The DP World Tour is rebuilding how golf is experienced, with HCLTech helping turn live play into a constant stream of content.
Watching golf used to be a contained experience. You showed up, or you turned on the broadcast, and what happened in front of you was the product. Everything else – stats, commentary, context – existed on the edges. That boundary is disappearing.
Through its new partnership with DP World Tour, HCLTech is helping rebuild how the sport is experienced in real time. The partnership includes a full transformation of the Tour’s digital ecosystem, from its website and app to how content is created, distributed and personalized. On paper, that sounds like the kind of upgrade every sports property is pursuing. The more interesting question is what happens when that system becomes the main way fans experience the sport.
Michael Cole, chief technology officer at the DP World Tour, has watched that change unfold quickly. When he joined in 2017, smartphones were still restricted at many tournaments, treated as a potential disruption to players and broadcast rights. Now, they are the entry point for everything. “That is their ticket, that is their cash, that is their content, that is everything they need,” he says.
That change alone would be significant, but Cole describes something larger underway. The first wave of digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, brought sport online and made it accessible across devices. What is happening now, in his view, is a second phase driven by AI, one that reshapes how the product itself is built and delivered.
Golf is a useful test case because of how complex it is. Unlike most sports, it unfolds across multiple locations at once, with more than 150 players competing over four days. The traditional broadcast can only show a fraction of that. The rest exists as data, every shot, every movement, every change in position. What HCLTech is building with the Tour converts that data into a constant stream of content, from automated shot commentary to player recaps and live blog updates, generated in real time and distributed across channels.
That has a direct effect on how fans engage. Instead of following a single narrative, they can pull together their own version of the tournament, focusing on specific players, moments or data points. Cole describes it as giving fans “the optionality” to shape their experience, creating platforms that “enable us to facilitate content in a format and in a time and a place that suits our audience.” It moves away from assuming what fans want and toward giving them the ability to extract it themselves. The technology stays in the background, but it changes the structure of the experience itself.
Jill Kouri, chief marketing officer at HCLTech, sees that as the real value of the partnership. The company signed two agreements at once: “Two contracts… one was for us to commit to be an official marketing partner, and one was for us to be its engagement partner for the work.” This brings the commercial and technical sides together from the start. It is not, as she puts it, “a sort of squishier value in some sort of situation,” but a structure where both sides are tied to tangible outcomes.
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That dual role creates something more useful than a traditional sponsorship, giving HCLTech a live environment to demonstrate its capabilities while also creating the opportunity to “go to market together” and talk about the work in a way that is grounded in what has actually been built.
For a B2B brand, that kind of visibility matters in a different way. Kouri describes her approach as “business to human,” a reminder that even enterprise technology ultimately has to prove itself through real-world use. Sport provides a setting where that proof is continuous and public, whether through fan engagement, content consumption or the ability to handle a complex, always-on environment.
The fan also becomes part of the development process. The DP World Tour has recruited more than 300 volunteers from its audience to test features and provide feedback as the platform evolves. That input shapes what gets built and how it is refined, with the experience evolving over time instead of arriving as a finished product.
All of this points to a change in how sport is structured. The live event still matters, but it is only one part of the experience. What surrounds it, the data, the interfaces, the layers of content, carries equal influence in how fans engage.
For marketers, that creates a different set of decisions. Buying visibility is still part of the equation, but it now exists with the opportunity to build something that fans use directly. Kouri is firm on where she would place the emphasis. “In a perfect world, I would absolutely recommend going the path that we have gone here,” she says, pointing to the value of work that is “truly transformational with the end user, the end consumer.” The focus is on initiatives that “touch the end consumer at the end of the day and the storytelling that goes with that.” The result is a partnership that gives her team something more substantial to talk about, grounded in the work itself rather than presence alone.
The DP World Tour project will continue to roll out over the next year, with its first phase expected to align with the 2027 season. By then, the question will not be whether the technology works, but how much it has changed the way the sport is experienced.
Because once the interface becomes the product, the boundaries around sport start to move. What fans engage with extends beyond the competition itself to include the system that delivers it and shapes it in real time.