Arccos Air: What you need to know about the GPS stat-tracker's new sensor-less option

Arccos, the leading company in the world in using GPS sensors attached to your clubs to track in-round stats and strategy with more than 1.5 billion shots recorded in its database, just used AI to create a golf game-analytics miracle:

Stat-tracking without sensors.

The company is launching Arccos Air, a device about the size of an Altoids Smalls tin, that slips into your pocket to track every shot in your round and provide updated strokes gained data (driving, approach, around the green and putting) all without having to use its grip butt-cap sensors, your phone or any other foreign element linked to your clubs. It is similar to the previously launched Arccos Link.

This sensor-less approach makes Arccos Air in many ways the average golfer equivalent of having PGA Tour ShotLink in your pocket. It’s all made possible by the Arccos database of more than 1.5 billion recorded shots and its collection of some four trillion on-course data points, said Arccos CEO and co-founder Sal Syed.

“With the 1.5 billion shots that we've recorded, we’ve been able to track all your motion data on that, and there’s also data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, naonometer, GPS and microphones taking in and recording all those inputs. Then, we’ve been feeding that into our AI algorithm, which is learned from the hundreds of thousands of golfers that that are members and have played with Arccos. The analogy I like to use is like Tesla and Waymo. They’ve used human drivers to teach the driverless vehicles. Similarly, we've used our sensors to teach the sensorless Arccos Air.

“We’ve been thinking about this for years. We’re here now because you have to have the right data to feed it into the algorithm, and then it works.”

Essentially, what Arccos has learned is when and where a shot is likely to be hit based on movements of the golfer along the course, as well as the movements in the swing. It’s even able to distinguish practice swings from real swings, and the AI modeling also works with the Arccos app to provide playing guidance through its AI Strategy available for every hole, as well as its Green Maps for some 9,000 courses. At the end of the round, Arccos Air syncs with the Arccos app to provide full-round statistics. It’s a tech upgrade to the entire Arccos platform built on increased simplicity, Syed said.

“I think of Arccos Air as the most frictionless way to get into the Arccos ecosystem if you want to do game-tracking,” he said. “We’ve learned there's two key demographics that, for different reasons, are averse to sensors. One demographic is the elite golfer, who doesn’t want anything different about their clubs or their game. So, we took that impediment away with Arccos Air. And then there is the case of how do you get people who are maybe not so tech savvy interested in game-tracking? For them, thinking about pairing 14 clubs sounds like a crazy undertaking. Switch them to Arccos Air, and it’s no different than pairing an AirPod. Anybody can pair an AirPod. That's how simple it is.”

The system also works with those who have the Arccos “Smart Sensors” on their grips to provide more detailed data on each club, although Syed said Arccos Air can “know” what club you hit on each shot with increasing certainty based on your data and the shots hit by other Arccos users. Sensorless users can toggle on a feature, the AI-powered “Smart Club Selection,” that assigns a specific club to each shot based on your data history. That information can be edited in the post-round review just as with the traditional grip-based Arccos Smart Sensors.

Arccos Air retails for $350, with the price including a year of Arccos’s Game-Tracking subscription (a $200 value).