Korbi Carrison started working as event vice president for the Global Gaming Expo in 2018. Since then, she’s dealt with the cancellation of in-person attendance at G2E in 2020 due to the global pandemic and was gratified that attendance rebounded to pre-COVID-19 levels in 2022.
A large part of Carrison’s job is keeping her finger on the pulse of the gaming industry.
Carrison has watched sports betting take off due to the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) the year she started, along with igaming gaining popularity, and ensured that G2E programming reflected those developments.
“Since 2018, there’s been major change and growth and transformation in the industry,” Carrison says. “So that has made the challenge of keeping G2E relevant and up-to-date a big and fun challenge for our team to take on. The fact is that we worked hard to make G2E the destination for global gaming, for people from everywhere.”
G2E takes place Oct. 9-12 at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas.
Carrison and her team at RX USA started to prepare for this year’s G2E “about 15 months” ago before the 2022 conference event started. She says the scale of the event and its numerous “moving parts” necessitate such advance planning in order to make the reality of G2E as seamless as possible.
And while every year brings new issues to discuss – this year, artificial intelligence is the buzz topic and certainly will be addressed – it’s also important to showcase traditional issues that affect the gaming industry.
“Mainstay topics, like the future of the casino floor, will definitely be represented,” Carrison says. “And this is where it’s really important for us to have a partner like the American Gaming Association (AGA) who is deep in research and findings and representation from their membership on what all of those stakeholders want to see at G2E. So, it’s a mix of the new and the traditional conversations that makes the program at G2E really exciting.”
Perhaps the biggest development in this year’s show came by way of a gamble that Carrison and her staff took. Earlier this year, G2E issued a call for content and speakers.
She admits to not being sure if anyone would respond.
“We really thought it was important to hear the voices of industry on what stakeholders from every angle wanted to see at G2E,” Carrison says. “We got 400 submissions, and from that point, we engaged with an education chair and our internal education teams at RX and the AGA. It’s a large team, there are a lot of people involved, and there’s a lot of outreach to stakeholders of all sorts, whether it’s operators, suppliers, academics. A lot of people are very generous with their talent and their time to help us put the program together.”
G2E’s staffers also issued surveys and talked to attendees right after the 2022 event to see what needed to be improved. Responses indicated that sometimes the expo hall was difficult to navigate.
Carrison said the staff looked for ways to streamline expo floor transit and decided one improvement would be the inclusion of an igaming zone.
“Over the years, there’s been a lot of igaming in the education programming, and there have been igaming exhibitors on the show floor, but they’ve been a bit scattered, all over the place,” Carrison says. “Not to mention that some of those very large exhibitors also have igaming verticals in their business. So, for the smaller ones that were a bit more difficult to find, we decided to gather them together in an iGaming Zone, the size of which has actually exceeded our expectations.”
The new iGaming Zone will be located near the Networking Zone – another popular area that debuted in 2022 to rave reviews – and the food court.
“It’s the beginning of that journey of where to find solutions, and thought leadership, around igaming topics,” Carrison says. “That was a big bet, internally. We took a bet, and it’s paying off.”
