Twilio Signal 2026 | Kevin Scott, PGA of America

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Kevin Scott

CTO

PGA of America

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Kevin Scott, PGA of America

Kevin Scott

CTO PGA of America

In this interview from Twilio Signal 2026, Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of the Professional Golfers' Association of America, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how Twilio's unified platform is helping PGA of America scale deeply personalized member experiences across a community of 30,000 golf professionals. Scott traces a partnership that began over nine years ago with SMS-based event operations — coordinating behind-the-scenes staff during weather incidents at major championships — and has since expanded into email via SendGrid, a F... Read more

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What is your role at the PGA of America, and can you explain what the PGA of America is and how it differs from the PGA Tour? add

How does your organization use Twilio’s products to support and coordinate golf events and behind‑the‑scenes operations? add

How do you decide whether to build technology in-house versus buying third‑party solutions (for example, whether to use Twilio or other vendors)? add

Who are your most important customers, and how do you create and scale personalized, high-touch experiences for them? add

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Kevin Scott, PGA of America

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome back to Twilio SIGNAL 2026. My name is Paul Nashawaty, coming to you live from San Francisco. I'm here with Kevin Scott, the CTO of PGA of America. Kevin, how are you doing?

Kevin Scott

>> Very good. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great. Great to have you on. I just saw you on the keynote. It was an awesome conversation. Let's start by, why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and introduce to PGA of America?

Kevin Scott

>> Yeah, sure thing. So Kevin, I oversee technology for PGA of America. I'm the CTO and the CIO. We're not that big of an organization, so we do both of those things together. Just as we have our chat here, it's probably helpful if I explain a little bit of exactly what the PGA of America is. So in the US at least, we're exposed to a couple of different things under the PGA brand. So from every weekend on TV, you'll see folks on TV playing golf, different tournaments, touring around the country. That's the PGA tour. We were once the same organization, but what is now the PGA of America, my organization. We also run golf events, but not every week, and they're really big. So we run the PGA Championship, the Women's PGA Championship, the Senior PGA Championship. Those events then are majors and every tour essentially. We also run the Ryder Cup in conjunction with the Ryder Cup Europe. So we don't run as many events, but we run really big ones. But the key difference is that that then becomes our revenue stream that we use to fund the main purpose of PGA of America, which is we're actually a not for-profit trade association of 30,000 men and women who make their living in the golf industry. So these are people that if you were to walk into a golf course or a club, you'd find them running tournaments, camps, clinics, lessons, general managers, all the things that brings golf to life. So what I usually tell people is that PGA kind of represents folks who have a golf club in their hand, as opposed to a remote control in their hand.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. It's really interesting. I thought what you do is really cool because one, I like golf. I'm not a very good golfer, but I try. The other thing is the interaction between engagements at these events, the bar has been raised very high. The audience is looking for that more and more engaging interaction and working very closely with what's happening. So all these events that you're talking about, they really have to have... I'm sure from a technical perspective, the pivot has been dramatic, right? Because now you have the ability to engage with the audience in different ways that you've never could before. So whether it's texting, or voice, or whatever it may be. So I have the opportunity to talk with Chris, Kohler, about the partnership that you had back in March. You want to talk a little bit about that partnership?

Kevin Scott

>> Yeah, sure thing. By the way, you were talking about events and turns out there's a lot of different types of golf events. So we just talked about ones that are big and televised, you got spectators and all that kind of thing, big purses. But of course there's a lot of other just individual events that happen at the local level as well within clubs, at facilities, leagues, all of these together create all the different events we look at. So with Twilio, we've actually been a customer for a long, long time, even before I joined nine years ago. And we started out relatively small, working through messaging. And next week is the PGA Championship, and two years from now, we'll have a PGA championship here in San Francisco. But as part of that, there's a lot of behind the scenes operations. So Twilio text messaging is the thing that we use to send out messages to our behind-the-scenes staff at those events. That looks like, sometimes there are weather incidents, we have to bring people off the course. And so we are texting basically to coordinate those things. So we started there and started then to build up with email and SendGrid. Our call center now runs on Flex. It has for a bunch of years. We use a great product called Twilio Pay that I would love to call out if I can. And then we are now going deeper and deeper into Segment. So I think we're just kind of scratching the surface there. There's a lot more that we can go into that we're excited about, but that's sort of become the portfolio. And these are all great products on their own. It turns out that they're all like with Twilio, but they've each earned their place in our world.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I think that the big shift, you've been a long term as a long time customer and client and partner with Twilio. I think the big thing I've noticed year over year, just in the last year, is the pivot from being a siloed kind of product company to more of a unified platform. That's what we're seeing at this event. There's this unified platform, one platform, one experience, one view, and then the announcements that we saw today were just really powerful. I think that that in my mind really helps accelerate that time to value. Would you agree with that?

Kevin Scott

>> Yeah. And being able to have them all work together is fantastic for us because it's simpler. At the same time, we've got things like... All of these are... In the old days, you would just push something out, push an email or push a message. And the natural thing is that becomes more valuable if you can actually get something back. And turning that conversation, it's so obvious, right? And then when you do that thing, you should learn something from it and you should probably hang on to what you learned. And some of that was on stage today. Some of it fits into other products and segments. And once you learn something in the conversation product, being able to move that over to either our data warehouse or pull it into the CDP segment, these things all fit together and they work nicely as a platform. But to be honest, it's generally not great if customers end up having to buy the whole thing all at once if you're just starting. So it gave us a really nice on ramp to be able to selectively choose like, okay, that's the right product for us, that's the right product, that's the right product. And in total, what you end up with is this thing that works really well together because they're designed and built that way.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, and also, I imagine in your environment, you have non-Twilio products as well that interact with this environment. So they have to all work well together in your ecosystem. So I think that's a big factor as well. I like that. That was some of the things that I was hearing.

Kevin Scott

>> Well, so we do. So for example, like we've got some things that aren't Twilio that we use to send email. That makes less and less sense these days, especially as we have more AI capabilities that allow us to... It's easier and easier for us to create our own products. And so we'll continue to use that to just... We have great things to work with, great primitives with Twilio, and so we'll just use those directly and the room for the kind of middle pieces there that usually cost a lot of money and have a lot of margin in them goes away. So we're fortunate, even though we're a little golf nonprofit, we have just enough technology people and they are really, really good that we have been able to kind of readjust our build versus buy mindset and we're not building everything because why would we ever want to? But there's a lot of things where the economics of that and the calculus, it shifted and it's changed and it caused us to rethink things. So I think there's a real advantage to companies that can have the ability to choose, make, or buy. And if you have the ability, then you can make an intelligent decision. If you are only wired to be able to buy things, then you're going to end up having to do that every time.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, if you build it yourself, you own it, right? Meaning if something breaks at 2:00 in the morning, you have to fix it. And if you're not in the business of building product, if you're in the business of, say, running the PGA of America, you want to run the PGA of America, you don't want to build your product. So I think that there's value to outsourcing where it makes sense. There's also faster time to value when it comes to product launches and such. And I get it that you want to kind of... Sometimes organizations want to flex their technical muscle and say, "Hey, we can do that ourselves, we could do it better." But the reality of it is the juice-

Kevin Scott

>> .

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, is the juice worth the squeeze, right? You're really going to get what you need out of it. And in my opinion, I think that where it makes sense, you build those connectors, you build those pieces. And now with AI, it makes it a lot easier to have agents in place, connect your heritage systems, connect to what you need into your new systems, but buy what you can where it makes sense. And I think that's one of the big things about this announcement, the announcements that we were seeing on the keynote, Twilio's press releases that have come out. I think unifying the platform and having that ability to really kind of connect things together appropriately really streamlines the effect, especially when this new day and age of AI.

Kevin Scott

>> Yeah, I totally agree. And it's obviously things are moving really, really fast in terms of the capabilities that companies have. And so whatever the balance is of what can we sort of reasonably afford to do or what would we want to maintain today changes very quickly. And so we're having to wrestle with that over and over again. We made product decisions two years ago that make a lot less sense today than they did just because the assumptions have changed, the abilities have changed.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. And that's going to change, that's going to rapidly change.

Kevin Scott

>> It's not about to stop, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's going to keep changing. Sorry, let's talk about some of the things that are coming, right? You have personalized membership journeys that are happening.

Kevin Scott

>> Personalized what?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Personalized membership journeys that are happening. How is the PGA of America creating unique membership profiles around this and how are you using your systems to make that all work?

Kevin Scott

>> Yeah. So I mentioned that our dearest customer are people who are PGA professionals, PGA of America golf professionals. And these are folks who are often multi-generational PGA members. They've put years into being certified in that and they've committed their career to being part of our brand. So deeply passionate members. And the experiences that we want to create for them are... There's a lot of reward for being high touch and personal. So we have no interest in like... I know a lot of companies are figuring out like, how do you get somebody off the phone quickly? We don't have that incentive. We want our members to call us, we want to talk to them, learn about them. We want to like help them have a better career, help them figure out what's next for them. So we have mentoring and coaching as part of our DNA.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Experiences. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Scott

>> So just helping people have better careers is the main reason to exist there. And as part of that, being able to personalize journeys for them, like, boy, it fits like a glove. That's exactly what we want to be able to do. And the problem is, I've mentioned that we have like people who will do a different type of career sort of coaching and counseling and guidance. Our ratio, there's 30,000 men and women who are PGA professionals, but we only have a couple dozen of those people who do that. So the ratio is on the order of 1 to 1,000. Pretty tough, right? And it's a perfect moment for technology to be able to come in and allow us to scale that better. So at a ratio of 1 to 1,000, you could only be so personal with people. You probably know a handful of them really well, but don't have the ability to know all of them. And so it expands the sort of radius of impact that our people have. I don't hear... In fact, I think that's probably different than the way a lot of customers, a lot of companies would think about interacting with their customers, but it's been fantastic for us to really scale out impact as opposed to think about like reducing... So basically it's an increase in customer experience rather than a decrease in OpEx.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I think it's awesome because you have these golfers, you have these people that you give them the right coaching, the right... I'm sure you have a thousand bits of resources available to all the members and such, and you want to give them that personalized approach, and now you can kind of tailor it to fit them what they need. Doing that manually was just, it's a lot of work.

Kevin Scott

>> Well-

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's impossible....

Kevin Scott

>> and it's subject to just mistakes and stuff that didn't get written down or whatever the case is. But now we transcribe all the things. We keep track of all the stuff that goes in. It's very... If you think about like... I bet there's some company that they know about me. In a sense, that's us. We want to know. And if you just look at down, like a single one of our people who help our members, they might know quite a lot about members, but it's next to impossible to disseminate that information to lots of other people so that when this person is not available, other people can pick up and run equally well. So it's just kind of turning this robust personalized service into an actual system that works at scale.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I think it's amazing. I think what you're doing is great work. Okay. So Kevin, what do you want the audience to know? What's the one takeaway you want the audience to know about what you're seeing here at Twilio at the event and what you're doing at the PGA?

Kevin Scott

>> I don't have any particular agenda, but I'll tell you something I'm a little enthused about.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Kevin Scott

>> Being able to combine really robust platforms that... I don't mean this to be hyperbolic, but like Twilio is one of a few companies that helps take us into the future. We are with them because they make us better, right? It's the simple way. And I'm sure they're going to want that soundbite. I'll get a job in the marketing department. But the ability for us to use a robust platform plus what we can do with new AI development tools basically puts us into a position where we can write our own story and we can trust the results. We're getting things that work at scale. So all the stuff that used to be hard is becoming not so hard. And what's left is a lot of like, do we want to bother doing that at all? And so there's value in taste, I guess. Is this something that we should do? Does it create a more valuable experience? Does this better engage golfers? Is this... A lot of our members are coaches, and so does it help coaches connect with their golf students better? So there's this whole range of different experiences that we want to make better. It's a lot bigger than just our call center.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure, sure.

Kevin Scott

>> And so those different touch points are... I think if I hit a message, it's like, you can actually choose how good you want to make those. And cost is less the barrier, complexity is less the barrier. It's like these things are increasingly easy to do and it's really more about like, do you have the vision to do it?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, Kevin, all great takeaways. Kevin, thank you very much for being on today. This has been awesome. Great having you on.

Kevin Scott

>> Great. Thanks for having me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you. And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty, coming to you live from Twilio SIGNAL 2026 on theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.