Arab Daily

By Keila Doyle, Founder of Golf Hero (formerly Golffily)

There is a particular frustration familiar to anyone who has tried to get better at golf. You take the lessons, you put in the hours at the range, and yet you arrive at the first tee with no reliable sense of whether any of it is working. For a while, that golfer was me. I would finish a round, glance at my scorecard and file it away in a drawer with all the others. A growing pile of paper that held answers I had no way of reading. I could not compare one round with the last, let alone see a pattern across a season. I was practising on faith and scoring on luck, and the frustration eventually became the reason I built Golf Hero.

I was convinced that technology could do what my memory could not: connect every round I had ever played and turn that history into a clear path forward. What I did not want was an app dispensing generic advice. So we spent months working alongside a golf coach, teaching our AI to understand the game with genuine depth, to grasp not only what the numbers say but what they mean for the player behind them.

Then I turned it on my own game, and the results surprised even me. When I started, I was carding 72 on the front nine and relying on hope to get me round. Within three months I had brought that down to 51. The improvement did not come from swinging harder or practising longer but from finally knowing what to fix.

The most valuable insight was one that neither my coach nor I had spotted. The AI identified that my blow-up holes were not the long, intimidating par fives but the shorter holes, which pointed squarely at my short game. I took that finding to my coach, who rebuilt my practice around shorter, more precise shots. That, to me, is the partnership at its best. A human coach teaches you what to work on, and the technology tells you whether it is actually working.

The change reached the mental side of my game as well. Seeing my progress laid out in black and white gave me a confidence that no swing thought has ever provided, along with the self-awareness to know when to attack a pin and when to play conservatively. We are wired to respond to progress, and in golf, evidence of it is rare and precious.

Sceptics will say that golf is a game of feel and that no algorithm can measure that. The research suggests otherwise. Our brains are remarkably poor at remembering what actually happened on the course, and sports science has repeatedly shown that objective feedback accelerates learning precisely because it closes the gap between what we think we did and what we actually did. The best players in the world do not rely on feeling alone. They use data to calibrate it, and that option is no longer reserved for tour professionals.

Most golf apps today tell you what happened: fairways hit, putts taken, greens in regulation. Useful, but it still leaves the golfer asking what to work on next. The coming generation of AI will answer that question, learning your game over dozens of rounds and identifying the one or two changes that will make the greatest difference.