To data scientist Steve Bright, the secret to successful casino management is essentially a math equation. If X+Y equals profit, then increasing X, Y, or both also increases profit.
The real challenge is identifying the most effective ways to do that – an ideal task for artificial intelligence, said Bright, vice president of data science for OPTX. The Las Vegas-based company provides a platform that collects and analyzes data from a property’s various operating systems, including gaming, hotel, and restaurants. The OPTX platform works with systems from multiple providers.
“The objective is to get data from everywhere a player touches something and there’s a computer record of it,” Bright explained. “All that is very much interrelated. Modern machine-learning techniques are really good at telling you what data is important.”
OPTX began operations five years ago, and now boasts more than 100 operators as partners in using its platform. In May, all of Bally’s properties in the United States joined the partnership. Bright said many player trends and preferences hold true across different markets.
He said recommendations by the OPTX Slots AI component can optimize slot and table game makeup. One feature examines the hourly play of slot games and predicts how much additional play could be generated by tweaking the lineup or grouping certain machines together.
“The slot floor is like a real estate problem,” Bright said. “Patterns and flows of traffic kind of naturally evolve. And the way these floors are evolved is that the good slot machine games get put in the busy areas. And the busy areas are busy in large part because the good slot machines are there.” Through machine learning, a computer program that can adjust its own formulas based on the data it has collected, Slots AI can suggest changes and chart the potential payback.
“What’s really important is what players do. Players tell you more about their future behavior based on how they behave now,” Bright explained. “We can provide a general model for how you should optimally change your game mix offering to best reflect your particular customer base.”
Going beyond those recommendations, OPTX Slots AI also checks how accurate the projections prove to be. “We test this prediction against the data (after the change),” he said. “If it was right, that’s great. If it’s wrong, we’re going to understand why and feed that knowledge back into our model.” That doublecheck also might identify an anomaly that suggests checking for environmental factors affecting play, such as a drafty vent.
OPTX Player Development AI, a machine learning component released last summer, can generate daily lists of hosted and unhosted players identified as the best contact prospects. Instead of focusing on the most familiar customers, its algorithm identifies those “who have kind of fallen off the map,” grouped into categories of high churn risk, missing, and declining play.
By optimizing offers for each player, Player Development AI already has generated about $3.5 million in incremental revenue, Bright said. The program also relieves casino hosts of computer-related tasks that take away from their more essential hospitality responsibilities.
“Casinos are ultimately about engaging people,” he said. “You want people curating the experience of your guests, walking the floor and mingling with your visitors.”
The Marketing AI component includes a feature that assigns a “future player worth” figure, allowing operators to segment players based on what their activity will be, rather than recent spending.
“What we’re looking to do is build a unified data structure and framework that gives operators a complete 360-degree view of the guest experience, whether that’s hotel, dining events, slot games, table games, marketing, or interactions with player development staff,” Bright said.
“There’s nothing magic about it. It’s all math.”
