Know someone who should be a star on Faces Of Gaming? Contact Tom Osiecki at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com.
Andrew Cardno, who co-owns Quick Custom Intelligence (QCI), is a data scientist who today is focused on teaching computers to do no less than revolutionize the casino industry.
Cardno recently introduced Chatalytics, an AI tool that manages cognitive load through generative intelligence, creating a human-like product that can solve operational and marketing problems with the “experience” of a master analyst, he says.
Being the optimistic futurist he is, Cardno will tell you, “Generative intelligence is like this sea change. The whole industry is going to be completely transformed, and QCI plans on being the leader in the generative transformation, which is the single biggest change in tech in 25 years.”
Unique and eclectic
How Andrew Cardno got to this point of industry transformation is an amazing story that is in itself as unique as it is eclectic.
You might say that Andrew Cardno is a modern-day Renaissance Man. Keep reading and you will agree.
It starts with the New Zealand Crocodile Dundee
Cardno was raised in rural New Zealand, where his father was a hunter, trapper, and builder who “could have been the model for Crocodile Dundee.” He is dyslexic and did not read or write long sentences until age 11, but a few years later won a national competition in New Zealand in physics.
He is a fourth level black belt in Taekwondo. In college, he taught indigenous Māori women computer skills and later mapped indigenous lands in New Zealand using a self-generated algorithm that was a precursor to Google Maps.
At Crown Casinos in Australia, he created a system of visual analytics used to revolutionize data on slot machine selection, layouts, and profitability—work for which he was awarded one of his two Smithsonian Laureate awards.
He co-authored 12 influential books on casino math with Dr. Ralph Thomas. His company, QCI, has a non-human Chief Operating Officer, ”Jarvis,” a generative-AI rules engine that is responsible for project management and task prioritization for his estimated 75 employees.
And he should be dead
At the end of our interview, Cardno moved to the back of his office and returned holding a damaged piece of metal. He then began to tell me this story.
At 22, Cardno was using a jackhammer in a ditch that struck a high-voltage 6,600-volt three-phase main power cable carrying 1,000 amps that melted the tungsten-carbide jackhammer blade, creating a small crater which generated an electrical arc about 15-20 feet tall, reaching temperatures around 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit—with Cardno standing in the middle of it.
“When I arrived at the hospital, still smoking, the doctors were shocked. One doctor told me I was the luckiest man alive, that no one should have survived such an electrical exposure. The amount of energy I absorbed—approximately 6.6 million watts—would have been enough to stop a freight train.”
“The doctor even suggested I buy a lottery ticket because surviving such an electrical incident was statistically impossible. It was a miraculous survival that defied all scientific expectations,” Cardno said.
Today he keeps the burnt, melted jackhammer blade in his office, “It became a profound moment of reflection about life’s unpredictability and my own resilience,” Cardno related.
Significant presence
QCI, which Cardno co-founded with Dr. Ralph Thomas in 2020, has established a significant presence in the global gaming industry in a very short time. As of 2025, QCI’s advanced software solutions are deployed in over 250 casinos across various regions, including North America, Australia, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, Latin America, and the Bahamas.
In the United States, QCI operates in 30 states and collaborates with 90 tribal nations. Globally, QCI extends to 17 countries, with development underway in 10 additional markets.
QCI provides software tooling for over 250,000 gaming machines worldwide and operates in 550 sites globally.
QCI’s software is designed to manage substantial gaming operations, handling an estimated $35 billion in annual gross gaming revenues.
Over the past 25 years, Cardno has led private PhD and master’s research teams, pioneering in visualization and data pluming. His contributions have earned him two Smithsonian Laureates, over 40 innovation awards, and recognition as a Lifetime Achievement Award recipient from Gaming and Leisure in 2024.
Crocodile Dundee
“Te Anau, the rural town in New Zealand where I grew up, was truly remote,” Cardno recalled. “One radio station, one TV channel, one store—eventually we got a restaurant. My father was a builder, hunter, and trapper; my mother started as a kindergarten teacher and later became a politician. Dad earned most of his living from hunting, and I went with him. It was a completely unique upbringing.”
He spent his childhood “running through the wilderness,” learning to survive in the bush alongside a father who, he says, “could have been Crocodile Dundee—minus the drinking.” Cardno adds, “If you know the movie, that character is basically my dad.”
Even the neighbors fit the adventure-film template. “Bill Black, the helicopter pilot next door, used to land in our front yard. So I had a legendary pilot on one side and Crocodile Dundee for a father. Drop me anywhere in a forest and I’d be perfectly at home—I’d know how to stay alive.”
Dyslexic
Cardno’s small country school was equally unconventional: about half the students left at 15 to work on farms, fishing boats, or hunting crews. “I struggled early, especially with reading—I’m dyslexic. Until age 11, I couldn’t read or spell words longer than three letters,” he said. Discovering science-fiction novels changed everything: he taught himself to read, then devoured math and physics.
By 12, he was programming on his first Apple computer. At 17, he recorded the top physics score in a national competition covering math, physics, and statistics. “I just loved physics and computer science; I’d found something I was naturally good at.”
The turning point, he notes, came at 16. “I had an outstanding physics teacher, John Davies—a British nuclear physicist who retired to Te Anau so his ailing wife could recover, and she did. Imagine having someone of that caliber teaching in a tiny New Zealand town,” Cardno said, still amazed.
House of Flax
While at university, Cardno accepted a teaching post at Te Pā Harakeke, which mean “the House of Flax,” a training center where Māori women learned traditional basket weaving. Most students were single mothers facing tough circumstances, and the space was strictly female-only: “There wasn’t even a men’s restroom,” he remembered.
“When I first walked in, the room was packed with flax and formidable-looking women,” Cardno recalled. The program’s leader, political activist Diane Prince, had a simple goal for Cardno: give these women enough computer literacy to qualify for government jobs. “We began with the absolute basics—literally how to switch on a PC.”
The approach worked. “Despite every obstacle, we achieved a remarkable success rate,” Cardno says. Over his university years he taught hundreds of women—and even picked up basket weaving himself, giving his first woven basket to his mother. “It’s surprisingly mathematical,” he laughed.
Mapping indigenous lands
Cardno worked on mapping indigenous lands in New Zealand while employed at the Department of Māori Affairs, where he developed a computer system to digitize and centralize land ownership data for the Indigenous Land Court. Using a 21-layer quadtree algorithm—“five years before Google Maps,” he notes—he created a mapping engine that clearly showed indigenous land parcels.
The project contributed to a landmark legal settlement where indigenous people were granted significant land and fishing rights. Cardno takes pride in this work, believing he helped support the indigenous rights movement in New Zealand by making land ownership data more accessible and organized.
Master Andrew
“My father was kind of like a street brawler in some ways. He taught me a little bit of boxing. I had a fascination for martial arts, and I started quite young, around 19, doing the martial art called Hapkido, which is a Korean martial art.
“My Grandmaster, Master Lee, was a Special Forces soldier from South Korea, and an incredible martial artist. I learned Hapkido for five, six years, and then kept going with martial arts, and I still practice. Today I’m doing Taekwondo, a Korean martial art like Hapkido, but it’s more like a sport. I am a practicing fourth degree black belt master of Taekwondo. So, you can actually call me Master Andrew,” Cardon declared.
“Around the time that I invented the mapping algorithm, the zoom image format, the multi-level, 21-layer map with the pre-generated tile-based images which is behind Google Maps and all the other maps, I also started working with a retailer in New Zealand called Shell Oil, creating contour heat maps of the space inside their convenience stores,” Cardno said.
Now you have to make it profitable
“One of my business partners was Don Burke. If you’ve heard of Kerry Packer, the big gambler in Las Vegas, his right-hand man was Don Burke. Don said to me, ‘We’re going to Crown Casino, and I’m going to buy it.’
‘”I was there in the room looking at the data, and then he calls this guy. I was there as he negotiated the price and locked it down. Then he turned to me, and he said, ‘Now you have to make it profitable,’ and I was flabbergasted. I was like, ‘How can a casino possibly lose money?’
“He said to me, ‘The thing about casinos is they’ve got these machines and tables that all make data.’ I was like, ‘Wow, this is exactly what I know how to do,’ to map that out with contour heat mapping.
“We built the data warehouse, and it was really hard to build a geospatial environment for them and put in this huge computer cluster to build these heat maps. There was so much opportunity, right? It was just everywhere.
“As soon as we started looking at the data, it was really obvious that this should change, and that should change, and there was a great team there, led by an economist whose name was Rowan Craigie.
“I was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have to change everything,’ so we did. We doubled the size of the slot attendant team. We changed all their marketing programs. We took a million dollars out of direct mail, because they were mailing everyone. It was terrible. We laid out the whole floor based on contour heat mapping techniques and improved their after-tax profitability by $75 million in six months just doing that,” Cardno exclaimed. This was written up as a case study and earned Cardno his second Smithsonian Laureate for Heroism in Information Technology.
I like this problem
“I thought, wow, I really like this data. I like this problem, optimizing floor space. I’ll go to America, where there’s lots of these things called casinos. So, I turned up in America. My wife still tells me that I don’t know how I stayed married after I did this. We went over there, two kids, three suitcases.
“I turned up in Las Vegas and started working with companies like Harrah’s Corporation and the Hard Rock, practicing the art of contour heat mapping of casino floors on huge, big clusters. And you know, I’m running this business. Here’s this guy from the outback of New Zealand, who knew nothing about America, very little about casinos, trying to run this business in America. I was so out of my depth,” Cardno said.
Cardno started the company called Compudigm, which had ‘very successful deployments.’ “I learned how to do geospatial optimization of gaming floors and applied it in a business and been very successful with a lot of properties,” Cardno stated.
Compudigm was eventually acquired by Bally Systems. Cardno next founded VizExplorer, where he also began working with casino analyst Dr. Ralph Thomas. VizExplorer was the next evolution of visual analytics, and they began working with companies like Walmart, Best Buy, the Mayo Clinic, CVS, and Toys “R” Us.
A legal dispute with Bally eventually caused Cardno to leave the company.
The Math That Gaming Made
Dr. Ralph Thomas and Cardno authored twelve books together on casino math called “The Math That Gaming Made,” with each edition covering subjects like Player Development, Security, Marketing, Data Base, and various published articles by the authors.
“Ralph and I have written books together. He’s an amazing mathematician, an amazing critical thinker. I really enjoyed the academic challenges of working with Ralph. He’s one of the brightest guys you will ever meet and one of the most brilliant mathematicians on the planet. And we’re great business partners.
“We were both just starting our own companies. I went to him and said, ‘You know, Ralph, we’re about to be competitors. We should really be partners.’ We partnered up and started QCI in March of 2020, and, of course, COVID hits!” Cardno said.
Data activation platforms
Faced with COVID shutdowns, QCI pivoted to developing a COVID recovery program that allowed casino companies to maintain relationships with customers. “We built this COVID recovery tool, as a way to recover from COVID, especially for player development groups. It’s now called QCI Host, and it’s been very successful,” Cardno said.
Today, QCI offers a variety of products built on its data activation platform—the QCI Enterprise Platform—including QCI Host, QCI Slots and Tables, QCI Marketing, QCI Loader, QCI Retail, QCI Portal, QCI Player and QCI Loyalty.
“The casino industry technology infrastructure we run on is like a morass of different systems of different ages, different integrations, and none of them talk to each other. It’s just a great big mess. So, having the knowledge of how to build a framework that can get that data from different places and build a data activation platform; really knowing how to do that was critical. The know-how that we had was just extraordinary,” Cardno stated.
Incredible growth
According to published reports, QCI operates in over 40% of the gaming universe in North America.
“It might actually be more, especially when you consider some of our customers are not fully deployed. By the time we get fully deployed, it might be closer to 50%, which is amazing. I don’t know of any other company that’s grown in our industry the way QCI has grown and it’s incredible,” Cardno remarked.
Sea change
In 2023, Cardno looked at the progression of artificial intelligence and realized that it had reached a tipping point. “This is completely going to change the world. This is it. This is the first big new tech thing in 20 years, right? It’s crazy, it’s a massive sea change.
In 2023 we stopped the business, pivoted, and started doing what you would now say is generative artificial intelligence using generative engines like open AI. We released our first copilot immediately—I think it was out inside February or March of that year,” Cardno said.
“We saw this new tech and it’s like this sea change. The whole industry is going to completely change with generative intelligence. It’s not going to be the same thing in five years in any way. We plan on being the leaders in the generative transformation, which is the single biggest change in tech in 25 years,” Cardno said.
This is really quite weird
Fast forward to recently when QCI release AGI55 rolled out.
“We were learning; learning what it is, how it works. And what do you do with generative artificial intelligence, what can it do? Roll forward to AGI55. Ralph and I were teaching this engine, and it’s like teaching a person. Don’t think about them as being computers anymore. They’re people, right? They don’t work like a computer. They work like a person, like it’s really quite weird, right?
“We’re now teaching, and they adapt and learn, and then they’ll make mistakes. You’ve kind of got to put these corrective things in places, and the language of teaching is now English. Ralph and I are teaching this engine how to answer analytical questions, and it has become pretty good.
“We’re like, wow, this thing is good at answering a lot of questions. What have we done? And then it dawned on us that what we’ve done in teaching it was we actually made it like ourselves—so, we made it a copy of ourselves.
“This thing is called Chatalytics, and it is wild, right? You can ask it any business question you want. You can ask these questions, and it will respond with really thoughtful, meaningful answers. And what Chatalytics does is take on the cognitive load that I would normally take on.
“You can tell it exactly what you want. You can say I need a report for my CMO on the success of my marketing programs without even specifying a date, and he’ll figure all that out and give you something back that’s quite useful. And that’s what we’ve built with Chatalytics,” Cardno related.
I asked Cardno how many casino companies QCI have working with Chatalytics? The answer was surprising.
“I haven’t actually counted that number. I’m just guessing about 100 casinos, 40 operators, something like that. It’s part of our core products. We don’t charge for it. It’s just a part of it, and we’re planning on charging for future versions of it. But everyone that we show it to is like, yeah, we’d like that,’ so, we turn it on for them. We’re deploying it as fast as we can,” Cardno said.
Jarvis
“We built this tool called Jarvis, which is a workflow engine and generative framework. Jarvis manages all of our support tickets. He manages all of the team management. He manages all of our projects. He manages all of our meetings and meeting notes. He manages all of the product development and product roadmap work. And he’s curating all this data and running generative engines, doing analysis,” Cardno said.
“We have about 75 employees who can type things into him, and he has jobs, and he tells them about what’s happening. If it’s a project, Jarvis will tell them what to do. And then when they’re finished, they have to tell Jarvis they’re finished, or Jarvis will detect that they’re finished and automatically trigger the next step. They are inside Jarvis every day, doing things,” Cardno said.
We can’t turn away from it
I asked Cardno where he thinks generative artificial intelligence is taking the gaming and hospitality industry in the next five to ten years.
“I want you to go back to the ‘90s or the ‘80s and think about fax machines. People used them and somehow someone convinced all businesses to have a fax number. That’s how businesses communicated, fax and letter. And, and then along came email. And the World Wide Web and cell phones. Everything changed, right?
“We went crazy with the World Wide Web and cell phones and mobile devices. Just an incredible adoption of this tech. If you think about it, comparing a company that was using fax moving to email; that’s a total sea change, right? They were not the same business. Well, that’s the same level of sea change we’re in right now.
“No one knows what it’s going to look like. We have no idea where this is going to end up. We can speculate, we can also say, like people did back then. ’Oh, maybe we’ll be better off without this. This is too much change. Things are changing too fast.’ We can say all those things, and they’re all true. But the hard reality is this change has happened. We can’t turn away from it. It’s done. There’s no way we can avoid it,” Cardno exclaimed.
Where it’s going
“Wow, just thinking about it, 10 years ago, I would have had to employ three more people. Now I could just get better at generative, and I can get a 4x multiplier in production. That’s a massive change and that’s what we’re experiencing internally. I think the whole industry, the whole gaming, hospitality, entertainment industry, is going to go through the same transformation.
“As we do things and think about the generative analysts that we’re building, we’re teaching them to get better and better and answer more and more complex, broad, ranging questions; to think strategically and do all manner of different things. Well, it’s taken me 25 years to develop that skill set. Now, anyone who wants can just have Chatalytics and gain access to an analyst with 25 years of experience answering difficult business questions about gaming operations. It’s remarkable, right?” Cardno asked.
Remarkable
It is remarkable, coming from a person who was raised in the outback of New Zealand, who is dyslexic, taught himself how to read and program computers, taught Indigenous women computing, won two Smithsonian Laureate awards and started one of the fastest growing tech companies in gaming.
As Cardno said in a company profile, “Not bad for a lad who was born in the outback of New Zealand and raised by Crocodile Dundee.”
Entries in the Faces of Gaming series:
- Andrew Cardno — Data Scientist, Dyslexic, Taekwondo Master, Author, Futurist, A Modern Renaissance Man Who Really Should be Dead (now reading)
- Dr. Katherine Spilde – There’s no place like home
- Mattress Mack – Furniture mogul, marketing genius, sports betting champ
- Jeff Connor, owner of Lockdogs – A better mousetrap
- Antonio Perez – An optimistic realist
- Kara Napolitano – Human rights advocate and trafficking expert
- Next Gaming CEO and skill-based slots evangelist Mike Darley
- Dennis Conrad – Executive, founder, creator, speaker, author, columnist, and innovator
- Adam Wiesberg – A journey from sign salesman to dealer to El Cortez GM
- Gary Ellis – Las Vegas entrepreneur
- Alan Feldman – From Mirage and MGM to responsible gaming expert
- John Acres – the Thomas Edison of gaming
- Alex Alvarado — Vice President, Casino Operations at MGM National Harbor and Casino Aficionado
- Lauren Bates — A successful VP at Konami and Chair of Global Gaming Women, all before her 40th birthday
- TJ Tejeda and EZ Baccarat – Reimagining a centuries-old game
- Chris Andrews — Don’t cry for the bookmaker
- Wes Ehrecke — From gasohol and pork chops to president of the Iowa Gaming Association
- Steve Browne – Casino philosopher, master gaming instructor and father of a rocket scientist
- Noah Acres – Shaking up the industry one player record at a time
- Kate Chambers – ICE queen, casino exhibition maven and keeper of fairy dust
- Joe Asher — From the newsstand and racetrack to sports-betting icon
- Paul Speirs-Hernandez — Randomness, chance, reward, and luck
- Ainsworth’s Deron Hunsberger — From finance and sales to president
- Roger Gros — Chronicler of the gaming industry for four decades and counting
- Debi Nutton — Everi board member, gaming trailblazer
- Cache Creek’s Kari Stout-Smith — Dancing backwards in high heels
- Andrew Economon — Making downtown Las Vegas cool again
- Richard Marcus — From the wrong side of the casino tables to the right
- Willy Allison — From New Zealand bloke to world game-protection leader
- Tom Jingoli — From gaming enforcement agent to COO of Konami Gaming
- Tino Magnatta — Interviewing the interviewer, 3,000 and counting since COVID
- Deana and Brady Scott — Still talking shop with the owners of Raving Consulting
- Kevin Parker — “Putting everything into everything I do”
- Laura Penney — Putting in the Work as CEO of Coeur d’Alene Casino
- Andre Carrier — Paying it forward
- Jean Scott — The original casino influencer, still frugal gambling after all these years
- Anika Howard — From Harrah’s First Interactive Employee to CEO of Wondr Nation
- Anthony Curtis — Gambling Guru, Las Vegas Expert, Customer Advocate with Street Cred
- Mark Wayman — An executive recruiter with a brand and something to say
- Melonie Johnson — From rural Louisiana to resort-casino leadership
- Brian Christopher — From actor, Uber driver, and cater waiter to slot celebrity
- Allan Solomon — From accountant and tax lawyer to pioneering casino owner
- Kenny Epstein — A Niche from Nostalgia
Tom Osiecki is a casino consultant who writes an occasional column for CDC Gaming called Faces of Gaming, about interesting and engaging people in the gaming industry.
Tom Osiecki is a marketing and management consultant for Raving Consulting and can be reached for consulting engagements at 775-329-7864.
If you know of a fascinating personality in the gaming industry you would like to see profiled, please send Tom Osiecki an email at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com
