At the close of the 2nd FLCMAA Summer Conference, we asked club leaders to put golf balls on the line. Bet Your Golf Balls is exactly what it sounds like: a trivia game where every question came from a session earlier in the event, and every wager was a test of what actually stuck. It turns out the questions people hesitated on are a pretty good map of the ideas worth writing down. So here they are, session by session, answers included.
AI will not replace hospitality. But it will raise the standard for it.
That was the closing thought of the session on AI and the future of the club industry, and the room had to complete the sentence from memory. The wrong answers were tempting: automate it, redefine it, make it more efficient. The right one matters because it puts the pressure where it belongs. Members are not benchmarking your club against other clubs anymore. They are benchmarking it against premium service experiences everywhere, and AI is quietly raising that bar across every industry they touch.
You can’t fix what you haven’t measured
The Jonas Compliance session produced the most instructive wrong answers of the game. When a system goes down on a busy weekend, the discipline that keeps essential services running is business continuity, not incident response, which is about resolving the issue itself. Policy Intelligence, another question that split the room, is the practice of comparing external requirements against your existing policies and identifying the gaps between them. And for clubs that don’t know what they don’t know about cybersecurity, the recommended starting point is not a new expert or a new plan. It is the Basic Assessment: understand where you currently stand first, then improve from there.
Frequency, friction, financial impact
From the manager’s guide to AI adoption that sticks: Wes Boggs offered the FFF filter for deciding where to start with AI. Look for the tasks that happen often, the ones that create friction for members or staff, and the ones with real financial impact. Where all three overlap, that’s your first use case. It is a deliberately unglamorous answer, and that’s the point. Adoption sticks when the first win is felt, not when it’s impressive.
Answer. Understand. Act. Anticipate.
The touchpoint-level session gave AI four practical jobs in a club, and the fourth was the one players missed most. Answering questions, understanding members, and acting on requests are where most clubs start. Anticipating, knowing what a member needs before they ask, is where the technology starts to feel like hospitality. The session’s other question was the easiest bet of the night once you heard it out loud: the ultimate outcome clubs should pursue with AI is not more automation, lower costs, or newer technology. It is more member value. Everything else is a means.
Bring AI in while you’re still deciding
The workshop on building your AI work partner reframed the letters themselves: AI as Amplified Intelligence, made up of three qualities, augmented, aligned, and abundant. It introduced the OCH briefing for working with AI well: give it the Outcome you want, the Context it needs, and the Help you’re asking for. And it answered the question of timing. The best moment to bring your AI work partner into a problem is not after you’ve chosen a direction or when you’re stuck. It is while you are still deciding which path to take, when a second perspective can actually change the outcome.
Where Jonas is taking this
Between rounds, we shared our own answer to the question every club is asking. AI is not a buzzword to us. Our mission is to bring practical, trustworthy AI to clubs in ways that improve operations, strengthen governance, and elevate the member experience: lead with dedicated leadership, listen to client feedback to guide what we build, build, measure against real outcomes, and scale best practices. Already in motion: the AI Report Builder, the AI Member Chatbot, Support AI, and AI Governance. Practical AI, trusted deployment, real club outcomes.
Nobody left with fewer golf balls than they arrived with. The ideas, though, were worth the wager.