Wilson Fit AI: The Next Leap Forward?

You could look at Wilson Fit AI as just an app to help you select golf clubs.

You’d be wrong.

You could also be fashionably cynical and say it’s just a gimmick. And you could act all dismissive and say since it’s from Wilson Golf, it’s irrelevant in golf equipment’s big picture.

And you’d be wrong on both of those counts, too.

It’s not often we see something that makes us go all wide-eyed and say, “Wait, it does what?”  But, friends, Wilson Fit AI is one of those things.

In fact, Wilson Fit AI just might revolutionize the world of custom club fitting.

And revolutionize is not a word we throw around casually.

What Is Wilson Fit AI?

AI (artificial intelligence) is omnipresent in golf today, as it is in so many other aspects of our lives. It has become a staple in product research and development for OEMs, particularly when designing variable-thickness club faces. A high-powered computer can iterate and refine a face design based on design parameters and desired performance. And the end result is something any engineer would look at and mutter, “I’d have never thought of that.”

Wilson is a card-carrying member of the AI R&D brigade. But Wilson Fit AI is the first time AI and machine learning have been applied to club fitting.

“Wilson Fit AI has a self-learning algorithm,” says Wilson Golf GM Bob Thurman, who is also VP of R&D for Wilson Sporting Goods overall. “Every time it’s used, every swing it measures and every fitter recommendation is loaded into the cloud and the algorithm is recalculated. It gets smarter and smarter.”

The Wilson Fit AI kit features a special fitting club with a Blast Motion swing sensor built into the grip. When connected to the app, the sensor picks up 12,000 swing data points and compares those points to the 325 million swings in the Blast Motion library. All that information goes through Wilson’s proprietary AI system to fit you into a Wilson iron. It also recommends the best shaft for you as well as length and lie.

All it takes is five swings.

How Does It Work?

Most online “fitting” tools follow a very linear “if this, then this” type of logic. Wilson Fit AI looks at those 12,000 data points and uses a convoluted (in a good way) non-linear path to predict launch, flex, length and lie.

It does all that very quickly.  A minimum of five swings is required to get a recommendation, but the fitter can have the golfer take as many swings as he or she wants. The fitter is also able to eliminate outlier swings.

The process is simple. The fitter will input the golfer’s name, height and wrist-to-floor measurement. The app then asks for some basic information such as handicap (or average score), competitive or recreational, scoring goals, preferred head design and whether the golfer is looking for distance and forgiveness or control and workability.

The golfer then takes several warmup swings with the Wilson Fit AI fitting club (it’s a 7-iron). Once warm, the golfer can then hit ‘till he’s happy.

The swing data recorded is essentially your swing DNA. The sensor records the start of your backswing to the top of your backswing and then the downswing. It records your swing speed not in miles per hour but in G-force. Based on those readings, the app will give you your swing tempo (3:1 backswing time to downswing time is considered ideal).

The sensor will also measure wrist bend (are you pronating or supinating?), wrist hinge and wrist roll. And it knows whether you’re creating lag or casting by determining the point in the swing when you cock and uncock your wrists. The sensor’s internal gyroscope feature then identifies your launch window. If you’re a low launcher, it’ll pick a shaft to bring launch up. If you’re a high launcher, it’ll pick a shaft to help bring it down.

Is Wilson Fit AI Accurate?

Based on past fittings, we’d say somewhere between reasonably and remarkably. Five swings told me my swing created 21 G’s of force with heavy face rotation on the backswing. If my teacher had seen that, he would have smacked me upside the head with a stern, “Haven’t we been working on that?”

Despite that, the system told me I created a decent amount of lag with my wrists unhinging at roughly the 83 percent mark of my downswing. At age 63, my goals are distance and forgiveness so Wilson Fit AI fit me into Wilson’s as-yet-unreleased player’s distance iron with a stiff KBS Tour Lite shaft.  It also suggested standard length and one degree upright.

This is where the role of the fitter came into play. Wilson Master Fitter Ed Garland watched several more shots and asked if my typical iron miss was left, which I confirmed. He then changed the lie to one degree flat to offset that tendency. He also asked if I tend to flip a little at impact and launch the ball high, which I do. The KBS Tour Lite’s relatively stiff tip will help mitigate that.

At my most recent fitting, Titliest fit me into the T-200 player’s distance iron and the same KBS Tour LIte shaft, albeit in regular flex (a couple of months’ worth of GolfForever workouts has paid dividends!). Titleist also spec’d my irons half an inch long and two degrees flat. Titleist’s standard T-200 7-iron is 37 inches long with a 63-degree lie angle. Wilson’s standard is 37.25 inches long with a 62-degree lie angle.

After Garland’s recommended lie adjustment, the specs were pretty much a wash.

A Fitting Fit

So where does Wilson Fit AI, ahhh, fit? Awkward syntax aside, Wilson plans to provide the Wilson Fit AI system to all of its registered fitters to use as a tool to help make their lives a little easier and a little faster.

“Fitting can be a time-consuming process,” says Thurman. “We also know if you go to two different fitters, you might get two different results due to different philosophies, different training, different backgrounds.”

Perhaps the best part of a fitting is learning about what your swing is doing, at least on that day. A standard launch monitor can give you a good amount of data. The Wilson Fit AI sensor, however, takes that data a step further and breaks down your swing’s DNA. Far from handcuffing a fitter, the Wilson Fit AI results provide more information for a fitter to take over the process and deliver a solid fit.

And, from Wilson’s standpoint, the app itself makes ordering Amazon-level simple. Placing the custom-build order is simply a matter of pressing the red button at the bottom of the screen.

It’s fair to ask how is this different from Mizuno’s Shaft Optimizer. Similar, in this case, doesn’t equal same. The level of analytics isn’t comparable, and Wilson Fit AI leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide both a shaft and head fit. The Mizuno Shaft Optimizer, as its name suggests, optimizes shaft selection.

A History of Innovation

You may not equate Wilson with innovation but no brand can reach its 110^th birthday, as Wilson will in 2024, without being innovative.

Say what you will about Driver vs Driver but it certainly was different. Cynics may cluck that Wilson couldn’t design a driver and had to resort to a reality show. If that’s your only takeaway, you’re a prime candidate for the cover of the next issue of You Missed The Point magazine. Did the winning drivers set the world on fire? Nope but that wasn’t the point, either.

It was to showcase Bob Thurman’s playground, Wilson Labs.

“We look for problems to solve,” he says. “Wilson Labs is where we bring these concepts out.”

For example, Wilson has created tennis balls and basketballs that don’t go flat and they’ve created a football with an internal sensor.

“It serves as a launch monitor for quarterbacks,” says Thurman. “It measures arm talent and is used at the Manning Passing Academy as well as in college and the NFL.”

The first Wilson Fit AI iteration featured the football sensor strapped to a golf club. It was unusable but it did prove the concept and led to the partnership with Blast Motion.

Wilson Fit AI: Where To Next?

Wilson will be sending the Fit AI kits out to its registered fitters shortly, with plans to launch the program on January 17th. There will be a landing page and dealer locator on the Wilson Golf website to help you find one near you. It’ll be up to the individual fitter what, if anything, they charge for the service.

For 2024, Wilson Fit AI will fit for irons only. Wilson will eventually add drivers, fairways, hybrids, wedges and putters.

Wilson’s fully aware that fitters using this tool will often wind up fitting a golfer into someone else’s product. That’s life in the big city. The company’s hope, however, is that Wilson Fit AI will get more players to, at the very least, try their equipment and bring Wilson into the discussion.

For a company whose glory days are in the rearview mirror, that’s a big win. And by any objective standard, Wilson does provide equipment ranging from solid to exceptional. The Dynapower is MyGolfSpy’s reigning Best Fairway Wood for 2023 and Wilson’s putters, player’s irons and player’s distance irons have all performed exceptionally in our testing.

Getting noticed, however, has been the hard part. If, at minimum, Wilson Fit AI gets Wilson on your radar, the company will consider that a victory.

“As we evolve the golf brand, we know there are a lot of golfers who are discovering us for the very first time,” says Thurman. “To get the golf brand back, it starts with great equipment and that starts with innovation.”