The ability of computing devices to devise decisions based on a broad information base, in short: AI (Artificial Intelligence) is leveraged by businesses all over the world. Examples are automated support per telephone or on websites, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. This article discussed potential applications for the private club industry and the chance to leverage AI for exceptional membership experiences.
Private clubs have started leveraging AI for “internal” use cases: membership feedback can be analyzed to aggregate both – positive and negative impressions and to summarize the results for the club leadership; this extends to automatically generated reports for 360 reviews, scorecards and tracking of Board, Leadership and membership goals and objectives. Robert Sereci from the Medinah Country Club is one of the early adopters of AI and tracks progress against his team objectives, membership feedback and highlighted results of 360 reviews in real time and gets alerted if deviation from his goals or his timeline is detected.
A broad application field for AI is sustainability: monitoring thousands of data points from a club’s utility meters and comparing it against e.g. climate data to see whether unusual usage occurs is clearly something a computing device can do – even in real time. That way, the club’s administrative staff can receive an early warning of devices about to fail, leaks or other technical problems. Below is a graph from a Florida club, where AI detected an – about to fail – compressor before a problem occurred for the club:
AI and sustainability also work well together when it come to measuring progress and to compare efficiency of operations with literally millions of data points, normalized and computed, e.g. to calculate CO2 emissions per round of golf played or per clubhouse sq ft.
New, inexpensive technology, like LoRaWan (Long Range Wide Area network) allows clubs to monitor even remote areas for humidity, temperature, usage, water quality and many more. The data generated is usually too large to comb through by hand. The Vivid Leaf sustainability platform integrates all this information, analyzes it, and informs the club leadership about trends and issues.
Looking at how AI could be used to improve membership experiences, the possibilities include faster reporting and tracking of problems (including malfunctioning equipment), analyzing usage patterns of the club’s assets and expanding those that are in high demand, and answering member questions, such as: which time today will the course/the fitness center/the pool/the tennis courts be the least busy?
As technology evolves, we shall see many more AI applications. Please feel free to reach out at info@vivid-leaf.com to discuss. I am happy to discuss AI applications for your club and what other clubs are doing.