The National Golf Course Owners Association ran two on-location AI workshops this autumn, alongside a growing programme of virtual roundtables, as the trade body leans on peer advice to answer what director of membership Christina Egan calls “finding your people.”
The National Golf Course Owners Association ran two on-location AI workshops this autumn, alongside a growing programme of virtual roundtables, as the trade body leans on peer advice over paid resources. The sessions were held in person at member courses, with NGCOA staff walking owners through specific applications, scheduling, marketing and member communications, rather than a general briefing on what artificial intelligence is.
Egan, NGCOA’s director of membership for the Southern Region, said staff have spent more time visiting courses this year, both member and nonmember, to hear what is actually happening at the operator level. The association frames the visits and the workshops as the same exercise: finding the shared problem behind a single course’s complaint, whether that is staffing, rising costs or customer expectations, and connecting the operator who has it to one who has already solved it.
That pitch lands differently depending on who is reading it. An independently owned course with no corporate backing has nowhere else to ask a staffing question except another owner who has lived through it, which is the gap NGCOA is selling into. A resort run under a management company such as Troon already has that peer network built into the operating agreement, so the value case is weaker, and the GM’s time is better spent elsewhere.
The source material, published by Golf Business (NGCOA), carries no pricing, attendance figures or a public schedule for further workshops, so operators weighing membership have to ask directly what the calendar looks like for their region. It is also light on what “practical AI applications” means in hard terms: the piece references scheduling and marketing use cases without naming a specific tool, so courses still have to do their own evaluation of software before committing budget.
Where the roundtable model has already shown up in commercial form is in programmes like Audubon’s club amenities programme, which leans on a 10,000-member base to spread cost and knowledge across facilities rather than leaving each club to solve the same problem alone. Staff-side, the same logic sits behind Foremost Golf’s push to pay staff for training time: the return on association membership or internal training is rarely a line item, it shows up later in retention and fewer repeated mistakes.
For a GM or owner reading this between meetings, the practical move is to ask NGCOA directly for the next workshop date in your region and what, specifically, it covers before assuming the association’s value is generic networking.
