the personal side, guests will use agents to book, but there does not need to be a middleman if you set your organization up to receive those bookings directly.
On liability when an agent books a round and there is a no-show: Trent noted any customer can contest a charge, but the emerging pattern in corporate circles is that giving an agent your credentials authorizes it to act on your behalf. If the agent booked it with your card, you authorized it and are likely responsible. He estimated this is roughly 9 to 12 months from beginning to snowball.
On improving AI visibility: Trent pointed to Gumshoe (gumshoe.ai) as a strong tool for defining your customer, checking how your product and service appear across the different AI tools, and getting a strategy to raise that visibility.