HPE tees up the technology for the first AI-enabled Ryder Cup – News

This past week the Ryder Cup was held at the famed Bethpage Black Golf Course in Farmingdale, New York. While the raucous crowd cheered the U.S. team, and European fans sang, “Ole, Ole,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. worked with the Ryder Cup to provide a rock-solid technology foundation for all aspects of the event including fan experience, back-office operations and all other aspects of running an event like this.

As an analyst, I have covered many sporting venues, but a golf tournament is unique in that it’s temporary and needs to be highly agile. At the event I met up with Michael Cole (pictured below), chief technology officer of the Ryder Cup Europe and the DP World Tour, and he described the challenge as having to “turn an open field into a smart city.”

Though Cole is correct, he is understating the challenge, since a golf venue isn’t like a fixed stadium where fans tend to be fixed in a single location. With golf, patrons move about the course to follow their favorite players. What adds to the complexity with the Ryder Cup is that on Friday and Saturday, there are only four groups on the course at once, creating a few holes with a massive number of people and the rest with only a handful of people on them.

AI everywhere at the Ryder Cup

The foundation for the artificial intelligence-enabled tournament was the network and HPE and the Ryder Cup team, partnered up to build a massive temporary network to support the more than 250,000 visitors across the 1,500-acre property. The network installation included 170 HPE Aruba Networking CX switches, 650 Wi-Fi 6E access points, 25 UXI sensors and a three-node private 5G network, which were managed through the HPE Aruba Networking Central platform. Although this AI platform is typically used for enterprise networks, its limits were tested over the course of a few days during the high-pressure tournament.

During my interview with Cole, I asked him why the need for AI now. “The Ryder Cup historically has been complicated operationally with lots of manual inputs and processes to get things done,” he said. “We are now able to implement AI to help drive greater efficiencies and insights that we were not able to before.” He then provided an example where AI was watching the network 24×7 and could spot any kind of anomaly that could cause performance problems and then give a recommendation on how to fix it or, ideally, fix it automatically.

The use of Private 5G has shifted with this tournament versus 2023 in Rome. At Marco Simone the private 5G network, built on HPE Athonet, was used for backhaul, as it was not feasible to run fiber over the golf course. At Bethpage, the networking team was able to run fiber wherever it was needed and private 5G complemented the Wi-Fi for connectivity. I asked Cole his opinion of the ongoing debate of 5G, and Wi-Fi.

“One isn’t better than the other, it’s how we use them in a complementary way,” he said. “We want to put the right technologies in the right areas and use a combination of private 5G, Wi-Fi and public cellular. We operate in this complex environment, and the true solution is not a single technology. It’s how technology solutions complement one another and give you that blended approach.”

Video acts as another set of eyes

Another interesting AI use case was the role of vision analytics. “We have 26 cameras in hour merchandise stores,” Cole explained. “We have three on ingress, 20 inside and three on exit. This lets us do things like automate people counting, looking for the density of people and understand if we have enough volunteers in there and be able to manage flow better. Historically, all the people counting and understanding of flow was done manually.”

During a press briefing, HPE showed a slide with several other AI use cases, which included:

• Spectator behavior analysis – Entry and exit counting, dwell time, queue duration and people counting.
• Event and revenue management – Merchandise and alcohol sales, food and beverage optimization, golf cart tracking and video analytics.
• Network alerting – Network utilization, bandwidth management and network performance insights.
• Advanced analytics — Relationship analysis and pattern recognition, insights, forecasting, planning and correlation of events.
• Fan experience – Tagging and organization of video clips and smart searches highlight reels.

The last set of features can be seen by anyone visiting the Ryder Cup website. When a match ends, a video summary of the match is created in near-real time, enabling a fan to go watch every meaningful shot from the match. Historically, this wasn’t possible, since the manual processes required to go through footage would take far too long to do daily.

Another fan-facing feature in the mobile app and website was the AI enabled Outcome IQ, built in partnership with Capgemini. The feature was first introduced at the 2023 Ryder Cup, in which it showed fans probability analysis. The feature initially showed the likelihood of a player winning a match and that changed after players hit certain shots.

It was a huge hit with broadcasters and fans, and the Ryder Cup has now enhanced the feature with shot context such as drive length, distance from the pin and other relevant information. “The AI intelligence provided is down to single-digit seconds and this would be impossible to do manually,” Cole said.

HPE Private Cloud powers AI infrastructure

To help support the environment, HPE set up a Connected Intelligence Center that acts as a control hub for organizers, providing a real-time view of what’s happening at the event. The main tool within the hub is the Operational Intelligence Dashboard, which leverages Nvidia Corp.-powered HPE Private Cloud AI to collect data from various feeds. This includes ticket scans, concession sales, GPS data from golf carts, and the AI-enabled cameras installed on the Bethpage Black Course. The HPE Private Cloud is the first use of private cloud I have seen at a sporting event.

HPE is also testing a generative AI conversational tool specifically created to help the 2025 Ryder Cup staff. The Ops AI Assistant retrieves knowledge and answers questions in plain language. Staff members can ask the AI assistant about procedures or to look up information in manuals and documents, among other things.

Looking ahead

While talking to Cole, I did ask about the 2027 Ryder Cup coming up in Ireland and he’s already thinking of how AI can improve upon the experience at Bethpage. He discussed the challenge and excitement of what AI could bring.

“Technology is moving faster than I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “I think we will see a greater evolution of agentic AI where the technology is not only spotting the symptoms and the insights but then acting on it and doing the behavioral outcomes on behalf of my team. Also, we should see greater personalization giving the fan the ability to follow the player more closely and having content that customized. I am expecting that all his innovation will be driven by advancements in infrastructure.”

If you were a European golf fan, undoubtedly you were thrilled with the results. Not so much if you were rooting for the U.S. What we can agree on is that AI, enabled by the network, is changing the game in ways that’s better for us all.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for News.

Photos: Wikimedia Commons, Zeus Kerravala