Arccos – the pioneer of big data and artificial intelligence for golf – today announced that Golf Inc. magazine has named Arccos CEO & Co-Founder Sal Syed to its 2019 list of the “Most Innovative People in Golf.”
The magazine cites Syed for leveraging the power of real-time data to transform golf in the same manner companies like Uber are revolutionizing transportation, writing: “It’s Syed who’s leading the golf data revolution… In just five years, (he) has surged to the forefront of golf innovation with Arccos, a cutting-edge system that’s changed the way golfers assess and manage their games.”
A low-single-digit handicap golfer, Syed, along with his co-founders, conceived of Arccos while attending business school at Yale. He has since formed industry-shaping partnerships with Cobra Puma Golf, PING and Microsoft, among others.
“Our vision is to track every shot in golf through partnerships with the top equipment OEM’s, and then use that data to fuel the Arccos Caddie artificial intelligence platform, which helps golfers and golf businesses make smarter decisions,” said Syed. “As an industry, we need to challenge ourselves to consistently innovate and explore new ways to make the golf experience more efficient and fun.”
In 2018, Arccos and Cobra launched golf’s first smart set, Cobra Connect Powered by Arccos. As part of this ongoing collaboration, every club in the Cobra KING F8 line and new KING F9 line features an Arccos sensor embedded in the grip. This helps players improve faster by automatically tracking and receiving actionable insights for every aspect of their game. PING will soon offer users of its clubs the opportunity to directly access the Arccos Caddie ecosystem.
Honored among the “World’s Most Innovative Companies 2018” by Fast Company, ranking #3 in the Sports category globally, Arccos boasts the golf industry’s richest data set. This includes nearly 200 million shots hit during more than 2 million rounds played by the Arccos community, and over 500 million GPS mapping data points on 40,000+ courses worldwide. Arccos has leveraged this data by partnering with Microsoft to create golf’s smartest caddie, using A.I. to show a golfed their optimal strategy and outcome predictions for every shot on any hole in the world.
Free for all Arccos Caddie users, the A.I. platform considers a wide variety of inputs, including a user’s shot history, historical performance of other Arccos users, wind speed/direction, other weather conditions, elevation changes, hole geometry, hazard locations and more.
“The PGA TOUR has done a great job of using advanced analytics to help its players practice and perform their best,” said Mike Downey, Director, Brand Partnership Engineering at Microsoft. “At other levels of the game, capturing the necessary on-course data has been a real challenge. Arccos has cracked that code and built a robust data set which they’re deploying via the Microsoft Azure cloud to the benefit of golfers worldwide.”
For more information, please visit: www.arccosgolf.com.
