Fore! How LIV Golf is pursuing a hole-in-one when it comes to playing with agents to bolster fan experience

LIV Golf - that’s Roman numerals L, I, V (54 - the number of holes played on a three round golf tour) - is a professional men's golf tour, awarded the status of best golf event in the world in 2023 and 2024 at the World Golf Awards. As such it has an enormous global fan following and making sure that the experience for those devotees is above par is a priority for the organization.

The latest stick with which LIV is playing is agentic tech, as Nick Connor, SVP of Technology, explains:

We are in a transition to be a true agentic enterprise. We look at it from the fan perspective and the back office perspective, but it's slightly more broad than that as well, because we have our broadcasts and we have our events....Equally, we have our players, who are probably the greatest asset to the tour, and supporting our players to be better every week is a key part of what we do.

LIV is using Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to better achieve its objectives. As the mission outline might suggest, engagement with a global fan base is a critical success factor in LIV’s thinking. Connor says:

Engagement is really the pathway to monetization. We need to build that fandom with our fans globally. Agentforce is helping us to do that through the datasets we have for statistics that have been surfaced out to the commentators and also to our players. That has also been surfaced to fans, such as when the events are happening within our products, and that, again, adds a much richer experience for our fans who are consuming content from from LIV golf during the events or between events.

That fan engagement will also help with telling more stories. It will help us understand intent, more of who our consumers are, and then using that data, with Data360 to activate out of Agentforce Marketing to fans and enrich what we're doing from a Marketing perspective.

Scale 

The platform aspect of the Salesforce offering is particularly important, he explains, enabling LIV to break  away from the danger of doing things in silos:

It can't just happen in one place or another. It has to happen across everything that we do. So scaling our use of agent force and our use of agent AI across the organization is critical to how the business operates moving forward. That's to do with IT operations. It is to do with Marketing - Marketing use cases could be using Agentforce for copywriting, for ideation, on campaigns, for helping with segmentation. We've also played with using Agentforce to create real-time recommendations that have been surfaced onto our digital products. So scalability is really critical in ensuring that we become a true agentic enterprise and leverage the power that Salesforce has given us through the technologies that it's bringing to market.

In terms of the tech in play, as noted LIV is using Data 360, formerly known as Salesforce's Data Cloud. Connor expands:

We also have a partnership with Google. We’ve been re-building a lot of our analytics platform, which is built in Google. But what's brilliant is that Salesforce is able to use zero copy integration to read that data in Google. Data is critical - the data has to be good in order for the answers to be good. Certainly in the work that we've done so far, particularly the golf stats, you can't just throw out stats and think the agents are going to calculate metrics and work out everything. It does need to be curated, it does need to be properly managed in order to get the right responses.

Like other organizations, we have transactional data and behavioral data as well, so that data also has to be shaped correctly. Then by leveraging tools that Salesforce provides within Data 360, and the connection to Agentforce, we're able to make the most of that. So the strategy we've had is not just about an agent; it’s a holistic technology strategy that is grounded in the data that we collect and the way we surface that data up into the tools in order to activate it and get the value from that data.

Value

There's the value being derived across LIV’s entire agentic enterprise, argues Connor, not least in terms of speed: :

What I mean by speed is, is the speed to give answers quickly and be able to act on those answers quickly. We’ve been able to use Agentforce on top of our data, to ask questions of the data, and get the answers that are needed to make decisions quickly. That could be something simple. It could be around merchandise and the sale of merchandise and what's going to sell out, or what's been the best seller. It could be about tickets, or it could be about statistics. It could be about other questions that come in.

Speed is also really important for the broadcast [side of the business], because when fans globally are watching our broadcast, the commentators need stories to tell. In the past, those stories would have been grounded a lot in statistics, and access to those statistics was somewhat limited, and that probably would have meant that somebody would have to ‘Slack someone’ to ask a question, or trawl through spreadsheets to get [the answer to] a question. What Agentforce is allowing us to do is to allow commentators and broadcasters to ask questions directly of our agent [and get] the insights needed at that moment in time in order for the commentators to tell stories throughout our events. That's really, really critical to how consumers and fans engage with LIV Golf globally.

While it’s still inevitably early days for LIV and Agentforce - it’s just over a year since the product was released! - Connor is thinking about future use cases that can be delivered:

One that I'm really excited about is around our golfers, and what value can we bring our golfers as part of their experience with LIV Golf? I don't think any sports league in the world will be able to give their players and athletes the kind of data that we will be able to give our golfers, and with Agentforce and AI powering the insights that help golfers on the course, I think that's going to be incredibly powerful for us as a leader.

I also think the fact that we're the global golf league and we are taking golf to every corner of the globe, that also gives us a great opportunity to leverage AI and Agentforce to engage with our global audience, bring them closer to us, and increase fandom within LIV Golf. That could be in relation to events, but also there's a massive opportunity for people that play with their mates on a Saturday -  how can we enrich that experience for the golfers that play on the weekend with their mates in the way that we're going to do for the Pros? So they're the things that I really think about moving on from February next year forwards, the potential opportunities we have for really leveraging AI to create meaningful experiences for golf fans, golfers and internal players and caddies and coaches.