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A wide range of gambling businesses in an array of jurisdictions are already using AI tools and ones that do not explore and implement AI now will be left behind in the future, according to a panel of experts.
Sten Andersen, the chief of innovation and future affairs at ATG, the Swedish Horse Racing Totalisator Board, said AI is “the most important” new technology and that his business takes its use “really, really seriously” during a panel at the SBC Summit 2024 in Lisbon.
Andersen and ATG see AI not just as a tool but as a transformation as important as digitalistion, meaning those that fail to see its relevance now will lag in the future.
“If you are a business plan owner at ATG, you must submit a slide on your AI plan. What are the key issues you will solve with AI and how are you going to do it,” Andersen said, adding that these plans will focus on different solutions when submitted by programmers, marketers, or people in finance.
A major issue flagged by Andersen when it comes to gambling firms using AI is how they are viewed by AI software firms, giving the example of OpenAI’s usage policies update on January 10, 2024, which banned real money gambling or payday lending offerings from building with the OpenAI API Platform.
“They [OpenAI] are not going to change this policy,” he added.
Dyani Marvel, the VP of marketing strategy and operations at Wondr Nation, an online gaming entertainment company owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, is already applying the use of generative AI to “supercharge” her team, using it to create images, to write copy and even as a “thought partner” to help create ideas for podcasts.
“If you can prompt correctly, you can get out of it what you want. We used to spend hours scrolling through stock images. We couldn’t find what we wanted but we were able to go into [generative AI program] Midjourney and prompt it there,” Marvel said.
To take advantage of AI technologies that are moving at “warp speed”, Marvel advises that people improve their knowledge base on the technology to make predictions about its future implementation.
“You need to have a future vision,” she said, warning that those who do not will struggle to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology.
Mario Pavic, the head of product at Happening, the technology engine powering Superbet's global brands, said he similarly uses AI for marketing and generating written content.
“It's now really easy to have proof of concept of some of the things that can work with OpenAI,” Pavic said, adding that “we are just using the OpenAI to see what is working with our customers. In terms of releases, it's way faster than before”.
Eberhard Dürrschmid, the CEO of Golden Whale, which provides data-driven and machine learning-enabled gambling infrastructure, believes there are limits to the degree to which AI can be relied.
“Keep creativity with humans, take difficult decisions into decision-making models,” Dürrschmid said.
He also believes that “transparency is key” to ensuring consumers are happy with the way companies use AI, adding that “we must tell people what we are doing with their data”.
Take a look at Vixio's Artificial Intelligence Outlook from August here.
