{"id":246590,"date":"2025-10-28T15:22:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T15:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/246590\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T15:22:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T15:22:14","slug":"bad-at-pool-but-love-to-play-topgolf-twins-bring-ai-to-the-table","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/246590\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad at pool but love to play? Topgolf twins bring AI to the table"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oct 28, 2025 \u2013 6.02pm<\/p>\n<p>Gift this article<\/p>\n<p class=\"d6475070fa5e1d14-title\" data-testid=\"Modal-title\">Subscribe to gift this article<\/p>\n<p class=\"d6475070fa5e1d14-giftDescription d6475070fa5e1d14-noMaxWidth\" data-testid=\"Modal-description\">Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.<\/p>\n<p><a data-testid=\"Modal-subscribe-button\" href=\"https:\/\/subscribe.afr.com\/?promote_channel=HI_AGFT_GNL_GIFTCTA&amp;utm_source=ArticleGifting&amp;utm_medium=HouseInventory&amp;utm_campaign=General&amp;utm_content=GiftCTA\" class=\"d6475070fa5e1d14-subscribeButton\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Subscribe now<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"d6475070fa5e1d14-subscribeSubtext\">Already a subscriber? Login<\/p>\n<p>The Shots sports bar in Watford, north-west of London, is not the first place one would look for global technological innovation. But in a private room at Shots last week, I played an artificial intelligence-enhanced pool game with Steve and Dave Jolliffe, the twins who pioneered an industry in this town near London.<\/p>\n<p>There, 25 years ago, they opened their first Topgolf, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.afr.com\/companies\/sport\/tiger-woods-not-golfs-only-comeback-story-20180409-h0yih9\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a chain of \u201cgamified\u201d driving ranges<\/a> where visitors can strike golf balls, drink and dine. By having big targets that were easy to hit and embedding microchips in balls to keep the scores, they made a difficult sport fun for beginners. \u201cWe came up with Topgolf because we weren\u2019t very good golfers,\u201d Steve Jolliffe told me.<\/p>\n<p>Loading&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"_137dbe642694dac0-source\">Financial Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oct 28, 2025 \u2013 6.02pm Gift this article Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-246590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}