Spotlight on Our Partners: Meet PGA TOUR

The PGA TOUR is at the forefront of sports technology, constantly innovating to bring fans closer to the action and enhance players’ experiences. Scott Gutterman, the Senior Vice President of Digital and Broadcast Technologies at the PGA TOUR, is at the heart of this digital transformation.

In a recent conversation, Gutterman shared his insights on the evolving landscape of sports technology and the PGA TOUR’s ambitious plans to revolutionize fan engagement. From launching a state-of-the-art broadcast studio to integrating cutting-edge AI and data analytics, Gutterman gave us a glimpse into the future of golf consumption.

In the following conversation, Gutterman takes us behind the scenes of PGA TOUR’s digital strategy, the importance of personalization and proactive technology, and the trends he’s closely monitoring—including the potential of generative AI. He also reflects on his own path in the industry, the mentors who shaped his career, and his passion for sports and technology.

This interview offers a unique perspective from a leader at the intersection of sports, media, and innovation. Let’s *drive* right in and explore how the PGA TOUR is redefining the fan experience through the lens of Scott Gutterman.

Scott Gutterman
Hey, Taylor, how are you?

Taylor Pipes
Hey, Scott, I’m doing well. How about you?

Scott Gutterman
Good, good.

Taylor Pipes
I appreciate you taking the time to schedule this. I know you’re busy, so I appreciate you taking the chance to meet.

Scott Gutterman
No worries at all.

Taylor Pipes
What’s a high-level overview of your role? I know you’ve spent quite a few years at PGA TOUR, kind of in your most recent capacity, kind of what is the work that you do and kind of the scope of the things that you touch,

Scott Gutterman
I am particularly focused on getting the PGA TOUR, our players, and our events in front of our fans in the two ways fans consume the TOUR most. One is through our broadcast partners, rights holders, and streaming partners. The broadcast technology teams that I manage are responsible for gathering everything on-site, transmitting it back here (to what will be the new PGA TOUR studios building), working with our live production teams, and getting that out all across the world. I’m very excited about that. One area I’ve managed full 19 years I’ve been here has been digital content. I started here in 2005 managing our digital platform team, and so I manage the websites, the apps, AR, VR, AI – the kinds of technologies that go into owned and operated platforms and the way that they bring our sport to our fans.

Taylor Pipes
What’s the most interesting part of a normal operating day? What do you look forward to most about going to work? Give me a slice of something you really, truly look forward to.

Scott Gutterman
I would say it’s two things. I’m privileged to come to work every day and watch a sport. Getting up and watching the best golfers on the best golf courses in the world is a privilege and something that I’ve enjoyed for the full 19 years and has kept me excited to come in every single day. But the other part of it for me is I’m a technologist at heart. So playing with technology, using technology, and getting new technology that serves something that excites the fans about our sport is always a big part of it. I started as a coder, so exploring and playing with technology is something I enjoy every day. As much as I’m responsible for helping to manage teams, now there’s always something fun to play with that we’re trying to push forward.

“Getting up and watching the best golfers on the best golf courses in the world is a privilege and something that I’ve enjoyed for the full 19 years and has kept me excited to come in every single day. But the other part of it for me is I’m a technologist at heart.” — Scott Gutterman

Taylor Pipes
Yeah, I was going to ask what you studied in college and how you landed at PGA TOUR at a super interesting time, like an inflection point with technology. It sounds like you did coding and translated that into this new opportunity to build awesome ways for consumers to engage with sports.

Scott Gutterman
Yeah. So, I was a Management Information Systems (MIS) major at Florida State University in Tallahassee. This was a little while ago, so the languages I was focused on were, gosh, I used to know very well Cobalt, Fortran, Pascal Basic, the very beginnings of Java and C. So, I was pretty fluent in that, and started my career programming financial services systems for my first five years, and kind of evolved into product management after coding for awhile, and then ended up going to work for a startup that friends of mine started up that just happened to be on the entertainment side of the business, instead of the back office side of the business where I had spent a good portion of my career. I fell into the sports side of that by bringing NASCAR.com from ESPN Starwave to Turner Sports back in 2000-2001, just when you knew the internet was really becoming a commercial entity for sports. That was my first foray into sports many, many years ago. You’re right, I hit it right in an inflection point and in the first internet wave. I have been fortunate enough to be there and here at the TOUR to kind of usher the TOUR onto a whole lot of really interesting technologies. When I first got here in 2005, it was just the website. Sure enough, every 24 to 36 months, something new was coming along that we had to go and do.

Taylor Pipes
At what point did the gears in your mind start turning when you landed here and it’s just a web platform with content and probably TOUR updates and schedules, and maybe ticket options. When did you see the opportunity that you could maybe turn this into something much bigger? When did that start to take shape?

Scott Gutterman
When I got to the TOUR in 2005, it was really just a website, and the team was small and just kind of in an outbuilding, and we outsourced pretty much all of the work. But a buddy of mine that I came here with, along with my manager at the time, knew this was going to become bigger, an important part of the media business for the PGA TOUR. And so, really, our goal was to not only grow the consumption of the PGA TOUR, but it was to begin to show the business how important this was going to be to fan engagement, to getting fans closer to our players, to sponsorship and revenue opportunities, and really growing the business. It was right at the point where people were beginning to realize that they could engage with a sport, not just by watching it, you know, in our case, three hours a day, four days a week, but engage on other platforms. At that time, we were fortunate to hit a bunch of technology waves that resulted in us taking full control of the digital business. In 2012, we brought the full digital business in-house and began to grow the team.

Taylor Pipes
What have you been looking at working on the last few months? I know I’ve just been overwhelmed with excitement watching a lot of the different people that you work with post on LinkedIn updates on how the PGA TOUR products are starting to evolve and answer a lot of the questions consumers are demanding.

Scott Gutterman
Yeah, so it’s been a pretty big part of our job. The last 12 to 24 months have been focused on really two things for us. One is we rebuilt the tech stack from the bottom up, greater flexibility and faster data for scoring, and reduced our ad positions by 30% to get fans closer to the content. And so we’re pretty excited. We’ve seen some great growth on that. We were up 8% in users year-over-year from 2023 to 2024. We’re up 15% in visits over that same period. Fans have really embraced the new PGA TOUR apps and websites so and it’s given us the flexibility to kind of continue to deliver – I think that’s what you’ve seen from the team on LinkedIn. So I’ve been very excited about that. The other part, which is what we’re talking about earlier, is we’re launching a new PGA TOUR studios building here that’s been five years in the making. We’re moving out of a 35,000-square-foot building that we had to build a TV compound around when we started ESPN Plus streaming three years ago. I’m sitting in that building right now that our staff will move in here at the end of the month, and we will start live streaming here on January 2, but in a new state-of-the-art, 165,000 square foot building with seven studios ready to go when we get started, the capability of going up to 13 studios in the future. There are eight control rooms of various sizes, a new tier-one studio that’s just downstairs, looking at the brand new LED floor and walls that have gone in there that is going to allow us to do all kinds of augmented and virtual reality broadcasts, as well as produce those four streams out of one building. And even, even more exciting for me is we’re getting all the PGA TOUR onto one campus and two buildings for the first time in the history of the PGA TOUR. And so we’re all pretty excited about having everybody together. So it’s going to be a real adventure and that’s what we’ve been focused on. And certainly, there’s, there’s a lot of new technology stuff, Generative AI (GenAI) that we’re working on with AWS as well.

Taylor Pipes
I don’t know how you juggle it all. Unless you’re like a technologist at heart or a broadcast nerd with this kind of stuff, but the things that you’re talking about, it would take mountains to move, and you’re accomplishing all of it. But how do you juggle what’s next? Generative AI is a new thing that a lot of companies talk about. How do you start thinking about that and where a product is going to become available a few years down the road?

Scott Gutterman
The responsibility of many of my leads and across the organization is to prioritize the things that we feel will have the biggest impact on the business, along with prioritizing exploration and innovation to figure out if something’s going to have an impact. As in any business, prioritizing what you are doing, prioritizing what you want to do, and deprioritizing the things that you have been doing that don’t work out is kind of the framework that we try to use. For us, it’s number one – what’s our fan experience? Number two, what efficiencies can we gain from any new technology or approach? Number three would be revenue opportunities and sponsorship opportunities. And number four is innovation. We try to frame all that out together. So that’s kind of what it is. And you can’t do everything. You’re going to pick some things that you’re going to get excited about that are gonna work, and you’re going to miss some things that you thought might work. So it’s always a challenge. Generative AI is one of those things that, for us, typically start as proof of concepts – low bandwidth proof of concepts. Staff will come to us with, and we give them bandwidth and time and then move those things into how we create a working proof of concept that hits our frameworks, and we try to see what it’s going to cost to execute and how are we going to reach fans with it, what kind of marketing we put behind it, and then going off and, operationalizing it all. That’s kind of where we are with generative AI. We’ve spent the last 24 months doing those things, but now it’s like, how do you operationalize all this in a world? You know, some of these things are very new to operationalize, so there aren’t answers yet. That, to me, is kind of fun to work on, though!

Taylor Pipes
Regarding the Comcast Sports Tech Program, what’s it been like working with the cohorts?

Scott Gutterman
For us, the Comcast Sports Program brings the opportunity to see what people are looking at. I love being here in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida – in Jacksonville. But it’s not New York, Austin, or San Francisco and the technology hubs that exist. The program allows us to go out and see what’s going on across different disciplines, across different areas of the world, and the different things I think people are thinking about. For us, that introduces us to everything from something we haven’t talked about, which is what we can do to bring to bear technology to help our athletes perform better, right? Sometimes, that’s the case, as we see in the current cohort. Or, for fan engagement – how do we address fans at events? So, it allows us a window into ideas that people have that may fit what we’re trying to accomplish. We may have a challenge, but how do you address that challenge? That’s where the program comes in, and how do we use those opportunities to find people to help us meet those challenges?

Taylor Pipes
Are there trends down the pike in the next year or two that you’re following that could potentially matriculate into the work that you’re doing that you’re keeping an eye on now?

Scott Gutterman
Certainly, I think generative AI is going to continue to be a trend of what we’re doing, machine learning, which we’ve been doing for years – scoring and win probabilities – working with companies like WSC Sports to do automated video clipping, things like that.

Also, how do we potentially look at agentic AI being used to help in two ways? One is to help our athletes understand how they’re performing when they come off the course. If I’m Rory McIlroy and I come off the course, and I’ve got this agent in what we call our Member App, the app that serves the players, that can kind of give them the things they want to know about how they performed and show them how they performed, right? If it’s multimodal, give them the video that says what your swing looked like on the 10th hole or on the fifth fairway. Things like that that help our athletes and are here.

And then, how do we continue to address that the consumption of content is going to become more personalized and more decentralized? How do we begin to make that leap? I think we’re headed toward the trend that I’m looking at is I think the world has served everybody very well, but

I think with some of the agentic AI coming, we’re beginning to see the edges of the new world. Instead of having to dig into an app to find something that you’re interested in, an agent or something on your phone or in your ear is going to tell you the things that you want to know because 80% of the time, the thing that you want to know is the same thing you asked about yesterday or the day before, or last weekend. Your phone should know enough about you, or an agent should know enough about you to know that Saturday at three o’clock, you might want to know who’s on the top of the PGA TOUR leaderboard or who’s about to make the cut and it’s just going to tell you. So, how do we move from that environment? That’s going to have a huge impact on consumption and the way that sponsorships are integrated. That’s the trend that I’m looking at now.

Taylor Pipes
Is there a startup or a company that you’re following right now that you’re just keeping an eye on? Maybe something that you use or rely on, that you’re just blown away by, and that is, you know, you kind of like learning from them and kind of bringing that into your work, and just that’s just kind of changing the way you think about things?

Scott Gutterman
I look at Anthropic and what they’re doing with their models and have grown to like their methodical approach to the way that they’re deploying tools, and the way that they’re trying to focus on ‘how do we get people to interact with what they’re building.’

I like what they’re doing, and I like their approach. I think AI safety is going to be critical IP. I think their approach to IP and Amazon AWS has a similar approach to IP, is really important to businesses. And I think it’s, I think that that’s something that we want to look at companies that are deploying in that method of helping us grow our opportunities, but also protect our IP. That is extremely important.

Taylor Pipes
We’ve reached the fun portion of this interview – the lightning round. Our team has come up with some interesting questions we want to ask you about some of your favorite things.

First question: Who is your favorite athlete?

Scott Gutterman
On the golf side, I have to say it’s always been Tiger Woods. I’ve been a huge, huge Tiger Woods fan since I was a kid. But I’m also a Florida State graduate. So one of my favorite athletes of all time is work Warrick Dunn, both for what he’s done off the field and on the field. He was a great, great running back and a great human being.

Taylor Pipes
What is your favorite team?

Scott Gutterman
Well, collegiate, Florida State University, the Seminoles, of course, is my favorite team. That’s the one that I follow the closest all the time, but not having a great season right now.

Taylor Pipes
What is your favorite sport?

Scott Gutterman
I play, watch, and live golf, and so for me, golf is my favorite sport all around, closely followed by collegiate football.

Taylor Pipes
Who’s your childhood hero, and why?

Scott Gutterman
Oh, that’s a good one. My childhood hero, I grew up a science kid, a science and science fiction kid. So my childhood hero was Arthur C. Clarke, and I grew up reading his books, but also, you know, his scientific contributions were the things that made me lean into what I do every day. That’s why I started programming as a kid in high school, and I’m always very interested in technology.

Taylor Pipes
What’s your go-to karaoke song if you imbibe? Everyone’s got one. What’s yours, Scott?

Scott Gutterman
if I did something like that, it would be the Beastie Boys, “Intergalactic” is one of my favorites.

Taylor Pipes
If you’re not at the PGA TOUR in your current capacity, what would you be doing?

Scott Gutterman
Oh, what would I be doing? I would probably be working somewhere deep in the AI field right now. So that’s probably what I’d be doing. That’s where I spend my spare time on technology.

Taylor Pipes
Who was your greatest mentor?

Scott Gutterman
My greatest mentor? It was probably a combination of two people. For me, it was my father and my grandfather. My father was always just a great mentor and a sounding board to me when I was a kid and developing my interests as a kid. My grandfather was a scientist at the naval ordnance lab during World War II. As a kid, I used to go into their labs all the time, which really influenced what I did.

Taylor Pipes
What’s the strangest or craziest talent you have?

Scott Gutterman
Oh boy, the strangest or craziest talent that I have? I am a space aficionado, so people know that when there’s a launch here, I can see the launches from Cape Canaveral now from my office. So I keep a very close eye on the track, and the team knows when there’s a launch, they’ll find me out on the patios out here, usually watching the launches or gathering people to watch them.

Taylor Pipes
I wasn’t going to make any assumptions, but I had some golf questions here, assuming that you enjoy it, but I wasn’t sure if you played. So, what’s your favorite course you’ve ever teed off at?

Scott Gutterman
Favorite course? Gosh, that’s a good question. Oh, North Berwick. North Berwick in Edinburgh in the East Midlands, not far from where we play the Genesis Scottish Open. I played, and this well before I joined the tour, in the late 90s, I played an amazing round of golf there. It’s a beautiful course. It was one of the windiest and coldest rounds I’ve ever played. But it was amazing to play and definitely one of my favorite courses I played on.

Taylor Pipes
All right, what’s your favorite local course there in Florida?

Scott Gutterman
Well, here in Jacksonville, my favorite course is the Valley Course, which is adjacent to the Stadium Course here at TPC Sawgrass. That’s my favorite. We do play the Stadium Course in the summertime. It is very, very hard, but it’s fun to play.

Taylor Pipes
What animal is on your driver headcover if you go that route?

Scott Gutterman
I do not. I have a TPC Sawgrass headcover on my driver right now.

Taylor Pipes
A company man, alright. What’s your favorite hole of golf anywhere in the world?

Scott Gutterman
Gosh. My favorite hole is the 17th here at TPC Sawgrass and the Island Green, not because of playing it, but because I was there in 2015 when Ricky Fowler came through and won the event by birdying the hole right there on the 17th. I was right behind the green, but he was throwing darts at the Sunday pin placement, which, if you’re familiar with it, no one throws darts at that hole. You always try to hit it just at the little hill to the left of it and let it roll down. But he was literally aiming right at the hole. And I’ve never seen anything like that. It was the best finish to any golf tournament that I’ve had the privilege to be at. And I’ve been to a lot of golf tournaments.

Taylor Pipes
What’s your favorite sports memory?

Scott Gutterman
Oh, gosh. I would say it was probably the 1993 National Championship, Florida State University’s first National Championship, the win over Nebraska. My friends famously tell me that I did not see the winning field goal. I was literally sitting on the seats at the old Orange Bowl with my head in my hands while they kicked the ball, and I did not see it. But of course, I jumped up and cheered, and so that’s probably my favorite sports memory.

Taylor Pipes
If you could change any one sports outcome, what would it be?

Scott Gutterman
None of the wide rights that Florida State experienced. I would gladly take those back!

Taylor Pipes
What are you currently reading right now? Give me a taste of what books are on your nightstand.

Scott Gutterman
You know, it’s funny. I thought you might ask me that question. I had been watching “Slow Horses” on Apple Plus, and I’ve never read any of the John le Carré “Smiley” spy novels. I’ve started reading those in the last couple of months. I’ve gotten through the first two of those, and I’ve also just finished a science fiction novel, which I’m always reading something science fiction called “The Ministry of Time,” which is a really cool novel that was just published last year.

Taylor Pipes
What’s your favorite emoji that you use in work-related messaging or things like that? It’s

Scott Gutterman
It’s got to be the wink emoji. I probably use that way too much.

Taylor Pipes
What’s a book that’s profoundly changed the course of your work or personal life?

Scott Gutterman
I read “The Right Stuff” as a junior in high school, and it had a profound impact on me. One of the key takeaways was that there were many different paths into the space and technology industries. The book validated my love of science and, combined with the inspiration from the movie “Tron,” motivated me to get into coding.

Taylor Pipes
What’s your favorite comedy movie of all time?

Scott Gutterman
Oh, my favorite comedy movie of all time. Boy, that’s a that’s a tough one. I want to say that I’m trying to think of the movie I’ve laughed the hardest – I think it would have to be “There’s Something About Mary.” I remember seeing that for the very first time; it was just a hysterical movie, so that’s up there.

Taylor Pipes
If you had a walk-up song, what would it be?

Scott Gutterman
I think it would be the one that I mentioned for my it would either be one or two Beastie Boys songs. It would either be “Sabotage” or “Intergalactic.”

Taylor Pipes
Scott, what a pleasure to meet you. Your work fascinates me. I love the PGA TOUR, and it’s cool to hear some of your stories.

Scott Gutterman
This was fun. I appreciate you guys including me.