Sports, Media, and Entertainment

A century-old game meets a real-time AI experience

For USGA, technology now touches everything from back-office operations to championship events and fan experiences. Anthony Santora, Managing Director of IT, describes USGA's mission as unifying, showcasing, governing, and advancing the game of golf. Rules AI extends that mission by making official rules expertise easier to reach for golfers of all levels.

Golf rules are uniquely situational. A recreational player, competitive golfer, or youth golfer can face a question that depends on the course, the lie, the circumstance, and the rule interpretation. Historically, that golfer might ask a friend, search online, read the rule book, or turn to a general-purpose AI system. USGA saw the risk: the answer might be outdated, incomplete, or simply wrong.

Turning USGA's rules data into a golfer-facing product

USGA set out to deliver expert-level rules answers to anyone, anywhere, at the moment they need them. The foundation was USGA's own data: about 35,000 rules question-and-answer pairs received through emails and phone calls, distilled into about 25,000 highly relevant pairs and organized across roughly 500 topic clusters. That curated rules data became the foundation for Rules AI, giving the generative AI system trusted USGA content to draw from when answering golfers’ questions.

Rules AI is designed as an engine that can be integrated into other products and services. GHIN, USGA's handicapping system and a core app for golfers, taps into the Rules AI engine so golfers can ask a rules question on course, after a round, or while learning more about the game.

Protecting the experience with Cisco AI Defense

USGA treated AI security as a go-to-market requirement. Santora cites three major concerns: protecting USGA's differentiated rules data, protecting golfers and their information, and defending against misuse such as cost abuse, jailbreak attempts, and prompt injection attacks.

Cisco AI Defense became the guardrail layer around Rules AI. "We partnered with Cisco to leverage AI Defense to ensure that every single input and output into our AI engine is safe and secure," explains Santora. "Leveraging Cisco AI Defense for red-teaming, we quickly identified where the holes were. We put the necessary guardrails in place through policies."

Every question is inspected before entering the rules engine, and every generated answer is checked before it returns to the golfer. Policies, dashboards, and event logs help the team understand out-of-bounds questions, false positives, and attack vectors even among trusted users.

Scaling with confidence

Speed was critical. Golfers expect AI answers in seconds, and adding security could have introduced unacceptable latency. Santora says Cisco AI Defense helps protect both the question and answer in milliseconds.

As Rules AI rolls out through GHIN, USGA has more confidence that it can scale the service while continuing to monitor, tune, and protect the experience. "Cisco AI Defense gave us the confidence that we would be secure and could go to market with a product that not only can we trust but our users can trust," says Santora.

Up and running in weeks, not months

The deployment moved faster than USGA expected. "There are very few products where nearly out of the box they perform and do exactly what you need them to do," adds Santora. "Cisco AI Defense was one of those products for us."

"The Cisco support team was phenomenal with explaining how everything works," notes Santora. USGA went from concept to a protected, golfer-facing service in about four weeks. "When we work with the support team, they're actually amazed with how quickly we were able to get AI Defense up and running within our system."